Conference Agenda

International large-scale assessments (ILSAs) such as TIMSS, ICCS, PIRLS, ICILS, PISA, and TALIS provide critical insights into educational outcomes and inequalities across diverse national contexts. They are widely used to monitor trends, enable international comparisons, and inform educational policy and practice (Johansson, 2016). At the same time, ILSAs function as laboratories for methodological innovation, supporting research that links individual outcomes to institutional and systemic conditions (Strietholt & Scherer, 2018). This symposium brings together recent research drawing on multiple ILSAs and is organized into five interrelated thematic sessions addressing digital transformation, civic education, educational inequality, student engagement and well-being, and methodological challenges in international assessment research.

The first thematic area focuses on digital competencies and emerging technologies in education. Drawing on ICILS, TALIS, and TIMSS, papers examine cross-national variation in technology and AI integration, the role of teacher characteristics and professional learning, and how digital provision and pedagogical use relate to achievement and inequality, including disparities linked to socioeconomic background and early tracking.

The second thematic area addresses civic attitudes, values, and engagement among young people. Using ICCS data, contributions explore students’ intentions to participate politically, their attitudes toward minorities, immigrants, and gender equality, and how school experiences relate to tolerant dispositions and engagement with social and environmental issues.

The third thematic area examines structural inequalities and contextual effects in education systems. Papers investigate how school composition, segregation, and socioeconomic context shape achievement and well-being across countries, including intersectional patterns by gender, immigrant background, and socioeconomic status. The session also addresses systemic resource inequalities through evidence on mathematics and science teacher shortages and their unequal distribution across schools.

The fourth thematic area focuses on students’ attitudes, motivation, and psychosocial factors. Contributions examine long-term gender gaps in reading behavior and achievement, the relationship between teacher gender and student outcomes, and trends in test-taking motivation relevant for interpreting achievement changes.

The fifth thematic area is explicitly methodological, with papers analyzing item-level features of achievement scales, participation and sampling standards, and the measurement of socioeconomic status, highlighting how technical choices shape conclusions about trends and inequality.

Overall, the symposium fosters dialogue among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners and advances rigorous, policy-relevant use of ILSAs to support more equitable and effective education systems.

Socioeconomic inequalities in educational achievement remain a persistent challenge across education systems worldwide (Chmielewski, 2019; Hernandez, 2022). While extensive research documents strong associations between students’ socioeconomic status (SES) and achievement (Sirin, 2005; Harwell & Zhao, 2021), less is known about how these associations vary across countries and how school-level socioeconomic contexts amplify or mitigate individual disadvantage. This study examines cross-national patterns in SES–achievement relations among Grade 8 students using data from TIMSS 2023, with a particular focus on contextual SES effects. Using an integrative data analysis approach (Wilcox & Wang, 2023), we estimated comparable two-level models for 43 education systems, with students nested within schools. In the first stage, we examined within-school SES effects, between-school SES effects, and contextual SES effects, defined as the difference between school-level and individual-level SES associations. Contextual effects capture the extent to which school socioeconomic composition is associated with student achievement beyond individual SES (Rumberger & Palardy, 2005). These effects were standardized using the ES2 metric, allowing meaningful cross-national comparison (Marsh et al, 2009). In the second stage, we applied random-effects meta-analysis and meta-regression to assess cross-national heterogeneity and to examine how system-level characteristics moderate contextual SES effects. Results show that SES is a consistent predictor of mathematics achievement within schools across all education systems, with the between-school SES effects being substantially larger, pointing to pronounced compositional inequalities. Contextual SES effects were positive in nearly all countries, indicating that students benefit academically from attending higher-SES schools beyond their own family background. However, the magnitude of these effects varied considerably across systems, ranging from negligible in several Nordic countries to very large in more stratified systems in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Southern Africa. Meta-regression analyses revealed that higher national income inequality and stronger between-school segregation in achievement were associated with larger contextual SES effects. In contrast, stronger democratic governance was linked to weaker contextual effects, suggesting that institutional arrangements may constrain the extent to which schools amplify socioeconomic advantage. Indicators of overall human development and education expenditure were not significantly associated with contextual effects. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that socioeconomic inequalities in achievement are shaped by interactions between individual background, school composition, and broader societal structures. The study highlights the value of international large-scale assessments for disentangling contextual mechanisms of inequality and provides comparative evidence relevant for debates on school segregation, equity-oriented governance, and educational policy reform.

Chmielewski, A. K. (2019). The Global Increase in the Socioeconomic Achievement Gap, 1964 to 2015. American Sociological Review, 84(3), 517–544. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419847165 Harwell, M. R., & Zhao, Q. (2021). An empirical example of capturing the impact of SES on student achievement using path analysis. International Journal of Educational Research, 105, 101715. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2020.101715 Hernandez, A. (2022). Closing the Achievement Gap in the Classroom Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Journal of Education and Learning, 11(2), 1. https://doi.org/10.5539/jel.v11n2p1 Marsh, H. W., Lüdtke, O., Robitzsch, A., Trautwein, U., Asparouhov, T., Muthén, B., & Nagengast, B. (2009). Doubly-Latent Models of School Contextual Effects: Integrating Multilevel and Structural Equation Approaches to Control Measurement and Sampling Error. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 44(6), 764–802. https://doi.org/10.1080/00273170903333665 Rumberger, R. W., & Palardy, G. J. (2005). Does Segregation Still Matter? The Impact of Student Composition on Academic Achievement in High School. Teachers College Record (1970), 107(9), 1999. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9620.2005.00583.x Sirin, S. R. (2005). Socioeconomic status and academic achievement: A meta-analytic review of research. Review of Educational Research, 75(3), 417–453. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543075003417 Wilcox, K. T., & Wang, L. (2023). Modeling Approaches for Cross-Sectional Integrative Data Analysis: Evaluations and Recommendations. Psychological Methods, 28(1), 242–261. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000397

As socio-emotional competencies gain prominence, students’ sense of school belonging (SSB) has attracted increasing attention (Aldrich et al., 2025). SSB refers to feeling accepted, respected, included, supported, and emotionally connected at school (Allen et al., 2017). In the international assessments the OECD and IEA measure a narrower form of SSB focused on social inclusion and identification with school. Stronger SSB is linked to better psychological outcomes, well-being, and achievement (Allen et al., 2018; Mullis et al., 2020; OECD, 2023). Using TIMSS 2023, Aldrich et al. (2025) found SES was only weakly related to school climate health (including SSB), whereas PISA trend analyses show belonging has declined most among lower-SES students (Högberg et al., 2021). This research builds on an intersectional framework (Codiroli McMaster & Cook, 2019) by examining three intercategorical groupings – SES, immigrant background, and gender –within post-Soviet educational systems in the EU (Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania) to analyze their relationships with sense of school belonging. The research questions are: 1) How are student-level factors such as “Students Like ” and “Student Bullying” associated with students’ SSB? 2) Do these associations differ across intersectional groups defined by SES (low vs. high), gender (girls vs. boys), and immigrant background (language spoken at home)? 3) Do intersectional SSB gaps vary across education systems and schooling stages? Using descriptive statistics and linear regression, this study analyzes data from OECD PISA 2022, IEA PIRLS 2021, and IEA TIMSS 2023. Within each country and study samples were divided into four equal SES quartiles. Intersectional groups were then constructed by combining each SES level with students’ gender and the language spoken at home. Comparisons focused on four groups within low SES and four groups within high SES. Preliminary TIMSS analyses indicate that low-SES students who do not speak the test language at home report lower SSB than higher-SES peers and low-SES students who do speak the test language at home. Boys report lower SSB than girls, and the gap between high-SES boys and low-SES boys is the largest among the intersectional groups. Across strata, predictors explain a moderate-to-large share of variance in SSB (R² = 0.32–0.61), with the best model fit observed for the boys’ group. Overall, these results suggest that associations with SSB vary across intersectional groups.

Aldrich, C. E. A., Reynolds, K. A., Leng, D., & von Davier, M. (2025). School climate health: Multidimensional profiles of school environments in TIMSS 2023. TIMSS & PIRLS Study Center Allen, K., Kern, M. L., Vella-Brodrick, D., Hattie, J., & Waters, L. (2018). What schools need to know about fostering school belonging: A meta-analysis. Educational psychology review, 30(1), 1-34. Allen, K., Vella-Brodrick, D., & Waters, L. (2017). School belonging and the role of social and emotional competencies in fostering an adolescent’s sense of connectedness to their school. In E. Frydenberg, A.J. Martin and R.J. Collie (eds.), Social and Emotional Learning in Australia and the Asia-Pacific (pp. 83-99). Springer Codiroli Mcmaster, N., & Cook, R. (2019). The contribution of intersectionality to quantitative research into educa-tional inequalities. Review of Education, 7(2), 271-292 Högberg, B., Petersen, S., Strandh, M., & Johansson, K. (2021). Determinants of declining school belonging 2000–2018: The case of Sweden. Social Indicators Research, 157(2), 783-802 Mullis, I. V. S., Martin, M. O., Foy, P., Kelly, D. L., & Fishbein, B. (2020). TIMSS 2019 International Results in Mathematics and Science. TIMSS & PIRLS Study Center OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume II): Learning During – and From – Disruption. OECD Publishing

Teacher shortages in mathematics and science are widely recognized as a global challenge, yet systematic evidence on their long-term evolution and unequal distribution across schools remains limited. Existing research has often relied on single-country studies, short time horizons, or aggregate indicators that obscure within-system inequalities (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003; Sutcher et al., 2019). As a result, less is known about whether shortages persist over time and whether they disproportionately affect specific types of schools. This study addresses these gaps by providing a longitudinal, cross-national analysis of STEM teacher shortages using four cycles of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2011, 2015, 2019, and 2023). Drawing on principals’ reports from more than 40 education systems at Grade 4 and more than 30 systems at Grade 8, we examine trends in shortages of teachers specialized in mathematics and science over a twelve-year period. To ensure comparability over time, analyses are restricted to education systems participating in all four TIMSS cycles. Moving beyond national averages, teacher shortages are conceptualized as a distributional phenomenon, and their prevalence is examined by school socioeconomic status (SES) and urbanicity. Pooled, school-weighted shortage rates are estimated separately by grade, subject, cycle, and school context, consistent with distributional perspectives emphasizing that staffing constraints may cluster in disadvantaged settings (García & Weiss, 2020). Results reveal three central findings. First, mathematics and science teacher shortages are persistently widespread across education systems, affecting a majority of schools in every cycle. At Grade 4, science shortages consistently exceed mathematics shortages, highlighting particular vulnerabilities in primary-level science staffing. At Grade 8, shortages display greater temporal volatility, especially in science, with evidence of partial decline by 2023. Second, shortages are strongly and persistently stratified by socioeconomic status. Schools serving socioeconomically disadvantaged student populations report shortage rates that are typically 10–20 percentage points higher than those of more advantaged schools, with gaps remaining stable or widening over time, aligning with evidence that staffing challenges are more severe in disadvantaged communities (Sutcher et al., 2019). Third, urban–rural differences are comparatively smaller and less systematic, particularly at Grade 4, although rural disadvantages are more consistently observed at Grade 8. These findings demonstrate that STEM teacher shortages are not merely a temporary labor-market imbalance but a durable form of educational inequality. This study reframes teacher shortages as an equity issue with direct implications for opportunity structures and targeted workforce policy (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003).

Darling-Hammond, L., & Sykes, G. (2003). Wanted: A national teacher supply policy for education—The right way to meet the “highly qualified teacher” challenge. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 11(33), 1–57. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v11n33.2003 García, E., & Weiss, E. (2020). Examining the factors that play a role in the teacher shortage crisis. Economic Policy Institute. Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D. (2019). Understanding teacher shortages: An analysis of teacher supply and demand in the United States. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27(35). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.3696