On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, causing one of the largest disruptions to schooling in history. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced unprecedented challenges for education research and large-scale assessments of student populations. Both schools and researchers were forced to modify…

Fifty countries from around the world participated in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 international assessment of reading comprehension at the fourth grade, and in every country there was a wide range of reading achievement from basic skills to advanced comprehension. This report presents international findings…

This report summarises Year 6 pupils' attainment in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) survey of 2016 in Northern Ireland and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is an international comparison study of reading at ages 9-10. PIRLS has a five-yearly cycle. Northern Ireland took part in PIRLS for the second time…

This study investigates change in the home language environment of Language Minority (LM) learners between kindergarten and eighth grade, drawing on data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten (ECLS-K) Cohort. The analytic sample included 1,538 children whose parents reported a language…

Beginning with the premise that pleasure is a driving force in life, this article examines the relationships between pleasure, schooling and society across the past century. Through the examination of school texts, narratives, and histories of literacy instruction, a case is made that part of the move away from keeping pleasure at the heart of…

Objective: To assess social and familial environmental influences on fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption of fourth- and fifth-graders living in a culturally diverse, urban setting. Design: In 2006, students from 9 fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms from a public school in the Washington-Baltimore Metropolitan Region were recruited as part of the…

Common in the research literature on bullying is the dichotomy of bullying and victim behavior. The present definition of a bully is a person who has engaged in repeated acts of aggression or harm to persons over whom he or she has power. The literature on bullies examines gender differences at length. However, the bully-victim literature has yet…

Using data for 4th graders in primary schools from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), I compare across 25 countries the ways in which home literacy environments influence children's reading performance. Examined are three indicators: early home literacy activities, parental attitudes toward reading, and number of books…

This article reports on analyses examining contextual influences on parenting with an ethnically and geographically diverse sample of parents (predominantly mothers) raising 387 children (49% ethnic minority; 51% male) in high-risk communities. Parents and children were followed longitudinally from first through tenth grades. Contextual influences…

This study reports on relationships among gender, maternal depressed mood, and children's trajectories of depressive phenomena across middle childhood and early adolescence. It tested the hypothesis that, compared to boys, girls become increasingly vulnerable to maternal depression as they enter adolescence. The study sample consisted of 834…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an assessment of the reading comprehension of students in their fourth year of schooling, measuring student performance on a combined reading literacy scale and on a literary subscale and informational subscale. PIRLS is conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of…

As part of its mission, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) is committed to the development of the community of researchers who work in the area of assessment both nationally and internationally. The association also has a commitment to provide policymakers with the types of data and analyses that will…

Objective: The purpose of the current study was to examine the practice validity of a new ecological assessment instrument for third through fifth graders in terms of whether it provided school staff with new knowledge about students. Method: Preassessment knowledge of school staff was compared to data obtained from 21 children and their parents…

This publication contains a sample of the 44 indicators in "The Condition of Education 2003." The indicators in this publication are numbered sequentially, rather than according to their numbers in the complete edition. The Contents page offers a cross reference between the two publications. Since 1870, the federal government has…