Geographical Olympiads are disciplinary competitions that can be a tool for assessing geographical knowledge and skills in different countries of the world. This article aims to analyse the results of the national and international geography Olympiads and to identify their conditionality and interrelationship. The secondary aim is to find out…

This study explored the similar and different characteristics of the self-drawings produced by Taiwanese and South Korean children. The 94 participants comprised 4- and 5-year-old Taiwanese (n = 48, 24 boys) and South Korean (n = 46, 29 boys) children with comparable sociodemographic backgrounds. Three aspects of their self-drawings were…

The increasing use of low-stakes international assessments highlights the importance of test-taking efforts. Previous studies have used self-reported and response time-based measures to examine this effort. Although differences between these measures have been suggested, their association with performances and potential gender gaps remains…

Concept-based teaching is presumably more effective than popular procedure-based instruction in helping students develop conceptual understanding, an important conceptual base for mathematics teaching reforms in many countries. This study examined the extent to which this assumption is true by controlling the influences of student socioeconomic…

This study aimed to compare key predictors of academic resilience in the distinctive socio-cultural contexts of South Korea and the United States, employing a machine-learning-based random forest technique. Using PISA 2018 data, we focused on students in the bottom 25% of family socioeconomic status, totaling 1,654 in South Korea and 1,175 in the…

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has a key role in driving educational discourse and global educational governance. Its comparative 'Programme of International School Assessment' (PISA) has explicitly linked the knowledge and skills of young people with the economic potential of countries. Through the International…

Although scholars have examined the effects of global tests on national and regional educational governance, few researchers have studied their impact on education in the Arabian Gulf. This research fills the knowledge gap by studying the international spectacle of PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS results in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- two…

International achievement comparison studies assess students on core subjects such as Reading, Mathematics and Science. Students who do not speak the test language at home can be expected to be disadvantaged because of language proficiency. The test language effect has not been given sufficient attention. The present study investigated probable…

The authors evaluated the effects of P-SELL, a science curricular and professional development intervention for fifth-grade students with a focus on English language learners (ELLs). Using a randomized controlled trial design with 33 treatment and 33 control schools across three school districts in one state, we found significant and meaningfully…

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low…