This book explores teaching and learning in lower secondary classrooms in the three PISA domains science, mathematics and reading. Based on extensive video documentation from science, math and reading classrooms in Norwegian secondary schooling, it analyzes how offered and experienced teaching and learning opportunities in these three subject areas support students’ learning. The in-depth investigations of video documentation are combined with analysis of the Norwegian PISA results in order to understand how teaching and learning in science, mathematics and reading can be improved. Recent reviews indicate that instructional practice does make a difference to students learning - and is more important than other factors including students’ socioeconomic background, class size, classroom climate, and teachers’ experience and formal training. This book opens the discussion on a European basis about contemporary challenges in teaching and learning in secondary schooling. Norway as a test bed is particularly interesting due to its long tradition with national curricula, and its unitary and non- streamed structure. Furthermore, ideas of educational progressivism and students’ active ways of working (such as individualized teaching, adapted teaching, inquiry based teaching etc.) have for a long time been actively promoted within Norwegian educational policies. The book draws on analyses that combine expertise in psychometrics and video-based micro genetic classroom studies with expertise in domain-specific instruction (math, science and reading). It feeds the conversation how issues of communication patterns are dealt with and made productive within different instructional formats, and presents possibilities to compare and analyze instructional formats and discursive practices for students’ learning.​

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improvement combined with increasing internal inequalities in another country, or rapid improvement in spite of an outdated curriculum in yet another. In addition, the book discusses a number of general questions: Is knowledge outdated?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 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.

The collection of chapters in this book results from ongoing scientific discussions on teaching, learning and curriculum studies in Europe. Didactics as a research field and area of knowledge deals with questions about teaching, learning and educational content. Didactics explores institutionalized teaching and learning processes that are fundamental to allow people living together and acting as citizens. It connects curriculum issues to classroom practices and student’s learning experience in a unique manner that goes beyond the field of curriculum studies and the field of the learning sciences. Focusing on different research traditions for conceptualizing the relationships between learning and teaching through the educational content learnt, the book presents advanced research in field of “Didactics - teaching and learning” that addresses the new challenges faced by the teaching profession. The collection of chapters in this book supports the continuous growth of comparative research on classroom practices and addresses in a novel manner the need for including international perspectives on Didactics in teacher education programs and graduate schools in education worldwide. Part 1 highlights the recent advances in the theoretical development of Didactics and more particularly the development of comparative didactics. Part 2 illustrates the diversity and complementarities of theoretical and methodological approaches for the empirical study of classroom practices. Part 3 maps certain societal challenges that didactic research faces in a changing world.

This book is an argument for reflexivity in the act of teaching, which means to acknowledge that intention guides the act of teaching. Teaching must create attention towards processes of collectivity in the classroom. Today, teaching is both acts of expressing knowledge and acts of securing justice to all students through a mediation of knowledge. Teaching therefore expresses both knowledge with reference to school subjects, and justice according to the distribution of this knowledge. The authors argue for teaching as the driver of education. To pay attention to teaching is to pay attention to that which is inside the system of education. To consider education as a mediation of knowledge between generations, places teaching as an act of performing the content of education, in a class in a school. The complexity of these processes is easily overlooked when education is used as a means in competitive economies. The approach taken in this text is that deliberations about teaching must be based on historicity. The support for this argument builds on a reading of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The book addresses teaching as an integral part of the learning process. In education today, everything seems to be concentrated around learning, as if teaching no longer takes place. Teachers and teacher educators need a language to discuss and understand teaching, both as personal and institutional actions. A Ricoeurian approach to a discussion on teaching as a reflexive and institutional practice, provides a timely approach to important questions related to teaching in our day and age.

Türkiye’s trajectory of improvement over the past two decades stands out internationally. Few other countries have been able to bring previously out-of-school children into the education system and improve performance at the same time.