Increasing the share of vocational secondary schooling has been a mainstay of development policy for decades, perhaps nowhere more so than in formerly socialist countries. The transition, however, led to significant restructuring of school systems, including a declining share of vocational...

The predictive power of the PISA test items for future student success is examined based on data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) for the PISA 2003 cohort. This working paper analyses how students’ responses to mathematics and problem-solving items in PISA 2003 are...

Does decentralization enhance service delivery and poverty reduction? Drawing on cutting edge research, expert contributors address this fundamental question facing policy-makers in developing as well as advanced countries. This timely book builds upon insights on the recent developments in the...

This paper examines how including latent variables can benefit propensity score matching. Latent variables can be estimated from the observed manifest variables and used in matching. This paper demonstrates the benefits of such an approach by comparing it with a method where the manifest...

The predictive power of the PISA test items for future student success is examined based on data from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) for the PISA 2003 cohort. This working paper analyses how students’ responses to mathematics and problem-solving items in PISA 2003 are...

This paper uses an approximate average percent-correct methodology to compare the ranks that would be obtained for PISA 2006 countries if the rankings had been derived from items judged by each country to be of highest priority for inclusion. The results reported show a remarkable consistency in...

This paper uses an approximate average percent-correct methodology to compare the ranks that would be obtained for PISA 2006 countries if the rankings had been derived from items judged by each country to be of highest priority for inclusion. The results reported show a remarkable consistency in...