Background: This paper investigates how the COVID-19 school closure has affected the gender gap in grade-8 students' performance and what are the drivers behind this. By analysing four different countries (i.e., the Russian Federation, Slovenia, Uzbekistan and the United Arab Emirates), the paper represents the first study addressing the issue…

There is a common belief that the more the time students spend in the classroom the more they learn; a conception which has been supported by considerable empirical research. However, most of these studies are correlational, which does not provide solid support for their conclusions. In this research work we intend to go a step further in the…

What is the explanation for American students' comparatively mediocre academic performance? "A Mirror for Americans" finds part of it in how they are taught in primary schools. Comparisons with East Asian teaching are supplied by 50 years of research findings. Grove asks not that we copy East Asian teaching approaches, but that we use…

The coronavirus pandemic has led to drastic measures around the world, which have also affected the education system. Schools were closed in the spring of 2020 in almost every country in the world, and many children and young people are still involved in distance learning to this day. What effect these measures have on children's and young…

This paper is based on the analysis of the relationship between early education, mathematical skills, and student achievement in Bosnia & Herzegovina, using data from the trends in international mathematics and science study (TIMSS) 2019. The study involves 5,628 fourth-grade students whose average age was 10.1 years. The research specifically…

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…

Pedagogical documentation has been understood as an important way for early childhood educators to provide high-quality learning environments for children. The authors explore the contested nature of quality and its interpretation in two cultural contexts: in Western Australia, where pedagogical documentation is a relatively uncommon practice, and…

The promotion of students' engagement with school is an internationally acknowledged challenge in education. There is a need to examine the structure of the concept of student engagement and to discover the best practices for fostering it across societies. That is why the cross-cultural invariance testing of students' engagement measures is highly…

The foundation of school success is laid early in children's lives. Consequently, assessments of academic precursors may help to identify children in need of additional support. Such early assessments could also be interesting from an international perspective when educational systems are compared. This analysis is used to inform on the…

Improving the school governance structure and establishing a modern school system are the current research focuses in elementary and middle school management. Through a comparative analysis of the school governance structure of four provinces and cities in China (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong, BSJG) and PISA2015 high-scored…

For years scholars have attended to either generic or content-specific teaching practices attempting to understand instructional quality and its effects on student learning. Drawing on the TIMSS 2007 and 2011 databases, this exploratory study empirically tests the hypothesis that attending to both types of practices can help better explain student…

The authors' purpose was to examine the relationship between three forms of cultural capital--the embodied, the objectified, and the institutionalized--and student performance in mathematics and science. Their analysis of Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study 2011 data from 32 countries and regions revealed that parental…

Programme for International Student Assessment data from 29 countries was used to measure immigrant school gaps (differences in scores between immigrants and natives) in relation to various potentially correlated factors. Results show that negative gaps are concentrated in the European Union; in the South, they are mainly correlated with school…

South Africa participated in TIMSS from 1995 to 2015. Over these two decades, some positive changes have been reported on the aggregated mathematics performance patterns of South African learners. This paper focuses on the achievement patterns of South Africa's high-performing Grade 9 learners (n = 3378) in comparison with similar subsamples of…

This paper analyzed elementary teacher education (hereafter 'TED') programs in the top performing European (TIMSS) countries to help inform future elementary TED policy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Methodological emphasis revolved around how much emphasis should be placed on general content knowledge (GCK), as opposed to general pedagogical…