An investigation into students' perceptions of global competence and their level of being informed about global issues: The Turkey sample of PISA 2018

Abstract

This study aimed at detecting students’ perceptions of global competence and their level of being informed about global issues and investigating the predictive power of students' level of being informed about global issues to their global competence perceptions. Research participants consisted of PISA 2018 Turkey sample. In PISA 2018, while students’ perceptions of global competence were measured by the items under the heading of “How easy do you think it would be for you to perform the following tasks on your own?”, their levels of being informed about global issues were determined by the items under the heading of “How informed are you about the following topics?”. Research results revealed that students’ perceptions of global competence were at the intermediate level while their levels of being informed about global issues were around the threshold value the separates intermediate and advanced level. The effects of gender and grade level on students’ perceptions of global competence and their status of being informed about global issues were found to be statistically significant; however, the calculated eta squared values showed that the aforementioned effects were negligible in practice. We established that 28% of the variance in students’ perceptions of global competence was explained by their level of being informed about global issues, which signifies that practices informing students about global issues significantly support their global competence perceptions.