The international surveys of pupil achievement – PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS – have been widely used to compare socioeconomic gradients in children’s cognitive abilities across countries. Socioeconomic status is typically measured drawing on children’s reports of family or...

International surveys of learning achievement and functional literacy are increasingly common. We consider two aspects of the robustness of their results. First, we compare results from four surveys: TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS and IALS. This contrasts with the standard approach which is to analyse a...

Within-country differences in educational outcomes are compared for a large group of industrialised countries. We investigate where inequality is greatest, the association between inequality in learning and average levels of learning, the interpretation of measured levels of inequality, and...

International surveys of educational achievement are typically analysed in isolation from each other with no indication as to whether new results confirm or contradict those from earlier surveys. The paper pulls together results from four surveys to compare average levels of achievement,...

While educational achievement surveys revolutionised research on education crossnationally, the surveys have been repeatedly subject of heated debate since first results were published. This paper reviews existing research examining the design and methodology of educational achievement surveys....

In 2013 Spain introduced a series of educational reforms explicitly inspired by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results. These reforms were mainly implemented in secondary education based upon the assumption that this is where Spain's educational problems lie. This...

This study uses the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) data, the only cross-national data having measured educational achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate educational achievement decline of fourth graders across 21 European countries between 2016 and...

This study uses the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) data, the only cross-national data having measured educational achievement during the COVID-19 pandemic, to investigate educational achievement decline of fourth graders across 21 European countries between 2016 and...

Literature examining immigrants’ educational disadvantage across countries focuses generally on average differences in educational outcomes between immigrants and natives disguising thereby that immigrants are a highly heterogeneous group. The aim of this paper is to examine educational...

International surveys of educational achievement are typically analysed in isolation from each other with no indication as to whether new results confirm or contradict those from earlier surveys. The paper pulls together results from four surveys to compare average levels of achievement,...