What did PISA and TIMSS ever do for us?: the potential of large scale datasets for understanding and improving educational practice

ABSTRACT

There appears to be something of an intellectual and philosophical gulf between education researchers who seek insights from statistical analyses of complex data-sets such as those provided by the OECD (PISA), and others who seek to develop rich, contextualised socio-historical understandings that can shed light upon why particular classroom practices operate and are sustained within a given milieu. This paper outlines these different perspectives, with particular reference to non-cognitive factors. Detailed analysis of the roots of high academic achievement, and associated challenges to student wellbeing, in many East Asian countries, is provided. The important influence of broad political and societal factors is highlighted by reference to cross-cultural differences across a large number of countries. The paper concludes by stating that while data from large datasets can assist in gaining greater understanding of cross-cultural differences, to be meaningful, such analyses should be incorporated within complex ecosystemic accounts.

KEYWORDS:

• PISA
• TIMSS
• ecosystemic analysis
• large data-sets
• non-cognitive factors
• East Asian education

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Julian Elliott is Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Durham University, UK.

Lazar Stankov is Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.

Jihyun Lee is Associate Professor of Educational Assessment and Measurement in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Jens F. Beckmann is Professor of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Durham University, UK.

ORCID

Julian Elliott http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9165-5875

Notes

1 Singapore is an exception in that it has moved away from using such tests to select government officials.

2 There are some variations among Confucian Asian countries in relation to second-chance opportunities to re-enter or transfer to a better school/university. In South Korea, for example, it is very hard to transfer to an academic track once a student obtains low scores on the university entrance exams. However, those students in Singapore who are placed into the Normal Academic track (those whose primary school exit examination scores are between the bottom 61th and 85th national-percentile) have the opportunity to take the national examination again, five years later, in order to enter the Advanced Pre-University group.

3 The term ‘nastiness’ to describe cultural differences may appear overly pejorative to a comparative education readership, but its origin is in cross-cultural psychology, a discipline where the use of such constructs is generally understood in a different fashion.