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…

Effective collaborative problem solving comprises cognitive dimensions, in which men tend to outperform women, and social dimensions in which women tend to outperform men. We extend research on between-country differences in gender gaps by considering collaborative problem solving and its association with two indicators of societal-level gender…

This article investigates the importance of global competence and its incorporation in interventions from Grade 5 to Grade 12 public education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to prepare learners for local and global challenges, such as sustainable development, technological innovation, climate change, etc. Using data from the Programme for…

PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] will be in the news again this year. The 2018 results are due to be released at the end of 2019 and they usually generate media interest. This Rangahau Whakarapopoto is a research brief which outlines things to watch out for as you think about what the results might mean.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a measure of soft skills suitable for use in a large survey of Australian adolescents. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted with N = 4,704 Australians aged 15-19 over 2 years. Principal components analysis was performed on 14 self-report items, followed by generalised linear mixed…

Although previous research showed that discrete social-emotional skills such as empathy, motivation, and social relationships in school significantly predict achievement, students tend to use various social-emotional skills in combination. As such previous investigations cannot comment on how different combinations or profiles of students'…

Computer-based assessments allow practitioners to collect rich process data by logging students' interactions with assessment tasks. In addition to providing final responses to test questions, computer-based assessments promise to furnish more evidence to support claims about what a student knows and can do through logging process data in log…

The present study explored the relationships between student engagement and mathematics achievement for 295,416 15-year-old students from 11,767 secondary schools in 34 countries who participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012. Affective engagement was measured by students' mathematics interest (InterestMath) and…

Based on Foucault's concept of the dispositive, the paper attempts to show how societies and schools have been functioning for some time now by regulating three dispositives: juridical, disciplinary, and security. While the crises of the 1970s shifted the combination of dispositives in education in the West towards security, this shift in the…

Open-ended (OE) items are widely used to gather data on student performance in international achievement studies. However, several factors may threaten validity when using such items. This study examined Finnish coders' opinions about threats to validity when coding responses to OE items in the PISA 2012 problem-solving test. A total of 6…

PISA claims that it can extend its reach from its current core subjects of Reading, Science, Maths and problem-solving. Yet given the requirement for high levels of reliability for PISA, especially in the light of its current high stakes character, proposed widening of its subject coverage cannot embrace some important aspects of the social and…

This paper briefly discusses four measurement challenges of data science or "big data" in educational assessments that are enabled by technology: 1. Dealing with change over time via time-based data. 2. How a digital performance space's relationships interact with learner actions, communications and products. 3. How layers of…

This Brown Center Report (BCR) on American Education is the sixth and final edition in the third volume and the 16th issue overall. The series began in 2000. As in the past, the report comprises three studies. Also in keeping with tradition, the first section features recent results from state, national, or international assessments; the second…

Using an international educational database, PISA 2009, this study investigates and analyzes 15-year-old students' attitudes toward school in 11 Asia-Pacific units (country, city, or area). For each unit, the study demonstrates four types of students' attitudes toward school, compares male and female students, and examines the relationships of the…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…