Most existing research indicates that working students perform more poorly than do full-time students on standardized achievement tests. However, we know there are wide international variations in this gap. This article shows that national and international contexts help to explain the gap in the academic performance between working and nonworking…

As more primary and secondary students worldwide seek after-school tutoring in academic subjects, concerns are being raised about whether after-school tutoring can raise average test scores without widening the variability in student performance, and whether students of certain ability levels may benefit more than others from after-school…

The paper focuses on education language policy in Slovene Istria and of Slovenia in Italy. On both sides of the Slovene-Italian border there is an ethnically mixed population of Italians and Slovenes, an Italian minority in Slovenia, and a Slovene minority in Italy. On both sides of the border apparently similar systems of bilingual education have…

Since the 1980s, school bullying--"Ijime"--has been a major concern of educational policy in Japan. In Japanese schools, homeroom teachers provide guidance for students' psychological and social development, in addition to academic development. Homeroom teachers spend significant time counseling students, visiting their families, and developing a…

This article compares the changes in the determination of educational aspirations from the end of the communist period in 1989 to 2003, focusing on a single postcommunist country, the Czech Republic. The Czech case is particularly relevant for comparative research on educational inequality and aspirations, as previous studies have shown…

This study compares the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 Mathematics results with the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 Grade 8 mathematics results, using country mean scores for 22 participants of both studies. It is found that Western countries generally performed better in PISA than in…

In order to improve teaching, it is important to understand why teaching looks the way that it now does and how its general form can be explained. One way to address this question is at the classroom level. This approach has been found in the ethnographic work of anthropologists and has been skillfully applied in the recent work of such…

Whilst school violence is a major public concern and a focus of educational reforms both in the USA and South Korea, few studies have comparatively examined the rates of school violence and school factors associated with them. Analysing nationally-representative data from eighth graders, their mathematics teachers and principals in 150 South…

The shift from a centrally-controlled to a market-oriented economy in the early 1990s put pressure on the Romanian education system to reform both the curriculum and methods of instruction employed in primary and secondary education. At least part of the pressure to implement educational reforms came from the relatively poor performance of…

This article explores the factors that contribute most to the Iranian students' mathematical achievement using the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 99 data. Mathematics achievement involves a complex interaction of factors that have specific direct effects and/or indirect effects through other factors on school outcomes.…

While schools play a major role in promoting parental involvement in schooling in many countries, few comparative studies examined the level of school expectation for parental involvement and its effect on student achievement. Using the TIMSS 1999 dataset, this study examined the level of school expectation for various types of parental…