Studies aiming to make cross-cultural comparisons first should establish measurement invariance in the groups to be compared because results obtained from such comparisons may be artificial in the event that measurement invariance cannot be established. The purpose of this study is to investigate the measurement invariance of the data obtained…

Using expert reviews and item response theory (IRT), this study evaluated the language- and culture-related construct-irrelevant variance and reliability of the 2019 TIMSS sense of school belonging scale (SSBS) for grades 4 and 8. The five items of the SSBS, which were identical for both grades, were reviewed for the language- and culture-related…

International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial…

Our research examined whether adolescents in the United States, China, and Japan differed in their conceptions of a creative person. Participants were American (n = 321), Chinese (n = 235), and Japanese (n = 393) adolescents in 7th and 8th grades who completed surveys at 3 time points. Using an open-ended questionnaire, adolescents were asked to…

International trended assessments have long attempted to provide instructional information to educational researchers and classroom teachers. Studies have shown that traditional methods of item analysis have not provided specific information that can be directly applicable to improve student performance. To this end, cognitive diagnosis models…

Many scales contain both positively and negatively worded items. Reverse recoding of negatively worded items might not be enough for them to function as positively worded items do. In this study, we commented on the drawbacks of existing approaches to wording effect in mixed-format scales and used bi-factor item response theory (IRT) models to…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

In an experimental study (N = 209), the authors compared the effects of exposure to typical middle-school written science content when presented in the context of the scientific discovery narrative and when presented in a more traditional nonnarrative format on 7th and 8th grade students in the United States. The development of texts was…

Using data from the international Teacher Education and Development Study: Learning to Teach Mathematics (TEDS-M), the measurement equivalence of teachers' beliefs across countries is investigated for the case of "mathematics-as-a fixed-ability". Measurement equivalence is a crucial topic in all international large-scale assessments and…

The purpose of this study was to examine leadership practices that lead to improving academic achievement for African American males. Specifically, this study examined cultural insensitivity and its impact on educating African American male students in reading. The study utilized several techniques to determine what practices educators used to…

Although the United States Pledge of Allegiance is a ritual in many schools, research on middle school students' views about this tradition is limited. Therefore, this grounded theory study included a survey of 100 middle school students on the Pledge with 33 follow-up interviews. Socialization and counter-socialization served as the theoretical…

One can not help but notice that the education community's professional fear-mongers focus heavily on PISA (Program of International Student Assessment) and rarely mention TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) or PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Study) in their discussion of the state of education in the United…

This paper addresses elements of the bilingual program for English language learners (ELL) in Illinois School District U-46 (U-46). Beginning with the context of bilingual education in the United States, the paper also introduces the current state of bilingual programming in U-46. ELL initiatives in light of the U-46 partnership with the Stupski…

Participation in school-choice programs has been increasing across the country since the early 1990s. While some have examined the role that families play in the school-choice process, research has largely ignored the role of social contexts in determining where a student attends school. This article improves on previous research by modeling the…

This paper draws on a large Australian commissioned research study that mapped classroom pedagogies called "productive pedagogies". The model of pedagogies derived from an admixture of theory and empirical observations and worked together what Fraser (1997) calls a politics of redistribution and a politics of recognition in its desire to…