Massive higher education expansion in the world’s four largest developing economies — Brazil, Russia, India, and China, known as the BRIC countries — is having a significant impact on the world supply of university graduates, including greatly increasing available cadres of engineers and...

There is currently a large body of literature about applying knowledge gained in class to real-life situations. However, comparatively little is known about how a student’s mastery of the material affects his or her ability to transfer this knowledge to unfamiliar settings. Our research seeks...

This paper focuses on the changing economic value of secondary and higher education in four potential world economic powerhouses - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - known as the BRIC countries. We show that in the past twenty-five years in the BRIC countries, changes in rates of return to...

Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and financed is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political-social construct, subject to various political forces,...

We use a national Brazilian test (SAEB) and an international test (PISA) to measure whether Brazilian students 13-15 years old improved their mathematics and language learning in1995-2012. We control for part of out-of-school influences by comparing test scores for students with similar family...

Russian 8th graders score relatively high on the TIMSS mathematics test. But they perform poorly on the PISA mathematics test compared to students in Eastern and Central European countries that traditionally taught a math curriculum similar to Russia’s. In this paper, we push beneath the...