| Summary: |
Equity has been and still is one major challenge for educational systems around the world. Since its inception, in 2000, OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims at providing countries and policy makers with comparable quality information and analyses about educational systems to inform their decision-making process. The present project is developed around three (related) broad objectives, all hinging the overarching relation between equity and countries' participation in PISA.The first objective departs from the fact that, 20 years after PISA's first wave, the literature is yet to address a crucial question: have participating countries improved their equity levels since they started to take part in PISA? Furthermore, is it possible to identify dimensions related to the systematic improvement or decrease in equity? To answer these
questions constitute the first objective of this project. We propose to achieve this by analysing the longitudinal evolution of countries' PISA equity indicator, i.e., the proportion of performance variance that can be explained by each student's economic, social and cultural status (ESCS). This will allow an assessment of how well countries have been at integrating PISA's results and lessons and improving their equity, as well as to identify countries (if any) that have been more (or less) successful in curbing the proportion of performance explained by the students ESCS. Consequently, we propose to probe for meaningful predictors of countries changes in equity levels within an array of existing variables.
The second objective takes advantage of the robustness of PISA's assessments and sampling, using it as tool for gauging the impact of policies that aim to increase equity in Portugal. The importance of this exercise is paramount if one takes notice that in the Portuguese context, the effectiveness of equity policies is seldom (if ever) assessed longitudinally by ob  |
Summary
Equity has been and still is one major challenge for educational systems around the world. Since its inception, in 2000, OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) aims at providing countries and policy makers with comparable quality information and analyses about educational systems to inform their decision-making process. The present project is developed around three (related) broad objectives, all hinging the overarching relation between equity and countries' participation in PISA.The first objective departs from the fact that, 20 years after PISA's first wave, the literature is yet to address a crucial question: have participating countries improved their equity levels since they started to take part in PISA? Furthermore, is it possible to identify dimensions related to the systematic improvement or decrease in equity? To answer these
questions constitute the first objective of this project. We propose to achieve this by analysing the longitudinal evolution of countries' PISA equity indicator, i.e., the proportion of performance variance that can be explained by each student's economic, social and cultural status (ESCS). This will allow an assessment of how well countries have been at integrating PISA's results and lessons and improving their equity, as well as to identify countries (if any) that have been more (or less) successful in curbing the proportion of performance explained by the students ESCS. Consequently, we propose to probe for meaningful predictors of countries changes in equity levels within an array of existing variables.
The second objective takes advantage of the robustness of PISA's assessments and sampling, using it as tool for gauging the impact of policies that aim to increase equity in Portugal. The importance of this exercise is paramount if one takes notice that in the Portuguese context, the effectiveness of equity policies is seldom (if ever) assessed longitudinally by objective data, as one can testify by the lack of such evaluations of the national compensatory education programme (TEIP), which is, countrywide, the most comprehensive programme that clearly aiming at equity improvement. Through desk research and literature review, as well as through expert consultation via interviews and/or focus groups, we expect to thoroughly identify implemented equity policies in the Portuguese context and their expected impact. The confrontation of the expected impact with the
actual change in equity levels in the last 20 years (resorting to the PISA analysis regarding Portugal) represents an invaluable opportunity to assess and discuss equity's policy effectiveness.
The third objective steams from the recognition that the worldwide circulation of PISA's results is mediated by processes of selection, reinterpretation, and re-contextualization by key actors that ultimately reconfigure the existing discourses about it in the public sphere. Thus, an additional goal of this project hinges on how PISA and its impact on equity are framed and (re)interpreted by primal stakeholders, namely policy makers, the scientific community and the media (regular and social). We pursue this objective by first interviewing
(individually or through focus-groups) experts on the subjects under study, i.e., equity and/or PISA, exploring how the interviewed regard the importance (or its lack) of PISA for equity promotion, as well as the mechanisms through which the PISA operates and impacts the educational field. Furthermore, we also propose to analyse how news about PISA and equity have been framed and discussed in (Portuguese) regular and social media. Results will map the perspectives and discourses that circulate in the general and social media about this topic, providing yet another layer to understand how PISA impacts and is used within educational equity debates, beyond PISA results and reports. Societies can only stand as democratic and fair to the extent to which they can get rid of their inequities. We believe that this project can tangibly contribute to our understanding of the evolution of educational equity and, by doing so, strengthen a core value of our democracies. |