PISA aims to serve as a "global yardstick" for educational success, as measured by student performance. For comparisons to be meaningful across countries or over time, PISA samples must be representative of the population of 15-year-old students in each country. Exclusions and non-response can undermine this representativeness and…

This study assesses whether student exclusions from PISA 2018 in Sweden followed the criteria set by the OECD. We do this using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Our conclusion is that the exclusions made in PISA 2018 in Sweden did not follow OECD criteria and were much too high. Furthermore, interviews with school coordinators indicate…

The Survey of Adult Skills is a product of the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) led by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Survey of Adult Skills aims to measure the skills needed by adults to participate in society and for economies to prosper. The 2023 survey assessed…

This study focused on the relationships between teacher characteristics and students' mathematics achievement in EU countries, including Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Slovenia, Sweden, and Turkey, which are the only EU countries participated in TIMSS 2015 at the eighth-grade level. The data consisted of the sample of 31,969 eighth-grade…

This study seeks to explore the effect of tools of school governance advanced by the global reform agenda (1) on student performance and (2) on reducing the effect of sociodemographic variables on this performance. To do so, we compare two Nordic welfare states with an egalitarian tradition: Sweden and Finland. The Swedish school system has…

The aim of this article is to explore the interrelationships between a national government and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in terms of the power and legitimization of education reforms, here based on the reciprocal dependence of the two actors. Although the current case study only analyses the shifting…

Higher academic performance is almost universally considered a good thing, and most quantitative studies show that performance is positively, although weakly, related to mental health. Simultaneously, however, qualitative studies consistently find that high-performing students and students attending high-performing schools report high levels of…

The past century has seen a debate on what characterises a scientifically literate citizen. Originally, scientific literacy implied that a citizen should know the products of science but has grown to incorporate processes of science and aspects of the nature of science. Studies on students' epistemic knowledge are rarer than ones on students'…

From once being synonymous with reading and writing, literacy, as a concept has expanded in the last three decades to today being associated with multiple meaning making forms and competences. Impactful, in this shift, has been the research orientation of New Literacy Studies. Besides academia, the literacy concept has also had a major influence…

The current study analysed the relationships between socio-economic status, migration background, and non-cognitive factors and PISA reading and mathematics achievement. The results from multi-level analyses on Sweden's PISA survey from 2018 indicate that both mathematics achievement and reading achievement are affected by SES, migration…

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across…

Background: A variety of studies point to a deterioration of educational equity in Sweden and increasing school segregation with respect to achievement and socioeconomic composition. Some schools are resilient to socioeconomic disadvantages in their student body and demonstrate high levels of achievement. However, little attention has been given…

How could the technicality arising from eleven percent of students being excluded from a PISA test in Sweden trigger a polarized debate followed by investigations by both the OECD and national authorities? This question is explored in the study by drawing on discursive institutionalism, especially the concept of normative background ideas,…

This study aims to assess student motivation to provide valid responses to the PISA student questionnaire. This was done by modeling response times using a three-component finite mixture model, comprising two satisficing response styles (rapid and idle) and one optimizing response style. Each participant's motivation was operationalized as their…

Education reform efforts stemming from the Programme in International Student Achievement have strengthened in recent years, particularly in response to the growth of global references societies -- high achieving educational jurisdictions such as Finland, Hong Kong-China, and more recently Estonia and Singapore. Despite political rhetoric,…