To advance the implementation of civic education curriculum, understanding what young people perceive as a "good citizen" is of great importance. The current study takes a quantitative approach to analyse the results of three civic education studies conducted by The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement…

This article focuses on the role of language ideology in four students' ethnic identity during one stage. I employ Bakhtin's concepts of ideological becoming, and of authoritative and internally persuasive discourse to explore how the student participants are conscious of language and social worlds, including their heritage language and ethnic…

This study aimed to examine the trends in grants for STEM/STEAM education in Japan as well as Japanese students' perception of science learning and future careers. The grants were addressed through analysis of chronological trends, while student perceptions were reviewed through student questionnaires on Trends in International Mathematics and…

Using TIMSS 2015 data, the present study aimed to explore the profiles of attitudes toward science among Hong Kong eighth-grade students (N = 4138), and further to investigate how these attitudinal profiles might relate with gender and science achievement. In TIMSS, attitudes toward science are specified in terms of four factors: intrinsic…

This study aims to first investigate the effect of the extreme response style (ERS) which could lead to an attitude-achievement paradox among the countries participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2015), and then to determine the individual- and country-level relationships between attitude and achievement…

Student engagement in the learning process drastically declines as students make their way through the education system from fifth grade onward. Student disengagement increases the likelihood a child will eventually drop out of school. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the promotion of student engagement,…

Since 1995, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) implemented the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) as an international comparative study. This article aims at identifying the correlations of science classroom instructions with TIMSS science achievement of eighth graders among…

In the literature, response style is one of the factors causing an achievement-attitude paradox and threatens the validity of the results obtained from studies. In this regard, the aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it attempts to determine which item response tree (IRTree) models based on the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) approach…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) mission is to enhance knowledge about education systems worldwide, and to provide high-quality data that will support education reform and lead to better teaching and learning in schools. In pursuit of this aim, it conducts, and reports on, major studies of student…

Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is an international comparative study that has been implemented by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) since 1995. This proposed study is aimed to identify the affective factors contributing to eighth graders' science achievement in TIMSS…

Positioned in the Hong Kong education context, this article evaluates the effects of teaching science through home and second languages (i.e. Chinese and English) in Secondary 2 (or eighth grade) science classrooms. A total of 479 students, divided into two language instruction groups, participated in a teaching intervention comprising 16 lessons…

Researchers in comparative education have suggested different ways in which their field of study can be enhanced by considering units of analysis at different levels rather than focusing on a single level such as the nation-state (Bray and Thomas, 1995; Torney-Purta and Barber, 2011). The study reported here seeks to contribute to this area of…

Current educational resources for sex education in Hong Kong are mainly designed to be used in classroom. They are mostly text-based and are unattractive to the most vulnerable adolescent group. As discussion on sex is still taboo in Chinese society, self-learning resources can supplement classroom teaching. This paper describes an interactive…

Many scales contain both positively and negatively worded items. Reverse recoding of negatively worded items might not be enough for them to function as positively worded items do. In this study, we commented on the drawbacks of existing approaches to wording effect in mixed-format scales and used bi-factor item response theory (IRT) models to…

International large-scale assessments are now part of the educational landscape in many countries and often feed into major policy decisions. Yet, such assessments also provide data sets for secondary analysis that can address key issues of concern to educators and policymakers alike. Traditionally, such secondary analyses have been based on a…