This book examines how children experience learning in ways that extend beyond what is captured by international assessment scores. It offers a sociocultural and child-centred account of educational engagement by foregrounding children's lifeworlds, their daily routines, relationships, expectations and affective experiences across home, school and community contexts. The book is theoretically grounded in the concept of scholarly habitus, which reframes academic engagement as an embodied and relational disposition shaped through lived experience rather than discrete variables or inputs.

Drawing on original qualitative research with children, the book employs lifeworld reflections, a multimodal, participatory research approach, to explore how children represent learning through drawing, mapping, narrative and re-enactment. By integrating these qualitative insights with published TIMSS and PIRLS data, the book offers a distinctive framework for understanding educational engagement within contemporary contexts of international educational measurement.

The book adopts a comparative lens across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, integrating qualitative lifeworld data with secondary analysis of international assessment data. It offers a focused yet theoretically rich contribution that bridges comparative education, childhood studies and educational sociology. It will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and policymakers seeking to rethink what educational success means in a global measurement era.

Elise Waghorn is Program Manager of the Graduate Diploma in Early Childhood Education and a lecturer in the School of Education at RMIT University, Australia. Her research focuses on children's lifeworlds, scholarly habitus, educational equity, early childhood education, and international educational assessment.