About the project
On a global scale, international large-scale assessments in education (ILSAE) such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), have received increasing attention from researchers, policymakers, and the media alike. Over the last twenty years, ILSAEs have substantially expanded both their geographic coverage and the breadth of the assessed constructs to include additional topics covering the transformation of the learning contexts and attitudes to current societal issues. Needless to say, with the sampling design encompassing a multitude of educational systems and the abundance of data, ILSAE data offers countless research opportunities. Despite this, ILSAE secondary research can be limited in its scope.
In the present PhD project, we argue that the scope of the topics receiving most of the attention is disproportional to the sheer magnitude of the ILSAE data and all the countless possibilities that it offers to advance our understanding of educational processes and contexts and to nuance the existing evidence from the ILSAE and outside of ILSAE research. In other words, we argue for utilising the collected ILSAE data to its fullest, and we focus on the underexposed and overlooked topics within the ILSAE secondary research that we do not yet process despite their potential to aid in producing relevant information for all stakeholders in education.
Compared to the well-researched areas that reside on fairly well-formulated and systematically organised theoretical backgrounds that act as a foundation upon which one relies to create new evidence, the under-studied topics may lack theoretical background altogether, or their theoretical background may pertain to limited cases and specific settings (e.g., on a case covering a single country) that may not generalise to a sufficiently wide context necessary for theory creation. In contrast, these circumstances warrant an exploratory approach; a study approach we explicitly adopt in the studies of the present PhD project.
Given their sampling designs, ILSAEs offer a unique opportunity to detect the phenomenon and test its generalisability across various educational systems (regions, countries, schools, classrooms) and cognitive and non-cognitive constructs (scales, items, topics, response formats). The latter argument naturally brings up the issue of systematically summarising the abundance of the results of an analysis performed on large portions of the ILSAE datasets simultaneously (across countries, scales, and items). Hence, the present PhD project uses various meta-analytical techniques as a tool to determine the common trends as well as identify the trends that may systematically vary across or within countries, regions, language groups, students, scales, and items.
Background
The project runs from September 2020.