Performance In PISA Research Articles

Dominant Discourses and Teachers’ Comparative Sensemaking through Internationally Sited Professional Development Experience

The United Arab Emirates’ education policy agenda is focused on a singular goal: to be one of the top 20 countries in PISA 2022. The focus on PISA has become so robust in the UAE that it is now a central component of teachers’ professional development. This article explores teachers’ sensemaking of dominant education policy discourses through their experience in an internationally sited professional development program in Vietnam – a country whose 2015 PISA performance inspired the education policy reform in the UAE. The findings presented in this article highlight teachers’ deficit framing of difference and their performative adoption of STREAM-focused practices to replicate Vietnam’s 2015 PISA scores. This article concludes with recommendations for future research to better understand the ways in which dominant discourses inform teachers’ professional development, and opportunities to expand teachers’ roles in the policymaking process.

Do teacher characteristics matter Findings from the PISA performance of Kosovar students

Do teacher characteristics matter Findings from the PISA performance of Kosovar students

Do teacher characteristics matter Findings from the PISA performance of Kosovar students

PISA continues to fundamentally influence educational policies and approaches globally. The present paper aims to explore the link between teacher characteristics and PISA student performance in the 2015 and 2018 assessments. Teacher characteristics such as providing feedback, showing an interest in students, providing help and assistance in most lessons are linked to higher achievement of students across all domains and years, compared to cases when teachers rarely or never show interest, provide feedback and help. Additionally, the findings showed that Kosovar students performed worse in the PISA 2018 compared to PISA 2015. While there is a small increase in reading literacy and mathematics between 2018 and 2015, this increase is not significant. The performance in science has significantly decreased in 2018, compared to 2015. Furthermore, the performance gap between public and private schools has increased significantly, by almost 100 points, with private schools continuing to perform higher across all domains.

An Exploration of Factors Linked to Academic Performance in PISA 2018 Through Data Mining Techniques.

International large-scale assessments, such as PISA, provide structured and static data. However, due to its extensive databases, several researchers place it as a reference in Big Data in Education. With the goal of exploring which factors at country, school and student level have a higher relevance in predicting student performance, this paper proposes an Educational Data Mining approach to detect and analyze factors linked to academic performance. To this end, we conducted a secondary data analysis and built decision trees (C4.5 algorithm) to obtain a predictive model of school performance. Specifically, we selected as predictor variables a set of socioeconomic, process and outcome variables from PISA 2018 and other sources (World Bank, 2020). Since the unit of analysis were schools from all the countries included in PISA 2018 (n = 21,903), student and teacher predictor variables were imputed to the school database. Based on the available student performance scores in Reading, Math, and Science, we applied k-means clustering to obtain a categorized (three categories) target variable of global school performance. Results show the existence of two main branches in the decision tree, split according to the schools’ mean socioeconomic status (SES). While performance in high-SES schools is influenced by educational factors such as metacognitive strategies or achievement motivation, performance in low-SES schools is affected in greater measure by country-level socioeconomic indicators such as GDP, and individual educational indicators are relegated to a secondary level. Since these evidences are in line and delve into previous research, this work concludes by analyzing its potential contribution to support the decision making processes regarding educational policies.

Attitudes Towards Science, Teaching Practices, and Science Performance in PISA 2015: Multilevel Analysis of the Chinese and Western Top Performers

This study analyzes how students’ reported teaching practices of their teachers and their attitudes towards science are related to the science achievements of four high-performing countries/economies in PISA 2015: Hong Kong, China, Canada, and Finland. A study of these regions can shed light on the commonalities of and differences between the high-science-performing education systems that have quite different cultures. Enjoyment of science learning is found to be the strongest predictor of performance for all regions. Students in HK and China have lower self-efficacy than their western peers, which is also less positively associated with performance. Among the teaching practices, direct teaching and adapted instruction are positively associated with enjoyment of science learning and science performance. Though not related to performance, students engaged in more science activities tend to have higher enjoyment and self-efficacy in science. Compared with boys, girls in all regions have lower performance and less positive attitudes towards science. Girls in HK and China tend to have lower enjoyment of science but higher self-efficacy than their western peers.

Trends in Teacher Monitoring Methods across Curriculum and Didaktik Traditions: Evidence from three PISA waves

The main objectives of this study were to examine trends in teacher monitoring methods (TMMs) among a representative set of 12 curriculum and didaktik countries, using data from PISA 2009, 2012, and 2015, and the association of TMMs with students’ reading, mathematics, and science performance accordingly. Curriculum and didaktik education traditions frame the study theoretically, while quantitative research methods are used, consisting of a two-sample difference of proportion test and hierarchical linear modelling. The findings suggest that across the PISA waves, the control over teachers is growing across all countries and in all three subject domains and four TMMs. However, the proportion of students in schools where any of the TMMs are used is higher and more statistically significant for curriculum than for didaktik countries. Student tests, teacher peer review, and principal observation are much more common TMMs than external inspector observation across all countries. Nevertheless, the use of external inspector observation is very low in several didaktik countries, and in the case of Finland almost inexistent. Results for Sweden seem to be over-reported as in previous survey work it was found that teacher self-assessment is the most common TMM, however, teacher self-assessment is not a variable included in the PISA survey. The results from within-country hierarchical linear models (HLMs) of associations of TMMs with students’ reading (2009), mathematics (2012), and science (2015) performance in PISA show mixed, and at times relatively large, effects from country to country and across three PISA waves, and interestingly the associations had diminished by PISA 2015. Adding a more diverse set of questions to PISA contextual questionnaires is warranted for results to be more meaningful and representative across more countries.

ICT Engagement: a new construct and its assessment in PISA 2015

As a relevant cognitive-motivational aspect of ICT literacy, a new construct ICT Engagement is theoretically based on self-determination theory and involves the factors ICT interest, Perceived ICT competence, Perceived autonomy related to ICT use, and ICT as a topic in social interaction. In this manuscript, we present different sources of validity supporting the construct interpretation of test scores in the ICT Engagement scale, which was used in PISA 2015. Specifically, we investigated the internal structure by dimensional analyses and investigated the relation of ICT Engagement aspects to other variables. The analyses are based on public data from PISA 2015 main study from Switzerland (n = 5860) and Germany (n = 6504). First, we could confirm the four-dimensional structure of ICT Engagement for the Swiss sample using a structural equation modelling approach. Second, ICT Engagement scales explained the highest amount of variance in ICT Use for Entertainment, followed by Practical use. Third, we found significantly lower values for girls in all ICT Engagement scales except ICT Interest. Fourth, we found a small negative correlation between the scores in the subscale “ICT as a topic in social interaction” and reading performance in PISA 2015. We could replicate most results for the German sample. Overall, the obtained results support the construct interpretation of the four ICT Engagement subscales.

Low, medium, and high-performing schools in the Nordic countries. Student performance at PISA Mathematics 2003-2012

ABSTRACT Decreasing performance in several core subjects among students in Sweden and the increasing segregation of schools are urgent issues in relation to equity in education, which has been a long-term goal in Sweden. The aim of this study is to identify factors in the school environment associated with student performance in PISA in mathematics at different performance levels in the Nordic countries. In order to separate the effects of school-level variables from the effects of student background factors, and to deal with the multistage sampling design used in PISA, multilevel analysis was used in this exploratory study. Based on data from PISA 2003 and 2012, which are the most recent assessments with a focus on mathematics, results have shown that a few school-level factors seemed to be associated with student success, and then mainly among low and medium-performing schools. Overall, school-level factors associated with success (or lack of it) partially differ between countries and over the years. These results have implications for educational professionals since some of the school-level factors identified inhibit potential for change.

Incidence of a Non-Sustainability Use of Technology on Students’ Reading Performance in Pisa

This article describes an investigation that made a comparative analysis of the influence of the use of technology for non-academic activities on the reading performance of students in 21 countries within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). To do this, we coded the SumIC001-008-010 variables (“Devices available at home” and “How often do you use digital devices for the following activities outside school”) in the PISA survey and quantified the effect by the proportion of variance explained of each variable in the model for each country. The results show that the reading score increases according to the variable for type and quantity of devices at home but falls drastically in all 21 countries when the “SumIC001” variable exceeds 15 points. Our research also found that the two activities that most negatively impacted reading performance if done on a regular basis were “playing online games via social networks” and “uploading your own created contents.” These results would seem to confirm that the non-sustainability and prolonged use of technology outside school is objectively negative for the development of reading competence in young people.

Student Performance in PISA 2018: Nettlesome Questions for Canada

Student Performance in PISA 2018: Nettlesome Questions for Canada

What makes Estonia and Singapore so good?

ABSTRACT Considering high performance in PISA, a case study of Estonia and Singapore is required. Estonia’s economy is not up to par with Singapore. On the other hand, Estonia is more democratic than Singapore. The national IQ levels are higher in Singapore (102) than in Estonia (99.4) but may explain a large portion of the attainment level in both countries. Singapore does also have more highly educated and better paid teachers, as well as a highly skilled foreign workforce. Annual educational quantity is very similar. Therefore, the high scores in Estonia relative to the OECD average and many wealthier western nations remain as somewhat of a minor mystery.

The Influence of vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension towards performance of students in mathematics

This study aims to find out about the influence of the vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension towards students’ mathematicals performance in PISA, either directly or indirectly. This research uses survey method with a quantitative approach and path analysis as a research design. The respondents are 70 students of Junior High School in Jakarta. Data collection is done through research instrument in the form of tasks about vocabulary and reading comprehension, while the mathematical questions about Space and Shape are taken from PISA 2015. The results of the analysis shows that there are: direct influence of vocabulary mastery towards students’ performance in mastering mathematical problems in PISA; direct influence of reading comprehension towards students’ performance in mastering mathematical problems in PISA; direct influence of vocabulary mastery towards reading comprehension; direct influence of vocabulary mastery towards students’ performance in mastering PISA’ mathematical problems through reading comprehension. It can be concluded that in order to enhance student’ mathematical competence in PISA, we also have to improve their competence in vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension through improvement of teacher’s competence and infrastructures at school such as language laboratory. We hope that this study can be beneficial for further research to improve mathematical competences of the students.

Capital and capabilities in education: Re-examining Australia’s 2015 PISA performance and context assessment framework

This paper offers a conceptual framework that combines Sen’s concept of capability and Bourdieu’s forms of capital to understand the generative mechanisms of educational advantage or disadvantage. The paper illustrates some ways that the Sen–Bourdieu framework can be applied to understand the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results and measures of educational contexts for Australia. The Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 results indicated that students’ socioeconomic background and student-level and school-level factors affect their educational performance. Guided by the proposed framework, the paper explains some of these effects and the contexts in which they occur. It suggests educational disadvantages are attributable to economic capital and other forms of capital within broader structural, representational and relational contexts of schooling practices. The implications for improving equity in education are to recognise forms of capital that enable or limit students’ educational capabilities, identify contexts and schooling practices in which such enablers or limitations occur, and improve opportunities as well as processes in schools in ways that secure students’ differences and uniqueness.

Contextual variables associated with differences in educational performance between European Union countries / Variables contextuales asociadas a las diferencias de rendimiento educativo entre los países de la Unión Europea

Extensive literature exists which shows the relation between academic performance and other variables of a contextual nature. A secondary analysis of the results corresponding to performance in PISA 2015 has enabled us to classify European Union countries into two different levels. The degree of relation between performance and contextual variables such as socioeconomic level, schooling indicators, resources allocated to education and organizational culture and school governance has also been studied at a national level. Subsequently, after selecting the variables that correlate the most with performance, the effects of the contextual variables on the differences of countries with high and low performance have been measured using a logistic regression model. Results show the role of some of the variables considered, with the economic level of the country standing out in particular, as well as parental involvement in decision-making. By way of conclusion, a series of recommendations are formulated to advance towards improvements in performance and to achieve educational convergence among EU countries.

Another slice of PISA: an interrogation of educational cross-national attraction in Australia, Finland, Japan and South Korea

ABSTRACTCross-national attraction is the first stage in international policy borrowing and analysis of its indicators provides insight into shifts in educational policies. We analyse cross-national attraction within the media discourse on the OECD’s PISA in four countries: Australia, Finland, Japan and South Korea. Using the largest circulation English language newspapers in each of these countries (2001–2015), we analyse references to the other three countries, then expand the focus to tally all international references and map emerging patterns. Finland is the predominantly referenced country, with media attention that eclipses all other countries. The attraction to Finnish educational culture is focused on aspects beyond what is measured in PISA; and flourishes despite Finnish performance in PISA, which although strong is deteriorating. Although limited to English language media, this study finds complex, sometimes inconsistent and paradoxical, patterns of cross-national attraction that deserve further research.

Description and evaluation of a large-scale project to facilitate student engagement in learning mathematics

Responding to students’ performance in TIMSS and PISA in East Asian countries/regions – low interests, low confidence, not seeing the value of mathematics, and high-achieving performance in average but a substantial percentage of “lowest performers”– a project JUST DO MATH has been launched in Taiwan. The themes of the project included developing students’ fundamental prerequisite mathematical ideas before regular classes, employing concrete manipulative representations as a starter for learning, and embedding learning activities in games. The design and implementation of the project involved the development of grounding activity modules and facilitation of professional development of mathematics teachers to implement instruction according to modules to engage students in learning mathematics. The findings – confirming the project significantly facilitated students’ cognitive and affective engagement in learning mathematics – can inform the government regarding educational reform and can suggest teachers and educators feasible instructional approaches to facilitate student engagement in East Asian countries/regions.

PISA 2012 mathematics literacy in Serbia: A multilevel analysis of students and schools

In PISA 2012 cycle, the focus was on the mathematics literacy. Data collected in PISA survey in Serbia on 4684 respondents show that students on average have significantly lower performance compared to average OECD performance. The aim of the study was to explore student (variables at the first level) and school level predictors (variables at the second level) of the PISA mathematics literacy using multi-level modelling. The most important finding is that student and school level variables are explaining variability in PISA mathematics performance almost equally. Results show that on the student level, significant predictors are gender, noncognitive characteristics (mathematics anxiety, mathematics self-efficacy, mathematics self-concept, openness for problem-solving), student perceived teaching quality and studying habits. Results also indicate that several school-level variables have direct effects on the PISA math performance and that several school-level variables moderate the relationship between student characteristics and PISA performance.

A Cross-National Examination of the Effect of the Schwartz Cultural Dimensions on PISA Performance Assessments

In recent years, PISA assessments have become more frequent, and transnational policy borrowing and policy adaptation have steadily increased, with implications on national education reform policies. The growing impact of globalization in education policy seems to have reinforced the underlying legitimacy of an educational world that lacks cultural diversity. This study seeks to highlight cultural dimensions as significant indicators of disparities in educational performance across countries in international tests. Combining data from the World Values Survey with the PISA scores, we examined how the Schwartz cultural dimensions relate to student PISA achievement at the national level. Results of regression analysis indicate that when controlling for GDP per capita, Conservatism (i.e., traditionalism, conformity, and security) remains the best predictor of PISA test results in the three core disciplines. Cultural dimensions in general, and Conservatism in particular, play a significant role in explaining academic achievements per country. Paradoxically, while globalization, in some instances, has led to positive educational policies and multicultural values that challenge Conservatism and Traditionalism, Conservatism may ultimately serve to build the group identity, social cohesion, and national solidarity necessary in this dynamic global era. This study emphasizes the need for comparative exploration that takes into account the influence of cultural dimensions at the national level. This is something that we hope will assist educational administrators to make their educational systems both more effective and more socially responsive.

Chronotype correlates with developmental index, intelligence and academic achievement: A study based on nationwide indicators

ABSTRACTChronotype or morningness–eveningness (M/E) is an individual trait with a biological basis. In this study, I analysed the relationship between M/E and nationwide available data, such as economic variables, school achievement, intelligence and conscientiousness, which is a personality trait. These variables have been chosen because, first, they are linked on the individual level with circadian preference, and, second these associations have been found based on meta-analyses, which gives these findings a high plausibility. In addition, economic status has also been proposed to be related to M/E. Higher developed countries showed a lower morningness, based on both, the ranking of countries as well as on the HDI value. Similarly, GNI was related to morningness, while higher intelligence and performance in PISA were related to eveningness. Conscientiousness was related to morningness, although the results failed the significance level marginally. When using IQ as a control variable in partial correlations, the relationship between GNI and morningness disappeared, as did the correlation between eveningness and PISA results.

Structural Relationships among the Variables of Reading Literacy Performance in PISA 2009

This study aimed to examine and compare the structural relationships of teaching strategies and students’ learning strategies that affected the reading literacy performance of PISA 2009 between Australia and Korea, which stood in the highest reading literacy score group. A structural equation model was employed as the methodology for the study. The data was obtained from the PISA 2009 database. The sample was selected randomly, and a total of 400 cases from each country were used for the analysis. The conclusions were as follows. First, the exogenous variables of teaching strategies influenced the reading literacy performance through the mediating variable, and the goodness-of-fit indices had a reasonable fit in the level of χ2=703.523(df=173, ρ=.000). Second, no significance was shown on any paths for the Korean model. On the contrary, for the Australian model those teaching strategies indirectly influenced the reading literacy performance through the mediating variable of memorizing.