The nonprofit and independent organization IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) is an international cooperative of national research institutions, government research agencies, scholars, and analysts working to evaluate, understand, and improve education worldwide. They are known for studies like TIMSS and PIRLS. They have awarded a 2020 Wolf Award to Dr Bokhove. The award is given annually to the author or authors of a paper published in a refereed journal, monograph, or book that includes analysis of data from one or more IEA studies.

Dr Bokhove received the Wolf Award for his paper The Role of “Opportunity to Learn” in the Geometry Curriculum: A Multilevel Comparison of Six Countries. The article was written with colleagues from Hong Kong and Japan in the context of the British Academy enGasia project, which compared geometry education in lower secondary school in these three countries, and then created digital geometry books. The article, which included a further three countries for comparison so six in total, focuses on how differences in achievement might be attributed to differences in “Opportunity to Learn” within a country’s curriculum. In the article we see “Opportunity to Learn” as a combination of curriculum content that is covered in the lessons, the amount of time spent on instructional hours and mathematics work, the education level of teachers and their preparedness to teach geometry topics. The paper does two things. Firstly, it describes integrated conceptual framework that combines elements from educational effectiveness, a curriculum model and “Opportunity to Learn” for analyzing curriculum effects. Secondly, using multilevel models, we empirically investigate with TIMSS 2011 data whether the “Opportunity to Learn” in the curriculum is associated with achievement in geometry education in six countries, thus validating that model. The analyses show that the countries differ considerably. Few findings held uniformly across all countries, with some counterintuitive. For example, in Japan fewer instructional hours were a significant positive predictor of higher outcomes. Overall, the results show that our conceptualization of “Opportunity to Learn” can be useful in analyzing curriculum effects.

See more information in IEA Insider.