This paper uses student answers to publicly released questions from an international testing agency together with statistical methods from Item Response Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of mathematics achievement. These...

In the mid 1980s, half of Colombia's rural schools did not offer complete primary education and more than half of rural children between the ages of 7 and 9 had never attended school. Unitary schools - multigrade classrooms taught by one teacher - were established in the early 1960s in isolated...

Aid and conditionalities are the"carrots and sticks"of the conventional, direct approach to fostering economic development. The economic theory of agency is the most sophisticated treatment of the direct carrots-and-sticks approach to influencing human behavior. Considering the outcomes of the...

A key consideration in the policy debate on the appropriate role of private schools in predominantly public school systems is cost effectiveness. The questions are: Do private school students learn more than their counterparts, and is it more or less expensive to educate students in private...

Graduate education in business administration was developed in the U.S. around the turn of the twentieth century. MBA and similar graduate-level business programs took hold more slowly in other countries, but the number of such programs expanded more rapidly from the 1960s onward. In an effort...

The 2003 PISA Korea sample is used to examine the association between within-school ability tracking and mathematics achievement. Estimates of a variety of econometric models reveal that tracking is positively associated with mathematics achievement among females and that this association...

Past research from Third World countries shows that school related factors have stronger effects on student achievement than do family background factors. However this paper finds that prior work suffered from conceptual and methodological flaws, and it suggests that once these shortcomings are...

This paper provides evidence regarding the effects of schools, teachers and teaching processes on enhancing eighth grade mathematics achievement in Nigeria and Swaziland. A principal conclusion is that the achievement of students in both countries was significantly affected by the...

In the past, research findings indicated that most of the differences in student learning were due to socioeconomic factors, and that, therefore, the effect of direct educational interventions to reduce learning inequality was very limited. However, the authors show that learning achievement...

What makes one school more effective than another - particularly which inputs and management practices most efficiently enhance student achievement - has become the center of lively debate in the literature. Which method to use to compare school effects particularly concerns analysts. The model...