Measuring innovation in education and understanding how it works is essential to improve the quality of the education sector. Monitoring systematically how pedagogical practices evolve would considerably increase the international education knowledge base. We need to examine whether, and how ...

This open access book compares and contrasts the results of international student assessments in ten countries. The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) released the results of its 2018 assessment in December 2019. This book reflects the debates that typically follow the release of these results and focuses on the causes of differences between countries. Such causes include continuous decline in one country, improvement combined with increasing internal inequalities in another country, or rapid improvement in spite of an outdated curriculum in yet another. In addition, the book discusses a number of general questions: Is knowledge outdated? Are computers taking over and replacing teachers? Are schools killing creativity? Are we adequately preparing the next generation? Are schools failing to educate our kids? The book starts out with a summary of PISA’s evolution and PISA results, and an explanation of the major factors that play a role in changes in countries’ results. The next ten chapters are devoted to ten specific countries, offering a summary of data and an explanation of the major drives for changes in education results for each one. Each chapter includes a short description of the country’s educational system as well as the impact of PISA and other ILSA studies on the country’s educational policies. The chapters also include a timeline of policy measures and main hallmarks of the country’s educational evolution, discussing the impact of these measures on its PISA results. A final reference chapter explains what PISA is, what it measures and how. While highlighting the 2018 results, the book also takes into consideration previous results, as well as long-term initiatives. This book gathers the contribution of well-known and respected experts in the field. Specialists such as Eric Hanushek, for the US, Tim Oates, for England, Montse Gomendio, for Spain, Gunda Tire, for Estonia, and all other contributors draw on their vast experience and statistical analysis expertise to draw a set of rich country lessons and recommendations that are invaluable for all of those who care about improving a country’s education system.

This volume offers insights from modeling relations between teacher quality, instructional quality and student outcomes in mathematics across countries. The relations explored take the educational context, such as school climate, into account. The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is the only international large-scale study possessing a design framework that enables investigation of relations between teachers, their teaching, and student outcomes in mathematics. TIMSS provides both student achievement data and contextual background data from schools, teachers, students and parents, for over 60 countries. This book makes a major contribution to the field of educational effectiveness, especially teaching effectiveness, where cross-cultural comparisons are scarce. For readers interested in teacher quality, instructional quality, and student achievement and motivation in mathematics, the comparisons across cultures, grades, and time are insightful and thought-provoking. For readers interested in methodology, the advanced analytical methods, combined with application of methods new to educational research, illustrate interesting novel directions in methodology and the secondary analysis of international large-scale assessment (ILSA).

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.