PISA aims to serve as a "global yardstick" for educational success, as measured by student performance. For comparisons to be meaningful across countries or over time, PISA samples must be representative of the population of 15-year-old students in each country. Exclusions and non-response can undermine this representativeness and…

The Skills Imperative 2035 is a five-year strategic research programme, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which is investigating future skills needs, skills supply and skill development, with a particular focus on the 'Essential Employment Skills' (EES) that are projected to be most vital across the labour market in 2035. The focus in this stage…

In large-scale assessments, performance differences across different groups are regularly found. These group differences (e.g., gender differences) are often relevant for educational policy decisions and measures. However, the formation of these group differences usually remains unclear. We propose an approach for investigating this formation by…

The present study used process data from a computer-based problem-solving task as indications of behavioural level of test-taking effort, and explored how behavioural item-level effort related to overall test performance and self-reported effort. Variables were extracted from raw process data and clustered. Four distinct clusters were obtained and…

This article seeks to unpack the taken-for-granted notion of low performance, arguing that performance and competency are not a given categories; rather they are "objects-for-thought" that receive their discursive and material contours through a chain of translations. As suggested previously by Gorur, PISA is analyzed through the lens of…

The aim of the study was to exemplify pupils' mastering of mathematical literacy. The study is a comparative multiple case study. In pupils' talk of mathematical activities aspects of mathematical literacy are discerned. A distinction is made between pupils: (1) pupils in mathematical difficulties, (2) pupils with another mother tongue than…

This report examines how immigrant students performed, mainly in mathematics and reading, but also in science and problem-solving skills in the PISA 2003 assessment, both in comparison with native students in their adopted country and relative to other students across all countries covered in the report (the "case countries"). In…