Background: Numerous studies have investigated the relationships between various student, home and contextual factors and reading achievement. However, the relationship between such factors and reading attitudes has been investigated far less, despite the fact that theoretical frameworks of large-scale assessments and school effectiveness research…

Research on effects of home computer use on children's development of cognitive abilities and skills has yielded conflicting results, with some studies showing positive effects, others no effects, and yet others negative effects. These studies have typically used non-experimental designs and one of the main reasons for the conflicting results is…

This paper studies the link between school facilities (buildings and grounds) and student achievement in eight countries using data from the TIMSS 2003 database. The results indicate a negative relationship, but the estimated coefficients are mainly insignificant. Interestingly, the coefficients differ heavily across countries. Whereas there seem…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is an international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades that has been conducted every four years since 1995, with the most recent assessment in 2011. PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is an international assessment of reading…

The cultural capital in families, more specifically, the educational level of parents, has during the last decades been shown to be the most important dimension of socioeconomic influence on school performance in many countries. Less is known about the factors that actually mediate this influence. The aim, therefore, is to investigate the relative…

The International Commission on the Teaching of Mathematics created by the International Congress of Mathematics at Rome, Italy, in 1908, submitted a large body of reports to the congress at Cambridge, England, in 1912. Those for the United States have been published as bulletins for the Bureau of Education. The material in this bulletin shows…