Special event: the AJE 20 Years of PISA webinar

The Australian Journal of Education (AJE) is dedicating its November issue to an important milestone for one of the world’s largest student surveys: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Contributors to this special issue, respected researchers and experts in their fields, will be sharing their insights in a free webinar on Wednesday 4 November. 

Australia has taken part in PISA since the first cycle with 265 000 students from 32 countries in 2000. Since then, PISA has grown hugely; the last report in 2018 assessed more than 600 000 students in 79 countries and economies, and its scope has expanded significantly in line with trends in assessment design and content. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) has managed PISA in Australia since it began and ACER Senior Research Fellow Kylie Hillman – guest editor of this AJE special issue – has worked with PISA data, and on secondary analyses of that data, for many years. 

‘The papers in this special issue use PISA data to illuminate aspects of student learning and development that main PISA reporting doesn’t capture,’ Ms Hillman said. ‘The result is a fascinating collection of research that crosses domains and regions, and looks at a range of topics from maths anxiety to collaborative problem solving.’ 

Does student year level contribute to the declining trend in PISA reading and mathematics in Australia? ACER’s John Ainley, Dan Cloney and Jess Thompson explore whether or not shifting age-grade distributions of students in PISA samples between surveys have impacted achievement. Read an overview.  

What does a comparative analysis of student performance in collaborative problem solving tell us? PISA assessed this complex and innovative domain for the first time in 2015 and, in this paper, ACER’s Claire Scoular, Dan Cloney and Dara Ramalingam with the University of Manchester’s Sofia Eleftheriadou compare the assessment framework to that of two other assessments of collaboration. Read an overview. 

Florence Gabriel and Abhinava Barthakur of the University of South Australia’s Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning, and ACER’s Sarah Buckley, put the impact of mathematics anxiety on self-regulated learning and mathematical literacy under the lens and find a domino effect of factors around maths anxiety that hinders maths learning. Read an overview. 

Emma Medina and Megan Chamberlain of the New Zealand Ministry of Education examine the declining reading performances of 15-year-old students in Australia and New Zealand in their paper, concluding that differences in teaching practices and interventions at the middle primary schooling level may be having a positive impact on Australian cohorts.  

The University of Amsterdam’s Maien S. M. Sachisthal, Brenda R. J. Jansen, Jonas Dalege and Maartje E. J. Raijmakers look at data from PISA and the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) to relate teenagers’ science interest network characteristics to later science course uptake. And I Gusti Darmawan from the University of Adelaide’s School of Education investigates changes in attitudes of 15-year-old Australian students towards reading, mathematics, and science and their impact on student performance. 

This exciting webinar – hosted by AJE Editor and ACER Senior Research Fellow Dr Petra Lietz – will include John Ainley, Claire Scoular, Florence Gabriel, Kylie Hillman and Emma Medina in a wide-ranging discussion of their findings, and of 20 years of PISA.

Numbers are limited so register ASAP.