South Australia's PISA performance has been in constant decline since 2003 with the proportion of PISA participants meeting the Australian national proficient standard dropping from 73% (in 2003) to 50% (in 2018). In contrast, Singapore is a consistently strong performer. To better understand student readiness in answering PISA questions, this…

This study examines the gender gap in financial literacy by using the Financial Literacy Assessment from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The analysis focuses on the influence of parents on their children's understanding of financial concepts, utilizing multilevel modeling procedures to examine variance among…

Purpose: Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western…

This study challenges prior evidence on the impact of Korea's high-stakes school accountability policy as a tool to improve overall achievement and close achievement gaps. Applying difference-in-differences method, the study compares Korean high school students' reading and math test score trends before and after the policy based on the National…

The PISA 2009 data (in reading) investigated the effectiveness of one year of schooling in seven countries: Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Germany, Canada, and Brazil. We used an instrumental variable, which allowed us to estimate the effect of one year of schooling through the fuzzy method of regression discontinuity. The analysis was…

This paper explores the relationships among attitudes toward mathematics, teaching, and academic achievement in mathematics. Based on the contextual and social nature of academic self-concept, two complementary studies are discussed. The first study from the northeastern United States examined the relationships among these variables in 84 high…