Most existing research indicates that working students perform more poorly than do full-time students on standardized achievement tests. However, we know there are wide international variations in this gap. This article shows that national and international contexts help to explain the gap in the academic performance between working and nonworking…

This article is based on an ethnographic case study and highlights the importance of spatial dimensions and spatial inequality as means of understanding the participation of a group of youths living in a sparsely populated rural area of Sweden. The analysis took as its starting point Doreen Massey's conceptualisation of place and space as…

Background: The present study investigates what factors related to the school context influence student achievement on TIMSS mathematics tests across countries. A systematic review of the literature on PIRLS, TIMSS, and ICCS was conducted upstream to identify those school, teacher, and classroom factors shown to be useful predictors of student…

The aim of this article is to deepen the understanding of how different aspects of the implementation of digital media may be related to subject paradigms and practice in the subject of Art in secondary schools in Sweden. The article is based on observations and interviews with teachers and pupils at secondary schools about their conceptions of…

In this paper we focus on variation of the design and the implementation of a specific task during three mathematics lessons in the 8th grade in a learning study (Marton & Tsui, 2004; Runesson, 2008). The theme of the lesson was division, with a denominator between 0 and 1. The teachers wanted their students to understand that when dividing…

This article focuses on the leadership used by the principal in a collaborative ICT project. The case study chosen was a school project conducted within the NCCE project (Nordic Cross Country Education). The EU funded project ran for three years in grades 5-9 in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The goal of the project was to develop cross-border…

The aim of the study was to examine school-related determinants of self-reported health among adolescents. Questionnaire survey data comprising 4,972 students, Grades 7 through 9, from 20 schools in northern Sweden were used. Also, complimentary data about each school were collected from the Swedish National Agency for Education. Using multilevel…

The purpose of the study was to investigate how grading in primary school affected students' achievement measured by grades in 7th, 8th and 9th Grade and educational attainment in upper secondary school (12th Grade), and how the effect varied as a function of students' cognitive ability, gender and socio-economic status. The data derived from the…

Socioeconomic status (SES) is often used as control variable when relations between academic outcomes and students' migrational background are investigated. When measuring SES, indicators used must have the same meaning across groups. This study aims to examine the measurement invariance of SES, using data from TIMSS, 2003. The study shows that a…

"The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy." Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S.…

The current study examined concordance and discordance between a measure of bullying and measures of peer aggression with respect to the number of students identified as victims. Swedish adolescents (N = 1,760) completed a web-based questionnaire. A measure of bullying and measures of peer aggression were compared in order to elucidate the unique…

This paper investigates achievement gaps between low and high socioeconomic students in 19 high-income countries. On average, math scores of students with indicators of high socioeconomic status (SES) are over one standard deviation above those with low SES indicators. The paper estimates the extent to which these achievement gaps can be…

In the present online survey, 158 teachers in regular and special education teaching in grades six to nine were asked to rate the importance of probable reasons for problematic school absenteeism. On average, the teachers estimated that among their students, 19 students had presented with problematic school absenteeism over the last five years.…

As the 21st century unfolds, the United States faces historic challenges, including a struggling economy, an aging infrastructure and global terrorism. Solutions will have to come from educated, skilled citizens who understand and believe in our democratic system and are civically engaged. This incisive new report examines these fault lines and…

The article investigates the interplay between the meaning given to certain key expressions and pupils' understanding of science subject matter, in a qualitative study of learning.The intentional-expressive approach to the epistemological role of language use served as a theoretical frame, within the wider context of phenomenographic research on…