Thesis advisor: Audrey A. Friedman / Despite the inherent obstacles posed by increasingly diverse student populations, school leaders worldwide are under mounting pressure to raise student achievement. This study utilizes hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to investigate the relationship between principal priorities and student achievement in reading literacy on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in sixty-four jurisdictions worldwide. Disaggregating the sixty-four systems into three performance levels, the research aims to equip principals across the global landscape with insights into current performance patterns of diverse learners and the leadership behaviors that associate with student achievement. The diverse groups of interest include boys, immigrants, language learners, socio-economically disadvantaged students, and rural pupils. Three conditions of effective leadership organize the priorities of investigation: defining a mission, managing instruction, and developing a climate (Hallinger and Murphy, 1985). The results reveal that across performance levels, diverse learners are underachieving but specific subgroups are faring better than others in some jurisdictions. Commonalities emerge from these jurisdictions and set a roadmap for interpreting the achievement of diverse learners worldwide. The leadership priorities that most frequently associate with student achievement when controlling for background factors vary across systems and across performance levels. The priorities under `defining the school mission' are most frequently statistically significantly associated to student achievement in promising systems and the priorities under `managing the instructional programming' and `developing school climate' are most frequent among high- performers. Overall, however, the associations are weak and ultimately open the possibility of a fourth condition of effective leadership: establishing a community connection. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

A educação é concebida como um processo fortemente impregnado pelas visões culturais, tendendo a veicular a transmissão de ontologias. É dada ênfase ao caso do ensino da ciEncia, que é encarada como correspondendo a uma versão actual e metropolizada da visão Ocidental do mundo. As fricções de aprendizagem sentidas no seio dos grupos sociais ruralizados, proletarizados e estrangeiros são estudadas como resultando de um predomínio de uma percepção e expressão associadas a fases culturais (quando da mesma cultura) ou culturas não inteiramente comunicantes com a ontologia prescrita pelo ensino. É estudada e avançada a hipótese de uma pedagogia de carácter poético que gere momentos críticos de aprendizagem a partir de traduções entre redes simbólico-materiais. A influência do estabelecimento resiliente de identidades e de processos de estereotipificação de classe/género/etnia são também objecto de pesquisa. São analisados dados dos resultados a ciências dos alunos portugueses no estudo PISA 2006 através de um modelo hierárquico e é efectuado um estudo etnológico numa escola do ensino básico. O caso dos alunos africanos é analisado com particular detalhe.

The number of countries participating in large-scale international assessments has grown dramatically during the past two decades and the use of assessment results in national-level education policy debate has increased commensurately. Recent literature on the role of international assessments in education politics suggests that rankings and performance indicators can shape national educational discourse in important ways. This dissertation examines the use of one such assessment, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), in education discourse in the United States from 2000 to 2012. The United States played a key role in the development of PISA and has participated in almost every international assessment of the past fifty years. Yet scholars have mostly overlooked the reception of international assessment in the United States. This dissertation seeks to address this gap. Using an original dataset of one hundred and thirty texts from American academic literature, think tanks and the media, I examine the use of references to PISA and to top scoring countries on PISA, e.g., Finland and China (Shanghai), during the first decade of PISA testing. I find that PISA has rapidly become an accepted comparative measure of educational excellence throughout US discourse. However, despite consistently middling American scores, attempts to turn America’s PISA performance into a crisis of the US education system have not stuck. Instead, I suggest that both global and domestic politics play a stronger role in shaping the interpretations of student achievement on PISA than does student performance. I show how the American PISA discourse: (1) is driven by political, not empirical, realities; (2) contains few calls for policy borrowing from top-scoring countries and has not engendered any direct efforts at policy reform; (3) is framed with remarkable consistency across the political spectrum; and (4) is a profoundly elite enterprise, privileging the voices of international organizations and policy makers over those of parents, teachers and students.

Syfte och frågeställningar Syftet med studien är att undersöka och jämföra hur klassrumsundervisning bedrivs i två svenska och två finska skolor för att finna möjliga förklaringar till PISA-undersökningens resultat (Programme for International Student Assessment). Syftet besvaras med hjälp av följande frågeställning: Hur och till vad utnyttjas lektionstiden till? Hur upplevs det allmänna klassrumsklimatet? Hur ser ledarskapet i klassrummet ut? Metod De metoder som använts i studien är löpande och på förhand kategoriserade observationer och kvalitativa intervjuer. Totalt har 24 klassrumsobservationer, tio lärarintervjuer och två intervjuer med rektorer genomförts vid två högstadieskolor i Storstockholm och vid två högstadieskolor i Helsingfors. Det som observerades var; lektionsinnehållet och tiden lagd på olika moment, elevernas självständighet, det disciplinära klimatet och relationen mellan lärare och elev samt klassrumsklimatet. Lärarintervjuerna rörde deras inställning till och åsikter om lärarrollen, undervisningen och eleverna medan rektorerna intervjuades om andelen behöriga lärare i kollegiet, lärarlöner, upplevda skillnader mellan skolor i Finland och Sverige samt effekter av skollagen. Resultat Det viktigaste fyndet i studien var den markanta skillnaden av andelen eget arbete. Med eget arbete menas att eleven arbetar enskilt med givna uppgifter eller att eleven självständigt eller med hjälp sätter egna mål, planerar, genomför och utvärderar det egna arbetet. I de finska skolorna användes 32% av lektionstiden till eget arbete medan samma siffra i Sverige var 70%. De finska lärarna hade även ett mer varierat lektionsinnehåll än de svenska lärarna. Dessutom undervisades de finska eleverna till 94% i helklass inom klassrummets fyra väggar medan samma siffra i Sverige bara var 74%. Andra skillnader mellan länderna var lärarnas ledarstil, synen på läxor och relationen till eleverna där de finska lärarna över lag utövade mer kontroll än de svenska. Klassrumsklimatet i de båda länderna skiljer sig åt i mindre grad.  Atmosfären i klassrummen upplevdes positiv i de båda länderna. Slutsats En förklaring till resultatskillnaderna mellan Sverige och Finland i PISA-undersökningen och de svenska elevernas försämring kan vara att lärarna i Sverige har en mer elevorienterad ledarstil medan lärarna i Finland har en mer uppgiftsorienterad ledarstil. I den elevorienterade ledarstilen är det den enskilda elevens förutsättningar som är i fokus och läraren ses som en handledare som vägleder sina elever i det egna arbetet. I den uppgiftsorienterade ledarstilen är det uppgiften, kunskapen som är i fokus och läraren ses en kunskapsförmedlare.

Thesis (Habilitation)--Bonn, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universiẗat, 2008. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. [479]-494) and indexes.

No description available.

Student achievement in mathematics continues to be compared internationally, with the results indicating that students in other developed countries are outperforming students from the United States. Mathematical modeling is an expectation in both the new Common Core State Standards and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This study seeks to find the differences in expectations for students in mathematical modeling between the United States and Singapore, which is one country that regularly outperforms the U.S. on international assessments. Since teachers and students regularly use textbooks for curriculum, homework, and other resources, this study compares two textbooks from the U.S. with the high school series adopted in Singapore. More specifically, the aim of this study is to compare frameworks of mathematical modeling and code to-be-solved problems in algebra textbooks using characteristics common to all frameworks. While the U.S. textbooks explicitly state which word problems address the expectation of mathematical modeling, the Singapore program does not have this attribute. So, an equivalent chapter (in objective and number of to-be-solved problems) in all three textbooks will be coded for evidence of the expectations of mathematical modeling. The results of this study indicate that no standard framework for mathematical modeling exists, but there are multiple areas of overlap. This study found that the ratio of word problems to numerical problems was comparable in the three textbooks, although the U.S. algebra textbooks used in a one-year course had the same number of to-be-solved problems as the four-year Singapore series. Results also indicate that to-be-solved problems in the Singapore textbook series do not provide students with more explicit mathematical modeling instructions than do the U.S. textbooks. This study also found that the interpretation of to-be-solved problems differed according to the experience of the rater. None of the textbooks in this study provided to-be-solved problems that asked students to engage in the mathematical modeling cycle as delineated by any of the four frameworks.

The significance of this dissertation research is twofold with both methodological advancement and empirical update. In this dissertation research, quantile regression (QR) was introduced to social sciences researchers as a response to the weaknesses of the traditional mean-based regression often referred to as multiple regression. General advantages of QR includes being more flexible for modeling data with heterogeneous conditional distributions, more robust to outliers, and having richer characterization and description of the data. Results of QR allow researchers to not only describe a general trend of changes in the effects of the independent variables across a continuous distribution of the dependent variable but also provide information on characteristics of any shift in the distribution caused by the independent variables. These shifts pertain to location, scale, and shape shifts. This dissertation research reviewed graphical ways to examine location, scale, and shape shifts, and more importantly, developed statistical ways to quantify location, scale, and shape shifts (i.e., test for statistical significance of location, scale, and shape shifts). Overall, this dissertation demonstrated that the introduction of QR as an advanced statistical procedure will advance the quantitative landscape of social sciences research. The results of this dissertation showed that QR can detect the differential effects of independent variables on the dependent variables that mean-based regression cannot detect and therefore uncovers more detailed relationships. This quality of QR enables more in-depth research than mean-based regression in many fields. The results of this dissertation also showed that QR allows for the understanding of relationships between variables outside the mean of the data, making it useful in understanding outcomes that are non-normally distributed and that have non-linear relationships with the independent variables. Finally, this dissertation introduced ways to detect and describe distributional shifts caused by the independent variables. The median regression line describes the (central) location shift. In addition to the estimated location shifts, the other QR lines provide information about the scale and shape shifts. This dissertation developed the bootstrapping approach to test for statistical significance when comparing location, scale, and shape shifts between parameters within and between samples (i.e., studies). This dissertation research applied QR to the examination of individual differences in mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy, using the 2003 and 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. The QR results showed that the effects of many student characteristics were not constant across the mathematics outcomes distributions (i.e., mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy). This suggested that individual differences were valued heterogeneously across the mathematics outcomes distributions. There was only one statistically significant location shift in terms of individual differences associated with family structure in both mathematics achievement and mathematics self-efficacy between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant scale shift in terms of individual differences associated with father SES in mathematics achievement for the middle 40 percent of the students between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant scale shift in terms of individual differences associated with gender in mathematics self-efficacy for the middle 40 percent of the students between 2003 and 2012. There was only one statistically significant shape shift in terms of individual differences associated with gender in mathematics self-efficacy between 2003 and 2012. Even though QR and LMR results can be similar in terms of statistical significance, they can differ dramatically in magnitude. Students’ age, gender, and socioeconomic status were typical examples in this study. The effect of student age generally became more positive as student mathematics achievement increased in 2003. This suggests that age had a stronger effect on better-performing students than lower-performing students in 2003. It also means that there are more age differences in the upper tail of student mathematics achievement distribution than in the lower tail.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the problem solving strategies, problem solving episodes, and metacognition of five Turkish students just graduated from elementary school and explore the interplay of these factors on their problem solving success in mathematics. The research data had been collected by clinical interviews and a self monitoring questionnaire followed by the interviews. Ten mathematical problems that participant students had worked on were selected among the released mathematical literacy items used in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003. The problem solving strategies used by participants were coded according to the descriptions given by Posamentier &amp / Krulik (1999). The cognitive-metacognitive problem solving framework developed by Artzt and Armour-Thomas (1992) has been used to observe the problem solving episodes of the participants. The coding system developed by Pappas et al. (2003) has been utilized to examine the major components of metacognition (mistake recognition, adaptability, awareness and expression of thought) of the participants. The self-monitoring questionnaire responses were analyzed to crosscheck the results obtained from the clinical interviews. The problem solving behaviors of the participants observed in the study confirmed their academic success levels. The study confirmed that the problem solving success is too complex to be clarified by a unique property or a behavior of the problem solver. The problem solving requires overcoming various obstacles to reach a successful result. Hence, not only the students should have the required mathematical knowledge and a good repertoire of different problem solving strategies, but also they should know when and how to use those strategies, and also they could monitor and regulate their problem solving processes using their metacognitive skills. So mathematics teachers should provide problems that require different problem solving strategies and encourage the students to explore new strategies, to take risks in trying and to discuss failures and successes with peers and teacher.

Policy Evidence by Design: International Large-Scale Assessments and Grade Repetition Links between international large-scale assessment (ILSA) methodologies, international organization (IO) ideologies, and education policies are not well understood. Framed by statistical constructivism, this article describes two interrelated phenomena. First, OECD/ PISA and UNESCO/TERCE documents show how IOs’ doctrines about the value of education, based on either Human Capital Theory or Human Rights, shape the design of the ILSAs they support. Second, quantitative analyses for four Latin American countries show that differently designed ILSAs disagree on the effectiveness of a specific policy, namely, grade retention: PISA’s achievement gap between repeaters and nonrepeaters doubles TERCE’s. This matters and warrants further research: divergent empirical results could potentially incentivize different education policies, reinforce IOs’ initial policy biases, and provide perverse incentives for countries to modulate retention rates or join an ILSA on spurious motivations. In summary, ILSA designs, shaped by IOs’ educational doctrines, yield different data, potentially inspiring divergent global policy directives and national decisions. When ILSAs met policy: Evolving discourses on grade repetition. This study explores phenomena of ordinalization and scientization of policy discourse, focusing on the case of grade retention in publications by OECD’s PISA and UNESCO’s ERCE (2007-2017), from a sociology of quantification perspective. While prior research shows these ILSAs yield divergent data regarding grade retention’s effectiveness, this study shows similarities in their critical discourse on grade repetition’s effectiveness. Genre analysis finds similarities in how both ILSAs structure their discourse on grade repetition and use references solely to critique it, presenting a partial view of the scholarly landscape. However, horizontal comparisons also find differences across ILSAs in the use of ordinalization (e.g., rankings) in charts, as well as differences in the extent to which their policy discourse embraces scientization. The ILSAs converge in singling out grade repetition as the policy most strongly associated with low performance; this should be interpreted in the context of one key similarity in their design. Policymaking to the test? How ILSAs influence repetition rates Do international large-scale assessments influence education policy? How? Through scripts, lessons, or incentives? For some, they all produce similar outcomes. For others, different assessment data, shaped by different designs, and mediated by international organizations’ policy directives, prompt different policy decisions. For some, participation in these assessments may be linked to lower repetition rates, as per the policy scripts hypothesis inspired by world society theory (WST). For others, assessments’ comparison strategies (age vs. grade) influence repetition in participating countries, according to policy lessons or incentives hypotheses, respectively inspired by educational effectiveness research (EER) and the sociology of quantification, and particularly the notion of retroaction. Fixed-effects panel regression models of eighteen Latin American countries (1992-2017) show that participation in assessments is associated with changing repetition rates in primary and secondary, while controlling for other factors. The findings show statistically significant differences between some assessment types. The conclusions spur new questions, delineating a future agenda.