To assess the meaningfulness of an intervention effect on students' achievement, researchers may apply empirical benchmarks as standards for comparisons, involving normative expectations for students' academic growth as well as performance gaps between weak and average schools or policy-relevant groups (e.g., male and female students, students…

Does schooling equalize achievement disparities among students with and without a migrant background? This question remains largely unanswered in sociology. We hypothesized that children of migrants would benefit more from schooling, thereby making schools engines of educational integration. Our study tests this hypothesis in the context of German…

Turkish-origin migrants on average show lower academic performance than Germans. This achievement gap cannot be fully explained by socio-economic differences between the groups. Negative competence stereotypes about Turkish-origin students predict the causal attributions that German preservice teachers make for migrants' academic underperformance.…

It is well-known that there are large disparities in academic achievement between children of different socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. This study examines the evolution of disparities in literacy skills between adults of different SES backgrounds. It compares countries' patterns in the evolution of disparities in literacy by SES…

This article examines the extent to which parental socioeconomic status (SES) affects the likelihood of a child becoming a top-performing student, offering an international perspective by reporting this relationship in 31 developed countries. The impact of 3 important educational system characteristics (differentiation in terms of early tracking,…

Education analysts often compare U.S. schools to those in Finland, Korea, Poland, even Shanghai. But surprisingly, few compare the schools here to those in Germany, though the two countries have much in common. Each nation is the largest democracy, with the biggest economy, on its continent. Each has a diverse population, strong unions, a federal…

In the past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data. The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the…

In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children's academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income-achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and…

The introduction of all day-schools in Germany was due in part to the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study 2000, which revealed a striking social inequality in the German education system. It was expected that in all-day schools especially "at risk" groups would be supported and thus the gap in…

Countless policy makers and researchers have flocked to observe the education systems of Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, which are among the top five performers in the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2009 reading assessment. Many visitors have been particularly impressed by the fact that these education systems succeed in…

Considering the great impact the first PISA-results caused in Germany and Japan, this study seeks to provide an explanation for the continuous higher achievement rates of students in the PISA-winner country Japan compared to their German peers. Another great difference between the two participants that was detected in PISA is the correlation…

This investigation examines the role of students' home and school variables in producing the achievement gap between second-generation Turkish students and their native peers in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Using the data from PISA 2006, this study supports past findings that both home and school resources affect the educational outcomes of…

Although Germany has experienced net in-migration for the past five decades, this fact has only recently been officially acknowledged. Furthermore, Germany is marked by a general monolingual self-concept very much attached to the idea of a nation-state with one homogeneous language. However, in large urban areas of Germany about 35 per cent of the…

This report has a simple aim: to present results from international assessments so readers can judge for themselves how American students stack up globally. It's intended to be a stand-alone supplement to the "Education Olympics" web event held between August 8th and August 22nd, 2008 (see edolympics.net). It shows how the U.S. has…