In 2020 and 2021, schooling, like many other aspects of life, has been heavily affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. During periods of school closure, education systems and schools have often been quick to organise remote support for home-based learning. But several observers have questioned the effectiveness of these schooling surrogates,…

This paper quantifies the learning gain that accrues to 15-year-old students over one year of schooling in 18 countries and economies, where the cohort eligible to sit the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)ISA test overlaps with two distinct school cohorts. School-entry regulations are used as an exogenous source of…

Background: Little is known about how fine motor skills (FMS) relate to early literacy skills, especially over and above cognitive variables. Moreover, a lack of distinction between FMS, grapho-motor and writing skills may have hampered previous work. Method: In Germany, kindergartners (n = 144, aged 6;1) were recruited before beginning formal…

The Reading Acceleration Program (RAP), which uses adaptively increasing text erasure rates to enforce reading rate improvements, has been positively evaluated in various languages, reader and age groups. The current study compared the established incremental increase of text erasure rate with a training using fixed erasure rates in two groups of…

"The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy." Such was the dire warning recently issued by a task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S.…

Educational effectiveness research often appeals to "value-added models (VAM)" to gauge the impact of schooling on student learning net of the effect of student background variables. A huge amount of cross-sectional studies do not, however, meet VAM's requirement for longitudinal data. "Contextualised attainment models (CAM)"…

Multiple-choice (MC) reading comprehension test items comprise three components: text passage, questions about the text, and MC answers. The construct validity of this format has been repeatedly criticized. In three between-subjects experiments, fourth graders (N[subscript 1] = 230, N[subscript 2] = 340, N[subscript 3] = 194) worked on three…

A handful of studies have found evidence of a gap in academic achievement between students of high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) families. Furthermore, some scholars argue that the gap tends to widen as students get older. Evidence is, however, inconclusive and relies mostly on limited methodological designs. Drawing on the Hamburg School…