OECD's brief self-report measure of educational psychology's most useful affective constructs: Cross-cultural, psychometric comparisons across 25 countries

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs, motivation, and learning preferences. This study evaluated SAL responses from nationally representative samples of approximately 4,000 15-year-olds from each of 25 countries (N = 107,899)—OECD's Program For International Student Assessment database. In one of the largest and most powerful cross-cultural comparisons of diverse educational psychology constructs, this study used multiple group confirmatory factor analyses to show that SAL's a priori 14-factor solution is well defined and reasonably invariant across the 25 countries, as are relations between SAL factors and 4 criterion variables (gender, socioeconomic status, math achievement, and verbal achievement). The results support posited relations among constructs derived from different theoretical perspectives and their cross-cultural generalizability. The SAL provides a standard set of educational psychological measures that have been translated into many languages with nationally representative norms that have been validated across the world. These should be a useful focus or supplement in diverse educational psychology research settings, and should provide the longitude and latitude against which to map new and existing educational psychology constructs

The Dutch sociology of education: Its origins, significance and future

Contains fulltext : 28833.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)As in many other countries the Dutch sociology of education has blossomed into a fully-fledged specialised branch of sociology since the beginning of the 1970s. A tradition of policy-oriented research has also consolidated the position of the sociology of education at the universities. The strength of this relatively small group of specialists lies in the solid empirical basis and use of advanced research techniques and analyses in their work. Theory and reflection are not the strongest qualities of this group. A good organisational structure naturally helps keep the ranks closed. Recently, however, marginalisation of the specialism is threatening because of isolation from general sociology. Mainstream educationalists and policy-makers are also challenging the sociologists of education to make their contribution more explicit than ever