Although the number of countries conducting large-scale assessments has increased significantly over the past two decades, this has not necessarily led to the effective use of learning assessment data in policy-making and planning. To better understand the reasons for this, the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP)…

Large-scale learning assessments can be used to generate performance and contextual data on student learning outcomes. They can be national, regional, or international; school based or household based. The UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO) has conducted a qualitative study to explore both how and why learning…

In large scale international assessment studies, questionnaires are typical used to query students' home possessions. Composite scores are computed from responses to the home resource questionnaires and are used as a measure of family socioeconomic background in achievement comparison or for statistical control. This paper deals with profiling the…

Academically resilient students are those students who are academically successful, despite coming from the socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds that have typically predicted poorer educational outcomes. These students are an important group to study because if policymakers can understand what factors may have contributed to their…

Most existing research indicates that working students perform more poorly than do full-time students on standardized achievement tests. However, we know there are wide international variations in this gap. This article shows that national and international contexts help to explain the gap in the academic performance between working and nonworking…