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…

The Student Background survey administered along with achievement tests in studies of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement includes scales of student motivation, competence, and attitudes toward mathematics and science. The scales consist of positively- and negatively keyed items. The current research…

Finnish students have been among the world's strongest performers on standardized assessments throughout the past decade. Consequently, educators and scholars are interested in how to explain such results. A common explanation, as seen on social media, is that Finnish educators do not regularly assess their students. This study explores educators'…

The past thirty years have seen a rapid expansion of testing, exposing students worldwide to tests that are now, more than ever, standardized and linked to high-stakes outcomes. The use of testing as a policy tool has been legitimized within international educational development to measure education quality in the vast majority of countries…

The present study extends research on classroom quality profiles by examining the differences between profiles with respect to children's development in pre-academic skills and motivation across the kindergarten year. Teacher-child interactions were observed in 49 Finnish kindergarten classrooms using the CLASS Pre-K instrument. Based on prior…

Over time international large-scale assessments have grown in terms of number of studies, cycles, and participating countries, many of which are a heterogeneous mix of economies, languages, cultures, and geography. This heterogeneity has meaningful consequences for comparably measuring both achievement and non-achievement constructs, such as…

This study examined the longitudinal associations between children's academic skills and the instructional support teachers gave individual students. A total of 253 Finnish children were tested on reading and math skills twice in the first grade and once in the second grade. The teachers of these children rated the instructional support that they…

The paper attempts to investigate the influence of textbooks on the results of international assessments such as TIMSS [Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study] and PIRLS [Progress in International Reading Literacy Study]. It tries to consider the role and impact of school textbooks on PIRLS and TIMSS performance across countries. As…

Background: Large-scale cross-national studies designed to measure student achievement use different social, cultural, economic and other background variables to explain observed differences in that achievement. Prior to their inclusion into a prediction model, these variables are commonly scaled into latent background indices. To allow…

The aim is to describe the development of achievement in compulsory school in the Nordic countries from the 1960s. The study relies on published results concerning literacy and numeracy from the international large-scale assessments between 1964 and 2012. Among others, the following conclusions are drawn: (1) for most countries, a small but…

Background: The present study investigates what factors related to the school context influence student achievement on TIMSS mathematics tests across countries. A systematic review of the literature on PIRLS, TIMSS, and ICCS was conducted upstream to identify those school, teacher, and classroom factors shown to be useful predictors of student…

This study investigated the longitudinal associations between children's academic performance and their mothers' affect, practices, and perceptions of their children in homework situations. The children's (n = 2,261) performance in reading and math was tested in Grade 1 and Grade 4, and the mothers (n = 1,476) filled out questionnaires on their…

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the extent to which primary school text comprehension predicts mathematical word problem-solving skills in secondary school among Finnish students. The participants were 224 fourth graders (9-10 years old at the baseline). The children's text-reading fluency, text comprehension and basic calculation…

This study investigated the connection between language (i.e., word comprehension, reading comprehension and spelling skills) and mathematical performance. The sample consisted of grade nine students (N = 810) in 14 lower secondary schools in the Swedish speaking areas of Finland. Standardized tests for reading and writing skills, and mathematical…

Finland and Singapore are both nations that have excelled in mathematics on international assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Evidence of Finland's educational success emerged with the outcome of the first PISA study in 2000. Since…