The time it takes a student to complete a bachelor's degree in college is ever-changing. The four-year timeframe to finish a degree in the United States has become a dream many will not accomplish for various reasons. Looking to the past, we have seen bachelor's degrees go from a three-year timeframe to a four-year timeframe, college costs have…

International student achievement comparisons have aroused interest widely across the world. Finland dominated the comparisons for a long time but now Asian countries have fared better. Both countries studied have faced abundant immigration, which has changed the student groups. In this article, we compare two quite different top countries:…

In two studies, we investigated the extent to which research using case vignettes of fictitious students is able to yield research results that are ecologically valid representations of teachers' assessments of students' educational achievement in their real classrooms. The type of assessment was teachers' tracking decisions from primary to…

Driven by a desire to improve academic outcomes and transform "failing" schools, governments around the world have often turned to the development of new forms of state-funded school. This paper looks at three such instances of the introduction of new forms of schooling, within three urban localities (academy schools in London; charter…

When students look at their classmates in the classroom, consciously or unconsciously, they see competitors both for academic recognition and social success. How do they fit in relation to others and how do they succeed in achieving both? Traditional views on the drive to succeed and the fear of failure are well known as motivators for achieving…

Language policy is generally seen as a national-level decision regarding which languages the state will support, and in which public domains. However, the reality is that language policy plays out at regional and local levels as well. In fact, it could be argued that the most important instantiations of language policy are those which directly…

This article presents in summary a selection of the work conducted by OECD in the field of technology and education, which has been an on-going focus of OECD work since the 1980s. Recently, much of this has been under the heading of "New Millennium Learners", but it has also included the widening of student achievement surveys towards…

Background: Given the pressure that educators and policy makers are under to achieve academic standards for students, understanding the relationship of academic success to various aspects of health is important. The international Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC) questionnaire, being used in 41 countries with different school and…

Several current international comparative large-scale assessments of educational achievement (ICLSA) make use of "Rasch models", to address functions essential for valid cross-cultural comparisons. From a historical perspective, ICLSA and Georg Rasch's "models for measurement" emerged at about the same time, half a century ago. However, the…

In this article we examine two concepts that aid our understanding of processes of identification in multiethnic schools. The first concept focuses on the complementarity of "three processes of identity" (identifying the other, being identified, and self-identification). This is brought together with the concept of sociocultural coupling…

There is considerable debate about the relative importance of family versus school factors in producing academic and nonacademic student outcomes, and whether and how their impacts vary across different student groups. In addition to critically reviewing and synthesizing earlier work, this study extends the literature by (a) using the ECLS-K, a…

In 1995, the state of Minnesota participated in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), oversampling students to permit comparison with the United States as a whole and with other participating nations. The data generated by the assessment and its subsequent analyses provide informative insights as well as suggest questions…

Presents a case study of a child whose parents are recent Chinese immigrants to the United States. Concludes that the child's emotional condition and her academic success might be jeopardized by her bilingualism and bicultural environment if her latent problems are not solved by her parents or teachers. (FL)

Music educators are particularly keen to offer learning opportunities that enhance creativity. How this happens remains something of a mystery. Within an international context, this article reports on a study that used a cross-cultural perspective on creative thinking with a particular focus on examining the link between problem-solving and…

This study addresses the question of why some minority groups do relatively well in school, in spite of facing substantial barriers while other minorities confronting similar barriers do far less well in school. The exploration proceeds largely through examining and comparing the school-adaptation patterns of minorities who are relatively…