Student performance in general subjects such as language and mathematical skills is poor in secondary vocational education. A professional culture of teaching--including recruitment of well qualified teachers, effective teacher collaboration and effective teaching practice--could be the key to success. To what extent is there a professional…

This review aims to explore the effects of placing children with special needs in inclusive educational settings, compared with segregated placement on measures of academic achievement and psychosocial adjustment. A secondary aim is to explore how different child or setting characteristics (gender, age, type and severity of special need, part- or…

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…

In the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2015, the educational systems from the Dutch speaking part of Belgium (Flanders), Germany, and Norway included scales capturing three dimensions of instructional quality (INQUA): classroom management, supportive climate, and cognitive activation. With the inclusion of these extra scales, a…

Although the importance of primary schools in the long term is of interest in educational effectiveness research, few studies have examined the long-term effects of schools over the past decades. In the present study, long-term effects of primary schools on the educational positions of students 2 and 4 years after starting secondary education are…

We use PIAAC data to study the relationship between parental education and educational success among adults from 23 advanced economies. We consider educational success in terms of both educational "attainment" (formal qualifications) and educational "achievement" (competencies) and in both "absolute" and…

Peer assessment has proven to have positive learning outcomes. Importantly, peer assessment is a social process and some claim that the use of anonymity might have advantages. However, the findings have not always been in the same direction. Our aims were: (a) to review the effects of using anonymity in peer assessment on performance, peer…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

The effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) in terms of increasing students' educational attainments has been extensively studied for higher education students and in nonexperimental settings. This paper tests the effectiveness of PBL as an alternative instruction method in secondary education. In a controlled experiment at the class level,…

Drawing on comparative analyses from nine Western countries, we ask whether local-born children from a wide range of immigrant groups show patterns of female advantage in education that are similar to those prevalent in their host Western societies. We consider five outcomes throughout the educational career: test scores or grades at age 15,…

A review of the empirical literature was conducted to establish the relation between teacher and student ethnicity, and cognitive and noncognitive student outcomes. It was hypothesized that ethnic teacher-student congruence results in more favorable outcomes for especially minority students. A total of 24 quantitative studies focusing on primary…

Across Europe we can observe the reinforcement of monolingual education policies, despite increasing multilingualism. Recent research has shown that the emphasis is on language proficiency in the socially dominant language. This is viewed as the key to educational success. The use of other languages or linguistic repertoires is not valued in…

Holding students back when they do not meet a specific attainment level is common practice in a lot of countries. However, this practice is not without controversy and recent studies point at the negative effects of grade retention, especially in the long-term. The majority of these studies focused on grade retention in primary education. In our…

The present study aims at unravelling the myriad of student-level (i.e., gender, socioeconomic status [SES], academic self-concept, achievement, ability, and occupational interests) and school-level (i.e., gender composition, maths composition, and SES composition) determinants of option choice in the academic track of secondary school in…

The main objective of the present study is to gain more insight into the school effects on the development of 2 noncognitive student outcomes, namely, the motivation toward learning tasks and the academic self-concept, and, more specifically, on the consistency of the school effects on these 2 outcomes. Data were drawn from the "Longitudinaal…