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This paper investigates the integration of response styles (extreme and midpoint responding and socially desirable responding) and their effects on self-reports among 76,887 teachers from 18 countries in the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Socially desirable responding (with a positive and a negative impression management factor) and 17 core constructs related to the teaching profession were measured with Likert scales; extreme and midpoint response styles were derived from these measures. Using factor analysis, a general response style was extracted with socially desirable and extreme response styles as positive indicators and midpoint response style as a negative indicator. This general response style was more strongly correlated with constructs of personal involvement, such as teacher efficacy and job satisfaction, than constructs with less personal involvement, at both the individual and country level; however, statistical correction for response styles had negligible effects on the size of cross-cultural differences and country rankings in any construct. We conclude that the general response style can be interpreted as response amplification versus moderation, and that there is no indication that correcting for the general response style increases the validity of cross-cultural comparisons of TALIS teacher data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracked educational systems are associated with greater social inequality in children's educational achievement. Until now, research has assumed that the impact of tracking on the inequality of educational opportunity is independent of other educational institutional features. Using data from the 2009 PISA survey, we study how central examinations affect the association between tracking and inequality. We find that parental socioeconomic status has a larger effect on ­student achievement in systems without central examinations, whereas in systems with ­central examinations, this relationship is attenuated. We argue that central examinations help hold schools accountable for their performance, which (1) encourages schools to allocate students to tracks on the basis of more objective indicators and (2) makes it likely for schools to invest more in lower-track students. Thus, central exams attenuate the stronger impact of parental status on children's performance in tracked educational systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Exposure to books and high culture provides important academic advantages. But the reasons for this are hotly disputed. Elite closure theory posits that culture merely signals children's elite status to gatekeepers who then grant them unjust advantages. But other theories suggest that scholarly culture provides cognitive skills that improve academic performance, which schools justly reward. We attempt to adjudicate between these theories using data on academic performance from 42 national samples with 200,144 cases from OECD's PISA. We find that a key aspect of scholarly culture, the number of books in the family home, exerts a strong influence on academic performance in ways consistent with the cognitive skill hypothesis, regardless of the nation's ideology, political history, or level of development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]