We study the existence of a gender gap between two methods of grading student achievement in Spain, namely teachers' assessment which measures cognitive outcomes and standardised test scores, which are consistent across Spanish schools. We use rich census information of Andalusian students attending secondary schools. Our results indicate that…

External and standardized assessments based on student results are a contested education policy among school actors. Movements of opposition have emerged in different countries, especially in those contexts with high-stakes accountability systems. However, this phenomenon has not been analyzed in soft accountability systems. The objective of this…

Neoliberal policy technologies are spreading across the globe. Most go unrecognised and unopposed, but in some cases, they have provoked reactions and movements that reject or resist them. In this article we focus on one such movement of resistance, consisting of a network of families (the 'opt out' movement) that is boycotting the Standard…

Oral language abilities have been reported to be related to reading development. This relationship seems to be determined by orthographic systems and reading development. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show reading difficulties, although most studies focus on reading comprehension. The present study has two main objectives: to…

Background: Detecting reading comprehension difficulties is challenging because many factors are involved in comprehension ability. Various reading comprehension tests can be used to detect difficulties but often do not yield the same results. Method: Our aim was to analyse the agreement between three commonly used standardised reading…

Though concept maps and graphic organisers are useful tools for bilinguals to organise the information being managed and learned, its systematic use is not widened and decisive in CLIL domains. Apart from helping students to acquire meaningful learning, concept mapping might promote in them word-recognition skills for the identification and…

An increasing number of countries are adopting accountability systems in education that rely on the external evaluation of students' learning outcomes through standardized assessments. The international dissemination of this form of accountability, often known as test-based accountability, does not imply that exactly the same policy is adopted…

This article demonstrates the use of structural equation modeling to develop norms for a translated version of a standardized scale, the Supports Intensity Scale-Children's Version (SIS-C). The latent variable norming method proposed is useful when the standardization sample for a translated version is relatively small to derive norms…

This paper analyses, from the perspective of the political sociology of policy instruments, the adoption and re-contextualisation of School Autonomy with Accountability (SAWA) reforms in Spain, with a particular focus on the region of Madrid. Over the last few decades, Madrid has adopted a wide range of education policies that have contributed to…

Spain is currently living a transitional situation. In 2013 a new educational law was passed, the Organic Law that Modifies the Quality of Education (LOMCE). That law, among many other aspects, introduces the use of standardized external tests either to (1) guide or provide suggestions for the educational track, or (2) to obtain inferences towards…

The Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales (RIAS) measures general intelligence and its two main components, verbal and nonverbal intelligence, each comprising of two subtests. The RIAS has been recently standardized in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain. Using the standardization samples of the U.S. (n = 2,438), Danish (n = 983), German (n…

This paper discusses the results of a study conducted with 218 students in the final year of high school to determine their opinions about the feasibility of using a tablet PC for delivery of a standardized English language test. One such test could be the English paper of the exam given to students upon completion of the Baccalaureate program in…

Introduction: The low productivity that prevailing in recent years in Higher Education requires urgently institutional responses aimed to improving quality of university education contributing to the development among students of key competences for lifelong learning. In this sense, the aim of this research was to explore the effects of an…

The aim of this investigation is to assess the correlation among different competencies-assessment systems available on the market to measure social skills in the university environment. In order to carry out the research, three self-perception competency tests were used, and 30 competencies were evaluated in a Likert scale with several response…

There is growing evidence supporting the importance of executive functions, and specifically working memory updating (WMU), for children's academic achievement. This study aimed to assess the specific contribution of updating to the prediction of academic performance. Two updating tasks, which included different updating components, were…