Examining the Effects of Students and School Variables on PISA 2012 Problem-Solving Achievement in Turkey

Abstract

Problem-solving skills are very important in ensuring effective participation in public life regard and schools play an important role in helping students develop problem-solving skills. The purpose of this study is to determine the student and school level variables that effect students’ problem solving skills using a two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The data in this study is belongs to 4848 students in 170 schools who participated PISA 2012. Gender, school attendance, openness to problem-solving and perseverance to reach solution variables constituted the student level variables whereas school type, educational resources, dropout rates and student/math teacher ratio variables constituted the school level variables. The findings indicated that all the variables but openness and perseverance have statistically significant effect on students’ PISA 2012 problem-solving achievement scores. The results of the analysis indicate that 54 percent of the variability in the problem-solving achievement scores is attributed to the differences between the mean achievement of the schools. Keywords: PISA; Problem solving; School effect; Two-level Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM)