Differences between students’ PISA reading literacy scores and grading for mother tongue and literature at school: A geostatistical analysis of the Finnish PISA 2009 data (original) (raw)
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� e � S and Grading for Mother Tongue and Literature at School
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Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 2016
On 6 December 2016, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) releases its report on the achievements of 15-year-olds from 72 countries and economies around the world. This triennial international survey aims to evaluate education systems across 72 contexts by testing skills in Mathematics, Science and Reading Literacy. This is the sixth cycle of PISA and the OECD suggests countries and economies now have the capability to compare the results over time to 'assess the impact of education policy decisions' 1. Compared to other education studies, the media coverage of PISA must be described as massive (Baird et al., 2016; Meyer & Benavot, 2013) and, as with previous years, it is expected that PISA will attract considerable discussion among policy-makers, educators and researchers (Wiseman, 2014). It is therefore timely to present a thematic issue of Assessment in Education, where we publish four articles that have analysed previous data-sets from the PISA studies each commenting upon the challenges, limitations and potential future assessment research on the PISA data. The articles touch upon issues regarding sampling, language, item difficulty and demands, as well as the secondary analyses of students' reported experiences of formative assessment in the classroom. One important message from the authors in this thematic Special Issue is the need for a more complex discussion around the use and misuse of PISA data, and the importance of pointing to the limitations of how the results are presented to policy-makers and the public. In an area where the media produces narratives on schools and education systems based upon rankings in PISA, researchers in the field of large-scale assessment studies have a particularly important role in stepping up and advising on how to interpret and understand these studies, while warning against potential misuse. In 2014, Yasmine El Masri gave a keynote at the Association for Educational Assessment-Europe conference in Tallinn, Estonia, following her Kathleen Tattersall New Researcher Award. We are pleased to publish the paper based upon her DPhil research: Language effects in international testing: the case of PISA 2006 science items. Together with Jo-Anne Baird and Art Graesser, El Masri investigates the extent to which language versions of the PISA test in Arabic, English and French are comparable in terms of item difficulty and demand (El Masri et al., 2016). As there is an ongoing discussion on whether it is possible to assess in a fair manner and compare science, mathematics and reading performances across countries and cultures, this present study offers important findings for future research. Using released PISA items, El Masri et al. show how language demands vary when comparing Arabic, English and French versions of the same item, and hence could impose different cognitive demands on the students participating in the PISA test in different countries. With the expansion of PISA to other countries through PISA for Development and the need for fair comparisons across countries, El Masri et al. suggest that subsequent research could explore the possibility of investigating computational linguistics approaches in test transadaptation as an alternative to the use of expert judgement which is the current practice in international test development. The next article in this issue by Freitas, Nunes, Reis, Seabra, and Ferro (2016), Correcting for sample problems in PISA and the improvement in Portugese students' performance, reports a
Finland’s high results in the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) are often attributed to its contextual factors, such as its culture and society. Egalitarian values and the welfare state provide explanation for some of the reasons behind its PISA success; however, the other Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland do not have the same outcomes in PISA. Finland scored higher than not only the rest of the Nordic countries, but also most of the world. Its strikingly good results indicate an enviable difference in achievement, which raises the question of why Finland scores higher in PISA than in the other Nordic countries. The Finnish perspective on the matter provides insight on these outcomes; therefore, this article explores the reasons behind these PISA results from the perspective of Finnish educationalists. The empirical results uncover the salient factors such as teachers and teacher education, attitude towards education and national values, and societal makeup and immigration. This writing explores the uniquely Finnish features that promote high performance in PISA.
Analysis of Cross-Cultural Comparability of PISA 2009 Scores
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2013
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a large-scale cross-national study that measures academic competences of 15-year old students in mathematics, reading, and science in more than 50 countries/economies around the world. PISA results are usually aggregated and presented in so called “league tables” in which countries are compared and ranked in each of the three scales. However, in order to compare results obtained from different groups/countries one must first be sure that the tests measure the same competences in all cultures. In this paper this is tested by examining the level of measurement equivalence in the 2009 PISA dataset using an Item Response Theory approach (IRT) and analyzing Differential Item Functioning (DIF). Measurement in-equivalence was found in the form of uniform DIF. In-equivalence occurred in a majority of test questions in all three scales researched and is, on average, of moderate size. It varies considerably both across items and across countries. When this uniform DIF is accounted for in the in-equivalent model, resulting country scores change considerably in the cases of the ‘Mathematics’, ‘Science’ and especially ‘Reading’ scale. These changes tend to occur simultaneously and in the same direction in groups of regional countries. The most affected seems to be Southeast Asian countries/territories whose scores, although among the highest in the initial, homogeneous model, additionally increase when accounting for in-equivalence in the scales.
THE INFLUENCE OF LOCAL CULTURE ON STUDENTS' EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES
Interaction in Educational Domains. , 2013
All adolescents are closely connected with their living environment, which influences their lives and learning in many ways. For example, individuals’ mental functions develop in interaction within different social, historical, cultural, and institutional contexts. In these environments, we can find different cultural features that have an impact on students’ educational outcomes. For example, in the PISA 2009 assessment for the Swedish-language schools in Finland, 10 percent of the variance among students in reading literacy scores could be explained by the index of parents’ economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) (Harju-Luukkainen & Nissinen 2011). There are also many other studies in which educational outcomes are associated with cultural factors (see e.g., Carbonaro 1998; Israel et al. 2001; Schlee et al. 2009; Castillo et al. 2011; Sun 1999; OECD 2010a; Bernelius & Kauppinen 2011). In this paper we take a meso-level perspective on education and learning and focus on the wider social contexts in which people interact and live. We believe that this interaction in the cultural contexts of different areas localizes, to some extent, the learning outcomes of individuals (see e.g., Coleman 1988; Bernelius & Kauppinen 2011). Our aim in this paper is to find and identify, if possible, areal accumulation of learning outcomes in Finland and look for similar areal patterns in different assessments. We will focus on the educational outcomes of Swedish language schools and take a closer look at three different areas in Finland. We examine the Swedish-language schools that participated both in the PISA 2009 assessment and in the School Health Promotion Study (SHPS) during the years 2008–2009. Concentration on the same schools makes the results more comparable. As regards PISA, we examine the data pertaining to reading literacy. As for SHPS, we focus on data related to students’ knowledge of intoxicants and issues of sexual health. The areal variation and the performance groupings, as well as the SHPS factors are studied by means of a spatial statistical method called “kriging” (e.g., Isaaks & Srivastava, 1989), discussed below.