It is aimed to compare the countries of South Korea, Finland and Canada, which are highly successful in PISA exam, and Turkey in terms of the transition system between educational levels. Document analysis method was used in the study. In the universe of the study, there are thirty-eight countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and…

Herein we examine the dominant image of East Asian schools as marked by a darker side of widespread bullying, leading to high rates of youth suicide. First outlining the substantial literature on bullying in the English language, we turn to show how -- paradoxically -- the rates of bullying and suicide are no higher, or in nearly all cases, lower…

Applying a measurement instrument developed in a specific country to other countries raise a critical and important question of interest in especially cross-cultural studies. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is the most preferred and used method to examine the cross-cultural applicability of measurement tools. Although CFA is a sophisticated…

We examine if the OECD survey of adult skills, PIAAC, can provide information about the relative quality of education and training in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. We find that the average population scores are inappropriate while the mean scores of natives well approximate the skills of individuals that had the chance to attend the…

Introduction: The prevalence rates of bullying vary significantly across countries and continents. Specifically, UNESCO estimates that the prevalence rates vary from 22.8% (CentralAmerica) to 48.2% (Sub-Saharan Africa). Recently these differences among countries andregions have been attributed to culture- and country-level variables. Thus, the…

The present study was aimed to investigate whether Finnish and Danish students' math achievement differed and which student-level factors, if any, explained the achievement gaps and whether teacher participation in decision making and teacher morale, among the school-level factors, explained the achievement gaps in Finland and Denmark. To this…

Education reforms around the world have been powerfully shaped by the rise of the neoliberal political, economic and cultural agendas. Neoliberal policies (re)produce certain types of institutional processes such as managerialism, performativity, and competition. These elements are mediated in varied ways by national ideologies, societal needs and…

Finland and Singapore are both top-performing countries in international assessments such as PISA. Finland has been consistently one of the high-achievers regarding not only students' literacy levels but also educational equity. Similarly, Singapore has continuously shown outstanding performance in PISA. It outperformed all the other participants…

Cross-national attraction is the first stage in international policy borrowing and analysis of its indicators provides insight into shifts in educational policies. We analyse cross-national attraction within the media discourse on the OECD's PISA in four countries: Australia, Finland, Japan and South Korea. Using the largest circulation English…

This article examines whether the way that PISA models item outcomes in mathematics affects the validity of its country rankings. As an alternative to PISA methodology a two-parameter model is applied to PISA mathematics item data from Canada and Finland for the year 2012. In the estimation procedure item difficulty and dispersion parameters are…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. In 2018, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asked participating pupils a number of questions about their wellbeing, and some of the measures can be tracked over time. Based on PISA 2015 and 2018, this report…

International student achievement comparisons have aroused interest widely across the world. Finland dominated the comparisons for a long time but now Asian countries have fared better. Both countries studied have faced abundant immigration, which has changed the student groups. In this article, we compare two quite different top countries:…

Recent national and international evidence suggests that the wellbeing of young people in the UK has decreased. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 national reports for England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2019a; Sizmur et al., 2019b; Sizmur et al., 2019c) identified cause for concern for 15-year-old…

Every teacher's classroom practice is embedded in a system of overlapping contexts that interact with their day-to-day decisions. In this paper, I focus on sociocultural context and how it interacts with teachers' subjective responses to accountability instruments. Drawing on interviews with secondary school teachers in Finland and Singapore --…

This study provides the results of a latent class analysis (LCA) using data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study -- 2011 (TIMSS-2011) with a focus on the 8th grade mathematics section. The study presents the analysis of item data with Mplus 7.31 to determine if results obtained yielded distinct latent subgroups. The data…