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• k-12 teachers document feedback during formative assessment as professional practice. • inscription practices are key resources for feedback during formal reading assessment. • previously-made inscriptions emerge, unplanned, as situated resources for feedback. • chains of inscriptions help teachers document, diagnose and provide feedback. • inscriptions are produced collaboratively through interaction during assessment. This paper examines the role of writing in sequences of oral feedback during formal formative reading assessment in an elementary school classroom. Previous research indicates that writing-in-interaction is central to the interactional accomplishment of feedback. The limitations of writing-in-interaction research on feedback for the study of formal formative reading assessment lies in its preoccupation with the planned-use of written inscriptions. Without presuming that inscriptions are planned as resources for feedback, the study asks 'what role does inscription play in the accomplishment of feedback during formal formative reading assessment interaction?' Analyzing a single case using ethnomethodologically-inspired conversation analysis, the current study demonstrates how writing done initially to record a student's reading performance emerges later, unplanned, as resource for sequences of diagnostic and instructional interaction. The paper contributes to an understanding of inscription as a practical technology for formative assessment, and demonstrates how the formal assessment of reading performance is interactionally accomplished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper examines the effects of increasing the school leaving age from 16 to 18. • The reform did not decrease the probability of dropping out of secondary school. • Neither did the reform affect employment, hours worked and wages by age 25. • Compulsory schooling age legislation is not enough in systems with grade retention. • It should be combined with the requirement of earning a secondary degree. This paper examines the effects of increasing the compulsory school leaving age from 16 to 18 in Hungary using a difference-in-regression-discontinuities design empirical strategy. While the reform increased the length of schooling, it did not decrease the probability of dropping out of secondary school, either on average or among the most at-risk group of Roma ethnic minority students. Due to grade retentions, marginal students were older than their peers and couldn't have reached the final grade of secondary school by age 18 to earn a degree. The reform also did not affect the probability of employment, hours worked, wages and the probability of working in low-skilled occupations at ages 20 and 25. In education systems that allow grade retention, compulsory education should have the explicit goal of keeping students in school until they earn a secondary degree, rather than just until a certain age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper captures the group dynamics underpinning preservice teacher identity formation to understand how childhood schooling and teacher education shape the teaching metaphors teachers construct of intercultural education. We propose a theory of identity grafting (IG) for a precise framing of the diverse ways teachers identify with intercultural education vis-à-vis other pre-established aspects of their teacher identities. Studying their IGs helped us connect the preservice teachers' experiences with the experiences of other teachers that had emerged in global literature. We draw insights from our efforts to co-construct with preservice teachers their professional development in facilitating intercultural education. Adapting the activities based on their responses, we co-constructed with each other during the workshop teacher identities with a sense of connectedness between intercultural education and other pedagogical forms. We observed preservice teachers as we facilitated their discussions, employing ethnographic approaches to immerse ourselves in the interactions of the workshop participants. The findings revealed that preservice teachers had become more mindful of the implications of their intercultural education practices after having reflective dialogues with each other. However, although the teachers successfully integrated each other's views about intercultural education practices, this could not be sustained when they attempted to contextualize these efforts. The teachers could not reconcile their disparate childhood experiences with cultural diversity as students graduating from schools with differing academic performance rankings (school banding). Therefore, they struggled to connect their experiences with other pedagogical forms that they had previously encountered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Reflexivity is an intersubjective process intrinsic to a decolonizing agenda in education. • Autobiographies are decolonizing texts that might challenge colonial practices in classrooms. • Decolonizing pedagogies are carried out by people , whose lives are embedded in coloniality. The teaching of English in Mexican elementary schools is emblematic of colonial practices. Counteracting this trend, this paper presents results of an "English" teaching praxicum which, allowing for decolonizing subjectivities, was conducted by two of the authors of this paper (Jatziri and Gerardo), Mexican student teachers in a low-socio-economic elementary school in Oaxaca, Mexico. Utilizing decolonizing pedagogies as a theoretical framework and critical ethnography as methodology, this paper presents the childhood life stories of Jatziri and Gerardo, and their decolonizing attempts during their language teaching praxicum through their dialogue with a student. Findings suggest these student teachers developed acute awareness of the diversity in the classroom through reflexive teaching. Hence, language education programs with decolonizing agendas should include reflexive teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proposed a novel multi-modal transformer with a new attention mechanism for action detection in untrimmed videos. • Multi-modal attention mechanism captures correlative patterns between spatial and motion modalities. • Proposed a new motion distortion correction algorithm to handle camera movements in the wild. • The proposed algorithm outperformed SOTA methods on two public benchmarks and our instructional activity dataset. This paper proposes a novel multi-modal transformer network for detecting actions in untrimmed videos. To enrich the action features, our transformer network utilizes a new multi-modal attention mechanism that computes the correlations between different spatial and motion modalities combinations. Exploring such correlations for actions has not been attempted previously. To use the motion and spatial modality more effectively, we suggest an algorithm that corrects the motion distortion caused by camera movement. Such motion distortion, common in untrimmed videos, severely reduces the expressive power of motion features such as optical flow fields. Our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet. We also conducted comparative experiments on our new instructional activity dataset, including a large set of challenging classroom videos captured from elementary schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since student achievement is related to educational attainment and to adult earnings, there is considerable interest in within-country achievement gaps between different social class groups, how they change over time, and the possible sources of those changes. In this paper, we analyze academic achievement gaps over a ten year period in Brazil. Our results suggest that social class inequality in public school student achievement on the Prova Brasil national test increased significantly among Brazilian 5th graders in the period 2007–2017, and that all of this increase was before 2013--indeed, mostly between 2011 and 2013. To the contrary, social class achievement inequality among 9th graders barely increased in 2007–2017, and that small increase appears to have occurred mainly in earlier years. We find that this increased achievement inequality among 5th graders was partly the result of increased inequality between schools with students of higher and lower average school class, and among municipalities with higher and lower income per capita and differing educational policies. Yet, a significant part of the increase is also related to changes in the within-school achievement gaps. • Describes trends in achievement for low and high socioeconomic pupils in Brazil in (5th and 9th grade). • Explains trends by changes in student factors such as race and gender, and returns to those characteristics over time. • Explains trends by changes in social stratification among schools and municipal variation. • Analyzes trends in achievement gaps by Brazilian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa exhibits one of the largest pro-girl gaps in education, yet the reasons behind this gap are poorly understood. This paper analyses South Africa's pro-girl gap in Grade 4 reading and Grade 5 mathematics achievement. I make use of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis to decompose the observed gender gaps into their explained and unexplained components, separately by school socio-economic quintile. This approach allows me to present new evidence that part of the country's pro-girl gaps in reading and mathematics are due to girls progressing through the early grades faster than boys. I also find that South African girls score higher on the constructs aimed at tapping student attitudes toward reading (reading self-efficacy and enjoyment, and engagement in reading lessons), and that these differences contribute significantly to the pro-girl gap in PIRLS reading achievement. Interestingly, despite outperforming boys in the TIMSS mathematics assessment, South African girls do not display more positive attitudes toward mathematics. The results suggest much more needs to be done to understand the reasons behind boys' disadvantage in the early grades, since much of the pro-girl achievement gap in Grade 4 reading and Grade 5 mathematics can be attributed the pro-girl advantage in grade completion in earlier grades. • South African girls outperform boys in both PIRLS and TIMSS. • This is partly due to girls progressing faster through the early grades. • Girls also display more positive attitudes toward reading than boys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although primary education in Brazil has achieved universal enrollment levels, the management of the educational system is decentralized with high heterogeneity at municipal level. The goal of this paper is to perform an efficiency analysis of the Brazilian elementary public schools. This study performs a thorough efficiency analysis of around 10,600 Brazilian elementary public schools, for the year 2017. The empirical assessment is conducted through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with double-bootstrap method. The model includes five inputs (teaching intensity, teaching quality, student-per-classroom ratio and two variables of prior achievement) and three outputs (progression rate and standardized scores on Math and Portuguese). Eleven different non-discretionary variables are employed to assess the determinants of the efficiency scores. The results show a relatively high average efficiency score (87 %), but also relevant disparities across the country's Regions. Eight out of the eleven non-discretionary variables are statistically correlated with efficiency scores, with an important role of indicators dealing with socioeconomic background (community and family). Importantly, potential attention must be posed about the apparent positive relationship between the efficiency of schools and the income inequalities in the cities where they operate. • This study performs a thorough efficiency analysis of around 10,600 Brazilian elementary public schools. • The results show a relatively high average efficiency score (87 %), but also relevant disparities across the country's Regions. • potential attention must be posed about the apparent positive relationship between the efficiency of schools and the income inequalities in the cities where they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focused on qualitative research on children's rights in primary schools. This study aimed to reconceptualize and interpret research findings to develop new insights rather than simply summarizing articles. The study adopted meta-synthesis, which is a qualitative research design. The sample consisted of 21 qualitative studies: 14 scientific articles from the International Scientific Indexing (n = 9) or the Social Sciences Citation Index (n = 5), and seven national theses (one Ph.D. thesis and six master's theses). Data were analyzed using inductive content analysis. The results show that most research on students' rights in primary schools addresses the right to participation but that some studies focus also on raising students' awareness of the right to education and children's rights. However, there is no research on other rights. Studies also make three recommendations: School staff should have a certain degree of literacy concerning children's rights; schools should adopt approaches based on children's rights; all segments of society should participate in training on children's rights. We also made some suggestions based on our results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the causal effect of grade retention in primary school on juvenile crime in Chile. Implementing a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that repeating an early grade in primary school decreases the probability of committing a crime as a juvenile by 14.5 percentage points. By estimating and simulating a dynamic model, we show that the RD result is mainly driven by two mechanisms related to the timing of grade retention. First, grade retention in early grades decreases the probability of grade retention in late primary school grades. Second, late grade retention in primary education has a positive and more relevant effect on crime than the direct effect in early grades. Our findings support the argument that, conditional on the decision to keep grade retention as an ongoing policy, the optimal implementation at the margin is to retain students in early grades in order to avoid retention in later ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 inhibited face-to-face education and constrained exam taking. In many countries worldwide, high-stakes exams happening at the end of the school year determine college admissions. This paper investigates the impact of using historical data of school and high-stakes exams results to train a model to predict high-stakes exams given the available data in the Spring. The most transparent and accurate model turns out to be a linear regression model with high school GPA as the main predictor. Further analysis of the predictions reflect how high-stakes exams relate to GPA in high school for different subgroups in the population. Predicted scores slightly advantage females and low SES individuals, who perform relatively worse in high-stakes exams than in high school. Our preferred model accounts for about 50% of the out-of-sample variation in the high-stakes exam. On average, the student rank using predicted scores differs from the actual rank by almost 17 percentiles. This suggests that either high-stakes exams capture individual skills that are not measured by high school grades or that high-stakes exams are a noisy measure of the same skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]