The present study provides insights on the influence of family socioeconomic and school resources on principal leadership and, in turn, the influence of principal leadership on the science learning of students. The study uses data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2015 (248,620 students and 9370 principals) from 35…

Although scholars have proposed school climate as a key mediator through which school-based management (SBM) can improve educational outcomes, empirical evidence on the relationship between SBM and school climate improvement is sparse. In this article, we use three waves of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data across 57…

Indonesian 15-year-old students' educational achievement has proved to be significantly lower than the international average based on one of the most prominent international large-scale assessments, OECD PISA. This prompted our interest in Indonesian students' cognitive development during secondary schooling in comparison with that of students who…

In education, reform and renewal are constant. Policies are continually changing to meet the needs of the times and the society. Political advisors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, play an important role among private consultants as policy actors. According to Gunter's (in: Howlett and Mukerjee (eds), Handbook of…

In the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment, students from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taipei, where the classroom disciplinary climate of schools was relatively strict, were top performers in mathematics. In this study, two-level linear analyses showed that the classroom disciplinary climate of schools significantly affected…

This study examined over 48,000 eighth-grade Chinese students' mathematics performance and use of learning strategies. In particular, this study explored how the use of learning strategies and their combinations are related to students' mathematics performance in Chinese context. This study examined three kinds of learning strategies derived from…

Secondary data analyses of large-scale international student assessment at the country level often reveal that educational systems which are high in academic achievement are found low in attitudinal outcomes of schooling, and vice versa. This is contrary to the non-negative attitude-achievement relationship frequently found at the student…

Climate strength was first conceptualised in the organisational psychology literature as the within-group agreement on the perceptions of climate. In contrast to the deep study of climate level, climate strength has not been clarified by school climate research. The purpose of this cross-cultural study is to identify the main effect of…

Teachers' classroom behaviors and their effects on student learning have received significant attention from educators, because the quality of instruction is a critical factor closely tied to students' learning experiences. Based on a theoretical model conceptualizing the quality of instruction, this study examined the characteristics of…

Direct subsidy scheme (DSS) schools are a product of Hong Kong's market-oriented educational reform, mirroring global reform that champions parental choice and school marketization. Such schools have greater autonomy in matters of curricula, staffing, and student admission. Although advocates of the DSS credit it with increasing educational…

Most schools in Macao are private schools, and there is a variety of grade repetition policy practiced in the 45 secondary schools. The policies are translated into school-based accountability of some kind of minimum competency standards. The objective of this study is to uncover the mediation mechanisms accounting for the influences of grade…

This study examines key school reform policies and outcomes of the USA and Korea over the past three decades from comparative perspectives. Since the two nations' unique educational problems brought divergent educational reform paths--standardization versus differentiation, high-stakes testing versus individualized assessment, and centralization…

The present study assesses the performance of 54 participating countries in PISA 2006. It employs efficiency indicators that relate result variables with resource variables used in the production of educational services. Desirable outputs of educational achievement and undesirable outputs of educational inequality are considered jointly as result…

In this study, we use decomposition methods on PISA 2006 data to compare student academic performance across OECD countries. We first establish an empirical model to explain the variation in academic performance across individuals, and then use the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to decompose the achievement gap between each of the OECD…

Problem solving as a skill is emphasized within the revised Japanese Course of Study for schools. This experimental study, conducted among Japanese high school students, evaluates an effort to develop student ability to identify reasons for "different" points of view, not just personally favored views. First, the ability of all students…