Curriculum and Learning Time in International School Achievement Studies

Abstract

Students’ opportunities to learn are closely related to student achievement and thus are an important aspect of education effectiveness research. International school achievement studies have stressed their importance for questions of equity in education. This chapter concentrates on the quantity of opportunities to learn: i.e., the curriculum content and the amount of learning time that a student experiences. A literature review leads to the identification of core concepts of curriculum and learning time that should be included in international large-scale assessments (ISLAs) in order to enable meaningful reporting, provide useful data for secondary research, and facilitate policy making. The resulting theoretical frameworks, combined with the literature on education effectiveness research, are compared against previous measures for both concepts in ILSAs, and provide the foundation for questionnaire material that was developed for, implemented and evaluated in the field trial for PISA 2015.