PISA-and-World-Bank-Educational-Data-Project

Background: Equity is a fundamental value and guiding principle of education policy, but it is not necessarily actualised in education systems around the world. In order to investigate educational equity in the difference of academic performance between gender groups, females and males, we collect international education data from the Internet. PISA is an international assessment of 15-year-old students’ capabilities in reading literacy, mathematics literacy, and science literacy as well as measuring a wider range of factors including students’ interest, attitudes and motivation. It is distributed across over 60 countries, and student background questionnaires and teacher questionnaires are collected as part of PISA assessment. Student scores vary greatly for different student subpopulations within a jurisdiction – e.g., gender. In this project, we are specifically interested in describing and explaining gender differences in students’ performances scores across countries. We hope to identify countries that have “equitable” schooling outcomes and their characteristics in education systems, including student and school culture, teacher educational practices, and societal factors. That said, we caution against simplistic international comparisons of country performances using correlates of higher performance in higher ranking countries for projecting causal generalizations and statements.