Browsing by Subject "PISA"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Open Access
Gender and student achievement in Turkey : school types and regional differences based on PISA 2012 data
(2017-05) Arga, Bora
Gender inequality has always been a major global issue in all fields. Unfortunately, we are living in a world that is still dealing with this persistent problem, the core of which is primarily education. According to global indexes and surveys, Turkey is almost always well below the world average in ensuring gender equality. In this sense, this study uses PISA 2012 data to explore whether the student achievement differs in Turkey between female and male students. The relationship between student achievement and several variables i.e. Teacher Student Relations, Attitude Towards School: Learning Outcomes, Attitude Towards School: Learning Activities, and Sense of Belonging to School was also examined. Two control variables were included in the analyses conducted: geographical regions and school types, in addition to the above-mentioned school related variables. The results indicate that there are no major gaps between genders; yet, school types equally affect both genders dramatically. Geographical regions only contribute to the between-schools differences; while school related variables, make no difference in Turkish students' achievement levels. The results also show that higher level of variables should be considered as evidenced by the variation between school types before focusing on teaching-level variables. In this context, Turkish educational system should shift its focus from gender as the primary issue to the immense variances between schools in order to ensure a better education that will result in higher averages.
Open Access
Okuma kültürü kaynakçası
(2022-01-05) Yılmaz, Bülent; Atalan Akdeniz, Özge; Emre, Samet; Tercan, Osman
Open Access
Potential relationships among language-complexity variables, home-language variables and range of reading ability: evidence from PIRLS 2016 and PISA 2018
(2022-09) Angell, Philip
Reading is one of the most important skills for children to master during their time in school. It is strongly connected to life outcomes, and as such, education ministries place it at the centres of their education policies. English is one of the most challenging alphabetic languages to learn to read, and governments of anglophone countries have spent many years working to improve the effectiveness of their literacy education. However, when examining International Large-Scale Assessments, it is notable that although students in anglophone countries are able to achieve among the highest reading levels, their poorest readers lag much further behind than the poorest readers in similarly successful non-anglophone countries. This study made use of data from PIRLS (2016) and PISA (2018) to investigate possible relationships between range of reading ability and language complexity variables related to orthography and morphology, as well as between range of reading ability and home-language disparity in anglophone countries. Pearson correlational analyses showed that orthographic complexity and morphological complexity were moderately correlated with range of reading ability in both datasets. Orthographic transparency was found to be strongly correlated with range of reading ability in the PISA dataset and very strongly correlated in the PIRLS dataset. Morphological unpredictability was not found to be correlated with either dataset. Home-language disparity was not shown to be connected with range of reading ability in the PISA dataset, but in the PIRLS dataset, students who never spoke English at home were shown to have a wider range of reading ability than other students.
Open Access
Taking PISA seriously: how accurate are low-stakes exams?
(Springer, 2021-06) Akyol, Pelin; Krishna, K.; Wang, J.
PISA is seen as the gold standard for evaluating educational outcomes worldwide. Yet, being a low-stakes exam, students may not take it seriously resulting in downward biased scores and inaccurate rankings. This paper provides a method to identify and account for non-serious behavior in low-stakes exams by leveraging information in computer-based assessments in PISA 2015. Our method corrects for non-serious behavior by fully imputing scores for items not taken seriously. We compare the scores/rankings calculated by our method to the scores/rankings calculated by giving zero points to skipped items as well as to the scores/rankings calculated by treating skipped items at the end of the exam as if they were not administered, which is the procedure followed by PISA. We show that a country can improve its ranking by up to 15 places by encouraging its own students to take the exam seriously and that the PISA approach corrects for only about half of the bias generated by the non-seriousness.