The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed impressive machinery to produce international comparative data across more than 70 systems of education and these data have come to be used extensively in policy circles around the world. In many countries, national and international comparative data are used as the…

Self-regulation of learning, learning to learn, and their potential stimulation by specific information and communication technologies (ICTs) are main topics in European policy. This issue of the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) focuses on research to develop, integrate and evaluate self-regulation of learning and the potential and…

In Sweden, and in most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, post-16 education is a general requirement to succeed in adult life. By the late 2000s, after about two decades of policies for student choice and publicly funded free schools, students' results in the Programme for International Student…

This article shows how young people in a Swedish upper-secondary school negotiate identities through social relations in a particular part of a school corridor that they call the "immigrant corner". This place offers subject positions determined by ethnicity, but the young people also legitimise various forms of intersections of gender,…

Recent international studies in upper-secondary education (USE) have highlighted the importance and complexities of this phase as it becomes a more universal experience. Here the authors examine recent trends in USE to provide a context for discussion of the English system, which has been moving from a "linked" to a more…

This article shows how the application of narrative methodology brings new insights into understanding students' choices and their experiences upon entering a higher education programme. The point of departure is a study of a cohort of 38 students followed over a three-year period from when they were about to finish upper-secondary school in…

This article introduces the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). This German longitudinal study produces a vast amount of data for the scientific community, and researchers all around Europe are invited to use the data to address various research questions empirically. Therefore, the authors provide information about the purpose as well as the…

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of pedagogy in lower-secondary school mathematics in Denmark and England. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernstein's pedagogic discourse…

This article is about the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and its actors. It analyses the development and role of PISA as a "cultural product" from the perspective of Bourdieu's field theory. The authors attempt to answer the following questions: Of which field is PISA the product? In which field and by whom is PISA used and…

This article seeks to nuance arguments about the impact of broad policy technologies of auditing processes upon teachers' practices by providing empirical evidence of the effects of such processes, in context. Specifically, the article draws upon a cross section of teachers' accounts of schooling practices in a specialist, academically oriented…

This article discusses young people's transitions from school to work at a time when educational systems have become more closely connected to the economy than ever before. The serious situation of high unemployment, unstable employment conditions and poverty among young people and young adults in Europe is highlighted. Using Sweden as an…

Current research into the experiences of refugee students in mainstream secondary schools in Australia indicates that for these students, schools are places of social and academic isolation and failure. This article introduces one such student, Lian, who came to Australia as a refugee from Burma, and whom the author tutored and mentored…

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and "evidence-based" practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with potential meaning…

Recent enlargement of the European Union (EU) has created debate as to the suitability of current structures and policies for effectively engaging citizens and developing social cohesion. Education and specifically modern foreign language (MFL) teaching are argued by the literature to play a key role in equipping young people to interact and…

Gender and socio-economic background are widely acknowledged factors influencing the educational choices of young people. Following their compulsory education, young people in Finland choose between academically oriented general upper secondary schools and vocational upper secondary schools. Gender and class intertwine in these choices in many…