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"International comparative studies of student achievement have caught the attention of governments, policy-makers, school leaders and educational researchers globally. They have become benchmarks of education for countries in the world and provide a broad perspective for countries to evaluate their education achievement. However, culture and school environment are two critical factors affecting educational achievement that deserve careful consideration and re-interpretation. This book brings light to these conceptual and methodological issues. The 14 articles in this book deal with various aspects of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), including cultural and social environments, principals' roles and views, achievements in Reading, Science, and Mathematics, and the trustworthiness of international comparisons. The articles use PISA and PIRLS data to present new insights and interpretations of international surveys. These insights will help educators, administrators, and policy-makers understand the working mechanisms of their school systems and the relationships between students' achievement and the culture and school environment they are in."--

"This book deals with teachers' behaviors that promote the creativity of students. It includes a rating scale for measuring a teacher's creativity fostering behavior — a scale known as the CFTIndex — and a series of conceptualization and research papers, including a lead article by Professor Authur Cropley, whose original ideas served as the basis of the CFTIndex. The other papers in this volume are by international authors who have used the scale in their research and who can now share their experiences using it in this volume. There is a dearth of measuring instruments that cover teacher behaviors where creativity is concerned, but the CFTIndex fills this vacuum, as evidenced by the many articles using this index in the international arena of creativity research."--Publisher's website.

"The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is gaining increasing attention among education authorities of the world. The number of participating economies almost doubled in the past one and a half decades, increasing from 43 in 2000 when it first started to 74 in 2015. PISA assesses the performance in Reading, Mathematics, and Science of 15-year-olds with different emphases rotating among the three subjects in different exercises. The attention of the participating economies has been focused almost exclusively on the ranking results which are used to evaluate the standings and progress of their education systems, although PISA does cover many background conditions which might have influenced the performance. Interestingly, East Asian economies have been consistently in the leading positions, and Finland has been frequently cited as a model for the Western economies and even the world to emulate. This monograph contains many secondary analyses of PISA data. It presents results of comparisons of Singapore, East Asian economies, and the world. It also points up some influencing factors such as time in and after school, test-language effect, administrative styles, and school environment. Statistical and measurement issues are also raised and demonstrated. Moreover, cultural differences are evoked as a plausible explanation of the differences observed between the East and the West. This monograph, using mainly simple and layman language, equips educational administrators and policy makers with in-depth insights into some of the intricacies inherent in the PISA data for a more appropriate understanding. It is readily appreciated that such an understanding is needed to prevent misinterpretation and avoid unsound policy or wasteful action."--Publisher's website.

"World university ranking started one and a half decades ago for the purpose of understanding what makes an excellent institution of higher education. Subsequent to the appearance of the Academic Ranking of World Universities at the Shanghai Jiaotong University, there soon emerged the QS World University Rankings and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. These three ranking systems are considered the classics as they are the fore-runners, although no less than ten new systems have come to the arena. The various ranking systems adopt a common approach of weight-and-sum to process the indicator data. Each system, somewhat arbitrarily, decides on a set of indicators and assigns different weights to these, presumably reflecting their relative importance. This simple (and simplistic) approach meets well common sense. And, in fact, much of the discussion on world university rankings is conducted at the commonsensical level. However, analyses conducted in the recent years uncovered several problems of the prevalent approach: spurious precision, mutual compensation, weight discrepancy, indicator redundancy, etc., which render the overall scores and ranking suspect in terms of validity. These are due to systems ignoring the fact that world university rankings are a form of social measurement and therefore need be seen from this perspective. Moreover, rankings encourage competition and, in the highly competitive world of today, it is natural that institutional attention is focused on the ranking results. By now, the original purpose of world university ranking seems to have been overshadowed, and world university rankings look more like international academic contests, as though they are annual sports meets. This monograph collects together many articles pertaining to the identified measurement and statistical issues of world university rankings and suggests remedies to make ranking results more trustworthy."--Publisher's website.