The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education worldwide as educational systems made the decision to close schools to contain the spread of the virus. The duration of school closures varied greatly internationally. In this study, we use representative trend data from more than 300,000 students in 29 countries to examine whether the cross-country…

Many education systems aim to provide learning opportunities to all students regardless of their backgrounds in order for them to realise their potential. Education systems are expected to break down barriers to social mobility. However, too often, children are not given enough opportunities to succeed, to pursue their interests, or to develop…

Less-skilled adult readers have been found to be limited in their awareness and use of effective reading strategies. In this study, we aimed to (a) identify the strategies used by less-skilled adult readers that best predict word reading performance on standardized reading tests and (b) identify the word reading strategies that less-skilled adult…

This study explored whether Year 1 school children exposed to a 12-week classroom-based gross motor program progressed differently than Year 1 children undertaking their regular school program in motor proficiency, mathematics, and reading outcomes. Fifty-five Australian Year 1 school children (25 boys, 30 girls, mean age 6.77 ± 0.40 years) were…

Apprenticeships remain an important source of skilled workers in Australia; however, commencements have not kept pace with the skills demand projected in the previous decade. During that same decade, undergraduate university enrolments grew considerably. In investigating whether young people who would previously have chosen an apprenticeship have…

Student well-being has emerged as a topic of considerable interest to researchers and educators. Recent work has sought to examine relationships between measures of student well-being and other constructs such as academic achievement, physical health, relationships with peers, and engagement in learning. Reading assessment and context…

Both formative assessment and growth mindset scholars aim to understand how to enhance achievement. While research on formative assessment focuses on external teaching practices, work on growth mindset emphasises internal psychological processes. This study examined the interplay between three formative assessment strategies (i.e. sharing learning…

The present article investigates the relationship between the degree of tracking and inequalities in reading literacy of second-generation and non-immigrant students in 28 Western countries. The article takes into account that next to between-school tracking, there are also more subtle forms of tracking, such as tracking within schools or classes.…

This paper investigates changes in 15-year-old Australian students' attitudes towards reading mathematics, and science, as well as their relationships with students' performance in these respective domains over the period of 2000-2018. multigroup confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the measurement invariance of the construct of…

While the relationship between school socioeconomic composition and student academic outcomes is well established, knowledge about differential effects is not extensive. In particular, little is known whether the relationship differs for students with varying levels of academic performance. We examined whether the school socioeconomic composition…

We investigated effects of tracking students into higher, more academic, and lower, less academic, school types immediately after primary school (early tracking) instead of having a comprehensive secondary school system (late tracking) on school gender segregation and gender gaps in achievement outcomes. We assumed that, in early tracking…

This paper explores how cultural and migrant backgrounds affect boys' and girls' high-school academic performance. Scores from the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment are analysed for Australian children from migrant and non-migrant families, conditional upon a measure of gender equity in secondary education in their country of…

One of the goals of education systems is to equip all students, irrespective of their individual characteristics, with market-relevant skills. Poor or inadequate skills limit access to better-paying and more rewarding jobs and, ultimately, to better living and health conditions, and higher social and political participation. Yet, inequalities in…

This study investigates consistent and inconsistent respondents to mixed-worded questionnaire scales in large-scale assessments. Mixed-worded scales contain both positively and negatively worded items and are universally applied in different survey and content areas. Due to the changing wording, these scales require a more careful reading and…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…