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…

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…

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…

In this comparative study, students from inclusive schools in Canada and Saudi Arabia shared their beliefs about factors associated with learning difficulties. Qualitative data were collected through interviews with 36 Canadian and 62 Saudi elementary students in Grades 5 and 6. Thematic analysis uncovered six themes: lack of knowledge,…

The focus of this descriptive research study was to compare charter and traditional public schools on the academic knowledge of fifth grade students as measured by Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) in a suburb of a large southwestern city. This analysis also compared charter and traditional public schools on AYP status. It was…

This paper studies the link between school facilities (buildings and grounds) and student achievement in eight countries using data from the TIMSS 2003 database. The results indicate a negative relationship, but the estimated coefficients are mainly insignificant. Interestingly, the coefficients differ heavily across countries. Whereas there seem…

Every country strives for its students to have advanced achievement in some way, shape, or form. But too often, competence is a higher policy priority than excellence, and shrinking minimum competency gaps is a higher priority than closing excellence gaps. In this brief, educational excellence is defined as the percent of students who meet or…

One of the important differences between educational systems from different countries is the age at which students are placed into separate tracks. We examined the effects of the age at which tracking occurred on student achievement in a comparative perspective, making use of recent waves of three internationally standardized student assessments…

The literature establishes that education drives economic performance, but the extent that education is associated with a country's competitiveness is empirically untested. Our study analyses Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data from 63 countries to ascertain education's role in explaining the competitiveness of a country.…

This study examined differences in the academic performance of students in grades 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11 in Seventh-day Adventist schools in the United States and Bermuda based on their level of involvement in school music organizations--band or choir--and school sports--varsity or intramural--as measured by standardized achievement and ability tests.…

Outreach activities, like mobile science exhibitions, give opportunities to hands-on experiences in an attractive learning environment. We analysed attitudes, motivation and learning during a science exhibition visit, their relations to gender and future educational plans in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Belgium (N = 1210 sixth-graders). Pupils'…

Increasing the number of hours students spend in school each year, on the assumption that this will improve student achievement, has become a widespread trend. However, the analysis reported here suggests that this trend can be misguided: the time students spend in the classroom is not always positively related to their academic achievement.…

This study describes Singapore students' (N = 607) performance on a recently developed Mathematics Processing Instrument (MPI). The MPI comprised tasks sourced from Australia's NAPLAN and Singapore's PSLE. In addition, the MPI had a corresponding question which encouraged students to describe how they solved the respective tasks. In particular,…

The purpose of the research was to monitor opinions of learners, parents and teachers on the aspects of coping at the second level of primary school in both Estonian-medium and Russian-medium schools. The research was carried out from 2006 to 2011. The research used a questionnaire which was administered to 652 learners and their parents in Forms…

We take an innovative approach to estimating student mathematics learning in the sixth grade of three African countries. The study reinforces the notion that beyond the quality of the teaching process in classrooms, national contextual factors are important in understanding the contribution that schooling makes to student performance. Our approach…