Since 2001, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been conducting, in cycles of five years, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The PIRLS program encompasses trend studies designed to monitor progress in reading achievement in an internationally comparative context. PIRLS 2001 and PIRLS 2006 both assessed primary school students in their fourth year of schooling (Grade 4 in the majority of countries). Progress in Reading Literacy in National and International Context is the second book to explore the influence of findings from the PIRLS surveys on different education systems. It presents a compilation of insights from 12 of the 35 countries that participated in PIRLS 2006. These insights relate to the impact of PIRLS on the systemic, governmental, administrative, and school-level aspects of the education systems featured and exemplify how PIRLS has influenced research initiatives, policy development, and national capacity-building. The primary aim of this book and its predecessor (Progress in Reading Literacy: The Impact of PIRLS 2001 in 13 Countries, edited by Knut Schwippert and published in 2007) has been to explore the opportunities that PIRLS’ findings hold for the development of education systems. Five of the 12 countries participating in the current impact of PIRLS project contributed to the 2001 project. For these countries, the current book provided opportunity to view, from a longitudinal perspective, the transformative processes initiated in response to the findings of both surveys. The book thus provides in-depth information on the various aspects of the national education systems represented herein that have originated, been restructured, or otherwise been modified as a direct or an indirect consequence of the results of the 2001 and 2006 PIRLS surveys. The book also gives a brief overview of the design, implementation, and main international findings of PIRLS 2001 and 2006. These introductory chapters are followed by country chapters, each of which is written by authors with unique insider perspectives gained from their work in their home institutions within their national contexts. Findings from these chapters are assembled in a comparative summary.

This book brings together contributions from different scholarly contexts that address a diverse range of focused topics, as well as empirical and conceptual perspectives, on research with international studies. Some chapters focus on technical aspects, exploring opportunities for drawing causal inferences from the data, and investigating biases originating in distributional scale properties. Others are of a more conceptual nature, addressing changes in the relevance of socio-economic indicators across time and countries, examining the exposure of mother-tongue and English instruction on performance and investigating the effects of test construction on gender difference. The discussion takes a much-needed meta-perspective on the usefulness of international large-scale assessments for educational research and allows reflection upon possibilities and opportunities for their improvement. This book was originally published as a special issue of Assessment in Education.

Technological and statistical advances, along with a strong interest in gathering more information about the state of our educational systems, have made it possible to assess more students, in more countries, more often, and in more subject domains. The Handbook of International Large-Scale Assessment: Background, Technical Issues, and Methods of Data Analysis brings together recognized scholars in the field of ILSA, behavioral statistics, and policy to develop a detailed guide that goes beyond database user manuals. After highlighting the importance of ILSA data to policy and research, the book reviews methodological aspects and features of the studies based on operational considerations, analytics, and reporting. The book then describes methods of interest to advanced graduate students, researchers, and policy analysts who have a good grounding in quantitative methods, but who are not necessarily quantitative methodologists. In addition, it provides a detailed exposition of the technical details behind these assessments, including the test design, the sampling framework, and estimation methods, with a focus on how these issues impact analysis choices.

Educational systems around the world look to student assessment programs as they initiate reforms and revise educational policies to increase student achievement. This edited volume examines the intersection of international achievement testing and education policy development in key countries around the world, exploring how assessments can inform curriculum, pedagogy, strategic planning, and ultimately determine large-scale education policy and governance. Noted chapter contributors explore how educational leadership and governance issues have been influenced by assessment programs across a range of political, economic, cultural, and educational contexts. The Intersection of International Achievement Testing and Education Policy provides educators, academics, and policymakers with cultural insights, historical contexts, and a framework for negotiating and understanding the consequences of educational policy decisions in schools.

This volume brings together educational effectiveness research and international large-scale assessments, demonstrating how the two fields can be applied to inspire and improve each other, and providing readers direct links to instruments that cover a broad range of topics and have been shown to work in more than 70 countries. The book’s initial chapters introduce and summarize recent discussions and developments in the conceptualization, implementation, and evaluation of international large-scale context assessments and provide an outlook on possible future developments. Subsequently, three thematic sections – “Student Background”, “Outcomes of Education Beyond Achievement”, and “Learning in Schools” – each present a series of chapters that provide the conceptual background for a wide range of important topics in education research, policy, and practice. Each chapter defines a conceptual framework that relates recent findings in the educational effectiveness research literature to current issues in education policy and practice. These frameworks were used to develop interesting and relevant indicators that may be used for meaningful reporting from international assessments, other cross-cultural research, or national studies. Using the example of one particular survey (the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2015)), this volume links all theoretical considerations to fully developed questionnaire material that was field trailed and evaluated in questionnaires for students and their parents as well as teachers and principals in their schools. The primary purposes of this book are to inform readers about how education effectiveness research and international large-scale assessments are already interacting to inform research and policymaking; to identify areas where a closer collaboration of both fields or input from other areas could further improve this work; to provide sound theoretical frameworks for future work in both fields; and finally to relate these theoretical debates to currently available and evaluated material for future context assessments.

A provocative and authoritative compendium of writings on leadership in education from distinguished scholar-educators worldwide. What is educational leadership? What are some of the trends, questions, and social forces most relevant to the current state of education? What are the possible futures of education, and what can educational leadership contribute to these futures? To address these questions, and more, editors Duncan Waite and Ira Bogotch asked distinguished international thought leaders on education to share their insights, observations, and research findings on the nature of education and educational leadership in the global village. The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Leadership brings together contributions from authors in twenty-one countries, spanning six continents. Topics examined include leadership and aesthetics, creativity, eco‐justice, advocacy, Big Data and technology, neoliberalism, emerging philosophies and theories, critical democracy, gender and radical feminism, political economies, emotions, postcolonialism, and new directions in higher education. A must-read for teachers, researchers, scholars, and policy makers, this Handbook: Champions radical pluralism over consensus and pseudoscientific or political solutions to problems in education Embraces social, economic, and political relevance alongside the traditions of careful and systematic rigor Challenges traditional epistemological, cultural, and methodological concepts of education and educational leadership Explores the field’s historical antecedents and ways in which leadership can transcend the narrow disciplinary and bureaucratic constraints imposed by current research designs and methods Advances radically new possibilities for remaking educational leadership research and educational institutions

This open access book describes and reviews the development of the quality control mechanisms and methodologies associated with IEA’s extensive program of educational research. A group of renowned international researchers, directly involved in the design and execution of IEA’s international large-scale assessments (ILSAs), describe the operational and quality control procedures that are employed to address the challenges associated with providing high-quality, comparable data. Throughout the now considerable history of IEA’s international large-scale assessments, establishing the quality of the data has been paramount. Research in the complex multinational context in which IEA studies operate imposes significant burdens and challenges in terms of the methodologies and technologies that have been developed to achieve the stated study goals. The demands of the twin imperatives of validity and reliability must be satisfied in the context of multiple and diverse cultures, languages, orthographies, educational structures, educational histories, and traditions. Readers will learn about IEA’s approach to such challenges, and the methods used to ensure that the quality of the data provided to policymakers and researchers can be trusted. An often neglected area of investigation, namely the consequential validity of ILSAs, is also explored, examining issues related to reporting, dissemination, and impact, including discussion of the limits of interpretation. The final chapters address the question of the influence of ILSAs on policy and reform in education, including a case study from Singapore, a country known for its outstanding levels of achievement, but which nevertheless seeks the means of continual improvement, illustrating best practice use of ILSA data.

The Handbook of Human and Social Conditions in Assessment is the first book to explore assessment issues and opportunities occurring due to the real world of human, cultural, historical, and societal influences upon assessment practices, policies, and statistical modeling. With chapters written by experts in the field, this book engages with numerous forms of assessment: from classroom-level formative assessment practices to national accountability and international comparative testing practices all of which are significantly influenced by social and cultural conditions. A unique and timely contribution to the field of Educational Psychology, the Handbook of Human and Social Conditions in Assessment is written for researchers, educators, and policy makers interested in how social and human complexity affect assessment at all levels of learning. Organized into four sections, this volume examines assessment in relation to teachers, students, classroom conditions, and cultural factors. Each section is comprised of a series of chapters, followed by a discussant chapter that synthesizes key ideas and offers directions for future research. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that teachers, test creators, and policy makers must account for the human and social conditions that shape assessment if they are to implement successful assessment practices which accomplish their intended outcomes.

Does the Nordic model of education still stand by its original principles and safeguard education for all? This Open Access volume is a carefully crafted collection of chapters that investigate the different aspects of equity, equality and diversity across the education systems in the Nordic countries. Based on data from various national and international large-scale assessments, the volume provides a better understanding of both the functions and foundations of the Nordic model, along with how the concepts mentioned above are enacted in practice. Across the chapters, data from different national and international large-scale assessment studies are used for cross- and single-country analyses on a variety of issues related to equity, equality and inequality in diverse educational settings. The investigations address different subject domains (i.e., mathematics, science, reading), age and grade groups, but also issues related to teachers and the schools themselves. In addition to these empirical chapters, the book addresses the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the ideas and tools embedded in the phenomena of equity and equality and how they have met in the Nordic model of education.

How does education affect economic and social outcomes, and how can it inform public policy?Volume 3 of the Handbooks in the Economics of Education uses newly available high quality data from around the world to address these and other core questions. With the help of new methodological approaches, contributors cover econometric methods and international test score data. They examine the determinants of educational outcomes and issues surrounding teacher salaries and licensure. And reflecting government demands for more evidence-based policies, they take new looks at institutional feaures of school systems. Volume editors Eric A. Hanushek (Stanford), Stephen Machin (University College London) and Ludger Woessmann (Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich) draw clear lines between newly emerging research on the economics of education and prior work. In conjunction with Volume 4, they measure our current understanding of educational acquisition and its economic and social effects. - Uses rich data to study issues of high contemporary policy relevance - Demonstrates how education serves as an important determinant of economic and social outcomes - Benefits from the globalization of research in the economics of education