Improving A Country's Education: PISA 2018 Results in 10 Countries Nuno Crato Newest Edition 2025
Improving A Country's Education: PISA 2018 Results in 10 Countries Nuno Crato Newest Edition 2025
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Nuno Crato Editor
Improving
a Country’s
Education
PISA 2018 Results in 10 Countries
Improving a Country’s Education
Nuno Crato
Editor
Improving a Country’s
Education
PISA 2018 Results in 10 Countries
123
Editor
Nuno Crato
Mathematics and Statistics, ISEG
University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
This book is probably one of the first to be published, or even the first, about the
results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018. It
discusses how PISA results in ten different countries have evolved and what makes
countries change. Information on each country’s educational system contextualizes
the discussion about PISA and other Large-Scale International Assessments’
results, such as TIMSS, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies.
One reason only made it possible for us to present this work to the reader with
such a short delay after PISA results were published in December 2019: we were
very fortunate to be able to gather an exceptionally knowledgeable and generous
group of international experts.
The ten countries discussed in this volume represent a wide variety of educa-
tional systems, from Australia and Taiwan, in the East, to England, Estonia,
Finland, Poland, Portugal and Spain, in Europe, and to Chile and the USA, in the
Americas. We have high-performing countries, countries that are around the OECD
average, and countries that are struggling to attain the OECD average. Each country
has its history that reflects efforts to improve educational achievement.
After the introduction, each chapter of this book concentrates on one country.
Countries are presented by alphabetic order. Each one is discussed by one of its
foremost national experts, some of them with experience in government or in
advising governments, many of them with experience in international organizations
and quite a few served as national representatives for international assessments. If
the reader peruses the biographic notes of each contributor, I’m sure he or she will
be as pleased as I was honored when all of them accepted my invitation to
contribute.
The idea for this book came about when I had the privilege of convening a
roundtable on TIMSS and PISA results at LESE, the Lisbon Economics and
Statistics of Education meeting in January 2019. It took place at the Lisbon
Economics and Business School of the University of Lisbon, ISEG, where I work.
It was the fifth meeting of this biennial conference, and five authors of this book
were present. We immediately felt that the diversity of experiences and the inde-
pendence of spirit of the participants enriched tremendously the analyses presented
v
vi Preface
for individual countries. We had the idea of preparing a contribution that could help
interpret PISA 2018 results and started preparing our work even before the results
were released. The outcome is this collective work.
The book is organized as follows. Each chapter is a data-based essay about the
evolution of a specific country, discussed and supported by PISA results and other
data, and represents the personal stance of the authors. Thus, each author represents
his or her own views and not those from his or her institution or government. Each
author draws on published data, as well as on a vast set of information and supports
his or her view with data and reliable information.
The introductory chapter gathers my reading of the ten chapters. It follows the
same principles: I express my views freely, but support them with the best infor-
mation available. I do not claim to voice the opinion of the authors, and I am the
sole responsible for what I wrote.
A final chapter introduced following a Springer referee suggestion provides the
necessary background in order to understand what PISA measures and how. It
shows examples of PISA and TIMSS questions that convey a better idea on what
the results of these surveys mean about students’ knowledge and skills.
I am honored to edit this book, and I am sure it will be useful to all those
interested in understanding what it takes to improve a country’s education system.
I feel very grateful to the LESE group and to my research centre Cemapre/REM, at
ISEG, for their continuous help and support in the publication of this volume.
We are all grateful to the reviewers who helped improve this collective work.
Needless to say, they are not accountable for any insufficiencies or views expressed
in this book.
Two anonymous reviewers invited by Springer publishers were very meticulous
and particularly helpful for the coherence of the full book and for improving the
chapters. We are also very grateful to the following invited reviewers for their
expertise and care.
Luisa Araújo, Instituto Superior de Educação e Ciências, Lisbon, Portugal
Jennifer Buckingham, Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow, MultiLit,
Australia
Patrícia Costa, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy
Montserrat Gomendio, Spanish Research Council, Spain
Ralph Hippe, European Commission Joint Research Center, Seville, Spain
Isabel Hormigo, Sociedade Portuguesa de Matemática, Lisbon, Portugal
Maciej Jakubowski, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw,
Warsaw, Poland
João Maroco, Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, Lisbon, Portugal
Gabriel H. Sahlgren, Research Institute of Industrial Economics and London School
of Economics
Mónica Vieira, Iniciativa Educação, Lisbon
vii
Contents
ix
x Contents
xi
xii Contributors
xiii
xiv Acronyms
Nuno Crato
Abstract PISA 2018 was the largest large-scale international assessment to date.
Its results confirm the improvements of some countries, the challenges other coun-
tries face, and the decline observed in a few others. This chapter reflects on the
detailed analyses of ten countries policies, constraints, and evolutions. It highlights
key factors, such as investment, curriculum, teaching, and student assessment. And it
concludes by arguing that curriculum coherence, an emphasis on knowledge, student
observable outcomes, assessment, and public transparency are key elements. These
elements are crucial both for education success in general and for its reflection on
PISA and other international assessments.
Modern international surveys on student knowledge and skills can be traced back to
the First International Mathematics Study, FIMS, held in 1964, involving 12 countries
and organized by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational
Achievement, IEA. The IEA itself was founded in 1958 at the UNESCO Institute for
Education in Hamburg, and since its inception had the ambition of providing reliable
assessments of student outcomes.
The IEA further organized the First International Science Study, FISS, in 1970,
the Six Subject Survey, in 1970/1971, the second studies in mathematics, the SIMS,
in 1980, and the studies in science, the SISS, in 1983. Along the last two decades of
the twentieth century, the IEA launched an additional series of international studies.
These studies focused on subjects as diverse as civic education (1971) and written
composition (1984). However, the two most successful waves of international studies
this Association organized were the TIMSS—with its acronym which could stand
The author was partially supported by the Project CEMAPRE/REM - UIDB/05069/2020 - financed
by FCT/MCTES through national funds.
N. Crato (B)
Cemapre/REM, ISEG, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]
for the third wave of studies, but now denotes Trends in International Mathematics
and Science Study—, and the PIRLS, Progress in International Reading Literacy
Study.
TIMSS has been held every four years, starting in 1995, and PIRLS every five
years, starting in 2001. At this time, the IEA further organizes the ICCS, International
Civic and Citizenship Study, held every seven years, and the ICILS, International
Computer and Information Literacy Study, held every five years. The last ICSS was
done in 2016 and the last ICILS in 20181 .
In 2000, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD,
started the Program for International Student Assessment, PISA, which has become
the best known of all international student surveys.
PISA is held every three years and encompasses three core domains: reading,
mathematics, and science. Every wave or cycle of PISA is focused on one of these
three domains, following thus a cycle of nine years. When PISA was designed,
mandatory schooling in most OECD countries ended when students were about
15 years old. Thus, this survey was naturally geared towards assessing all students,
those that continued their schooling, and those likely to soon enter the labour force.
It was important to assess how prepared they were for this new stage in life.
In addition to PISA, OECD organizes, inter alia, PIAAC, a survey of adult skills,
and TALIS, Teaching and Learning International Survey, a study directed to teachers
and school principals with detailed questions regarding their beliefs and practices.
PISA, TIMSS and all these studies have been labelled as International Large-
Scale Assessment studies, ILSA studies, and have a set of common characteristics.
Country participation is voluntary, each country pays for the costs and organizes the
application of the surveys, following common rules supervised by the promoting
organization. Students are selected by a multi-stage random sampling method. Most
test questions are confidential, in order to allow for its reuse across surveys for
longitudinal calibration purposes.
Although each survey focuses on specific cognitive skills, each provides data on
a large variety of issues, such as teaching methods, students’ perception of their
abilities, and social and economic students’ background.
Two main differences between PISA, on one side, and TIMSS and PIRLS, on
the other, are the selection of students and the intended measurements. While PISA
is age-based, surveying 15-year-old student regardless of their grade and type of
program they are following, TIMMS and PIRLS are grade-based—TIMSS is applied
to 4th and 8th grade students and PIRLS to 4th grade students. While PISA tries to
assess applied knowledge and skills, or literacy, in a generic sense, TIMSS aims to be
curriculum-sensitive, and so tries to measure achievement based on an internationally
agreed basic curriculum knowledge. While the OECD organizes PISA with specific
ideas of what should be measured and specific ideas about the aims of education,
IEA organizes TIMSS to measure what each school system is achieving, taking into
consideration each nation’s curriculum and aims.
1 For the history of IEA and these studies see IEA (2018).
Setting up the Scene: Lessons Learned from PISA 2018 … 3
A few countries have been participating in some of these international tests for
decades, thus having a series of results that allow for assessing progress over time
and estimate the impact of educational policy measures that have been introduced. A
large number of countries have participated consistently in PISA surveys, providing
a moderately-long multivariate time series and a set of very rich contextual data that
helps understand each country’s evolution.
Although PISA and TIMSS have been criticised from diverse perspectives2 , the
data they provide are so rich that they allow for various descriptive and correlational
studies which shed light on many educational issues.
PISA and TIMSS data also allow for the observation and discussion of policy
measures impact. Given the complexity of intervening factors, causality is always
difficult to establish. But the time series are now longer than political cycles (usually
four or five years) and longer than student’s compulsory schooling life (usually nine
to twelve years), and this allows the analysis of the impact of educational policies.
One excellent example is a study performed by one of the contributors to this
volume and his co-authors; this study shows the impact of standardized testing on
student cognitive skills3 . Taking advantage of the panel data structure of countries
and countries’ performance across six PISA waves, from 2000 to 2015, authors show
that “standardized testing with external comparison, both school-based and student-
based, is associated with improvements in student achievement”. They also reveal
that such effect is stronger in low-performing countries and that relying on internal
testing without a standardized external comparison doesn’t lead to improvement in
student achievement.
2 Pisa 2018
So far, the largest and most comprehensive of all ILSA studies has been PISA 2018.
About 710 000 students from 79 participating countries and economies representing
more than 31 million 15-year-old students performed the two-hour test4 . This time,
most of the students answered the questions on computer. The core domain was
reading literacy, although the survey also covered the other two domains, mathematics
and science5 .
Having as a reference the cycle in which each domain was for the first time
the major one and using results from the then participating OECD countries, PISA
normalized initial scores by fitting approximately a Gaussian distribution with mean
500 and standard deviation of 100 points for each domain. Now, the OECD mean
scores are 487, 489, and 489, for reading, mathematics, and science, respectively.
2 See, e.g. Araujo et al. (2017), Goldstein (2017), Sjøberg (2018), and Zhao (2020); and Hopfenbeck
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