International Handbook of Comparative Large-scale Studies in Education: Perspectives, Methods and Findings

Trude Nilsen is a research professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo, Norway. She holds a PhD in science education and her thesis was awarded the IEA Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Award.  She is the leader of the research group Large-scale Educational Assessment (LEA) at her department, and a leader of the large project Teachers’ Effect on Student Outcome (TESO). TESO is funded by the Norwegian Research Council and is a longitudinal extension of TIMSS. In addition, her work comprises analyzing data from the main ILSAs and supervising PhD students. Of all the ILSAs, TIMSS has been the main focus since 2010, and she is, and has been, an international external expert in the Questionnaire Item Review Committee (QIRC) for TIMSS 2019 and 2023. She also has worked as an external expert for the OECD in the Questionnaire Expert Group (QEG) for TALIS 2018 and the TALIS Starting Strong 2018. She has published a large numberof articles in international and national journals as well as books, such as the award winning and widely disseminated Springer book Teacher Quality, Instructional Quality and Student Outcome. Relationships Across Countries, Cohorts and Time. These publications primarily pertain to the areas of educational and teacher effectiveness. Using ILSA data she focuses on school climate and teacher instructional quality as well as educational equality and applied methodology including causal inferences.

Jan-Eric Gustafsson is professor emeritus of education at the University of Gothenburg. His research has primarily focused on basic and applied topics within the field of educational psychology. Three main categories of questions have been in focus: individual prerequisites for education; effects of resources for andorganization of education; and educational outcomes at individual and system levels. The research on individual prerequisites for education has in particular focused on the structure of cognitive abilities that has resulted in a hierarchical model which integrates several previous models of individual differences in cognitive abilities.  The research on educational determinants and outcomes has primarily been based on data collected within the international large-scale assessments, and particularly so in the studies conducted by IEA. Gustafsson has also been involved in development of quantitative methodology, focusing on issues of measurement with the Rasch model and on techniques for statistical analysis with latent variable models. He was for almost two decades a member of the IEA Technical Executive Group, which advises on design, analysis and reporting of the IEA studies. To an increasing extent he has also become involved in national educational policy issues and he chaireda governmental School Commission, aiming for improvements of the quality and equity of the Swedish school system. In 1993 he was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2020 he was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.