PISA and PIRLS

The Effects of Culture and School Environment

Kaycheng Soh

• Editorial: WSPC
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813276550
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Evaluación y valoración en la educación

International comparative studies of student achievement have caught the attention of governments, policy-makers, school leaders and educational researchers globally. They have become benchmarks of education for countries in the world and provide a broad perspective for countries to evaluate their education achievement. However, culture and school environment are two critical factors affecting educational achievement that deserve careful consideration and re-interpretation. This book brings light to these conceptual and methodological issues.

The 14 articles in this book deal with various aspects of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), including cultural and social environments, principals' roles and views, achievements in Reading, Science, and Mathematics, and the trustworthiness of international comparisons. The articles use PISA and PIRLS data to present new insights and interpretations of international surveys. These insights will help educators, administrators, and policy-makers understand the working mechanisms of their school systems and the relationships between students' achievement and the culture and school environment they are in.

This book is a companion volume to the author's earlier publication — PISA: Issues and Effects in Singapore, East Asia, and the World (World Scientific, 2017).

Contents:

• About the Author
• Prologue
• Part I: Cultural and Social Environment:
  • The Influence of Culture on Academic Achievement: Illustration Using PISA 2009 Data
  • Social Environments for Learning in Finland and Singapore: Perceptions of Students and Principals in PISA 2009
• Part II: Principals' Roles and Views:
  • Principals as Instructional Leaders? A Lesson from the PIRLS 2011
  • Principals' Leadership and Views on Teachers and Students in PISA 2012: Comparisons between OECD Members and Partners
• Part III: Reading, Science, and Mathematics:
  • PIRLS 2011 Reading and the Effects of Home, School, and Classroom Factors: Confirming and Contradicting Findings
  • Reading Achievement, Materials, Times, and Purposes in PISA 2010: Comparing OECD Members and Partners
  • Reading Competencies as Predictors of Science Achievement: Lessons from PISA 2009 Data
  • Reading Competencies as Predictors of Mathematics Achievement: Lessons from PISA 2009
  • Collaborative Problem Solving in PISA 2015: Highlights and Reflections
  • PISA's New Venture in Creative Thinking: Some Conceptual and Methodological Concerns
• Part IV: Trustworthiness of International Comparisons:
  • Readability of PISA Reading Tasks as a Predictor of Reading Performance
  • Ecological Fallacy in Predicting Reading Achievement: The Case of PIRLS
  • Mathematics Achievement and Interest Negatively Correlated
  • Does Ranking Tell the Truth in International Academic Comparisons? An Example from PISA 2012 and 2015
• Epilogue

Readership: School principals, teachers, and policy-makers at the national level. Postgraduate students reseraching on educational systems and environments. Parents concerned with cultural and organizational factors affecting student achievement.PISA;Achievement;Culture;Ranking;School Environment;World Ranking0 Key Features:

• The articles are all based on re-analysis of extent data of PISA
• PISA has an influence on educational policies and practices over the world and hence proper interpretation is critical
• PISA has included aspects of education other than just achievements in the three subjects, these deserve further consideration and caution

Part I

Cultural and Social Environment

Chapter 1

The Influence of Culture on Academic Achievement: Illustration Using PISA 2009 Data

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA; Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.) ranks 65 nations (and economies) on the academic achievement of 15-year-old students in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. These nations can be expected to differ widely in culture, although cultural differences do not feature as a potential factor in student performance. As schools are established by nations differing in culture and thereafter function in their respective cultural contexts, the importance of a possible cultural influence on the operation of schools and, in turn, on student learning cannot be over-emphasized.

Education and Economics

In the educational context, student achievement is analogous to productivity in economics. Here, a nation’s culture serves as a filter through which certain practices are accepted, encouraged, and implemented while others are abhorred, avoided, and discouraged. This implies that culture can have an influence on student achievement through encouraging certain instructional approaches and discouraging others (e.g., Rubenstein, 2006). For instance, rote memorization, especially of culturally treasured classics, is traditionally encouraged and practiced among East Asian nations while rote learning is viewed with suspicion and even condemnation among Western nations. For another example, personal experience shows that East Asian students see lecturers or workshop leaders as the know-all experts who are expected to impart knowledge (and who are, therefore, not to be overtly questioned), whereas Western students enjoy the opportunity of expressing their views (which may be right or wrong) and expect to be asked for their opinions. In short, a didactic approach to teaching, in contrast to a more participative one, is preferred by East Asian students. Such different practices and expectations, being influenced by cultural differences, can be expected to lead to differences in achievement, both quantitatively (how much is learned) and qualitatively (how and what is learned).

Boykin et al. (2005) demonstrates how culture was associated with the perception of achievement. They studied the culture-based perception of academic achievement of 138 Fifth-grade students (66 African Americans and 72 European Americans) with low-income backgrounds. The study intended to determine whether the students’ perception of achievement was mediated by culture. Analysis revealed a main effect for the cultural learning orientation. Communal high achievement was endorsed more than individual or competitive high achievement. There was, however, an interaction effect between cultural group and cultural learning orientation. African American students endorsed high-achieving peers via communalism, with a clear-cut rejection of individualism and competition. On the other hand, European American students’ endorsement pattern was not so distinct. The authors concluded that African American students typically might not reject high-achieving peers per se but rejected the cultural factors that so often were yoked to achievement in traditional schooling contexts.

Although the culture–productivity connection has been extensively studied in economics, it does not seem to have been actively pursued in education. However, a few such studies will be summarized to drive home the message that academic achievement (as a form of educational productivity) can be beneficially seen with a cultural perspective.

In the educational context, Navarrete, Betancourt, and Flynn (2007) posited that culture (i.e., values, beliefs, and norms) has a direct effect on academic achievement and also an indirect effect on behavior via the psychological process of attribution, i.e., student perception of the causes of their achievement or the lack of it. Fatalism is an attribute characterized as subjugation to nature and the belief that there is little one can do to alter fate. Latinos have been found to have higher levels of fatalism compared to Anglos and this belief has been shown to influence medical treatment adherence and cancer screening behaviors among Anglo and Latino populations. The authors suspected that fatalism may be influencing achievement in Latinos. They hypothesized that fatalistic cultural value and family SES would influence achievement directly and/or through their effects on attributions for academic success or failure among Anglo and Latino high school students. They studied 93 Anglo and 56 Latino high school students. A LISREL analysis shows (1) family SES has a significant direct path to achievement, and (2) fatalism has a negative indirect path to achievement via stability of causes for failure. The model has a Goodness of Fit Index of 0.95, indicating a high degree of validity. This implies that culture does have an influence on achievement.

While the studies summarized above typify the quantitative approach to studying the relation between culture and educational productivity, Trumbull and Rothstein-Fisch (2011) adopted an ethnographic, qualitative approach for their study. The authors studied seven Spanish/English bilingual elementary teachers with an average of 12.7 years of teaching experience. The study focused on the Individualistic–Collective perspective and data was collected by using problem-solving scenarios in a pretest–posttest design. The authors concluded that “If high academic achievement for all students is a goal, then achievement motivation theory must move beyond a cultural universalist stance to the recognition that cultural values influence students’ social and academic goals” (44). Based on the informants’ responses, they concluded that “in the context of the achievement gap that separates dominant culture students from their non-dominant culture peers it behooves achievement motivation researchers to persevere with efforts to deepen our understanding of what motivates students” (47). This, again, underlines the influence culture has on the motivation to learn, which in turn influences achievement or educational productivity.

Notwithstanding the limitation of the above-cited studies, it is readily appreciated that more needs be done to study the cultural influence on educational productivity for better insight into how schools have been unheedingly affected by their surrounding cultural milieu and what can be done to enhance their performance in terms of student achievement. In this regard, the PISA data (world-wide in that it covers a large number of nations on earth) can prove useful as it enables such a study at the widest possible scope hitherto available.

Culture and Productivity

Hofstede’s (1984) study of Cultural Dimensions has spawned much research into the relation between culture and productivity, especially in the economic realm. Hofstede (2001) initially surveyed IBM employees to study differences in corporate culture. In his study, Hofstede examined the attitudes and work values of more than 116,000 employees of IBM in more than 40 countries. The data was factor-analyzed and resulted in four Cultural Dimensions:

• Power Distance: This indexes the inequality in power between superiors and subordinates within an organization. Organizations with higher Power Distance tend to have longer chains of command with more rigid procedures for communication (especially upward communication).

• Individualism: This is the opposite of collectivism. Organization high on Individualism tends to value the individuals’ self-actualization and development.

• Masculinity: This defines the role of gender in an organization. In high masculinity organizations, high-level posts and better-paying jobs are taken mostly, though not exclusively, by male staff members; there is obvious lack of gender equitability.

• Uncertainty Avoidance: This has to do with the organization’s tolerance for ambiguity and its concern to maintain written rules and rituals.

Later in 1990, Hofstede added a fifth Cultural Dimension, Confucian Work Dynamic, which is characterized by traditional Chinese culture with the concern for orderliness, thrift, persistence, and sense of shame. It is also referred to as Long-term Orientation and, as the name implies, has an orientation towards the future, as seen in values like thrift and persistence. This is well reflected in the Chinese proverb “Bitter now, sweet later” and the Western concept of delayed gratification. Thus, although the fifth Cultural Dimension is purported to have been derived from Confucianism, it perhaps is similar to the Protestant or Puritan Ethic, minus the religious connotation. This dimension was added after finding that East Asian countries such as China, Japan, and Korea acted quite differently from other countries due to the influence of Confucianism. However, the validity of this fifth Cultural Dimension was questioned on philosophical and methodological grounds by Fang (2003). According to Neill (2012), there is a sixth dimension in the Hofstede model, the dimension of Indulgence versus Restraint (IVR). Indulgence is the degree to which a society allows the free gratification of human drives related to enjoying life and having fun. On the other hand, Restraint stands for suppression of gratification of needs, which are regulated by strict social norms.

Hofstede’s first four Cultural Dimensions have since been widely used in cross-cultural research, especially in connection with studies of economic development. In the realm of economic development, Mathers and Williamson (2011) suggested that formal institutions need to map onto the informal or cultural rules if they are to function and sustain. In other words, informal (cultural) and formal institutions complement one another to support economic growth. Following this logic, Mathers and Williamson (2011) claimed that the success or failure of formal economic institutions depends on pre-existing informal or cultural rules. This suggests that culture has the ability to influence productivity of economic freedom by a filtering process through which the constraints must pass.

To verify the validity of such a contention, Mathers and Williamson (2011) studied the interaction effect of culture, economic freedom, and economic growth. They created a set of panel data of growth rates of 141 countries, using the database of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index. In their conceptualization, culture was defined as customary beliefs and values transmitted by social groups fairly unchanged from one generation to the next. For measuring culture, they used data from the World Values Surveys to capture the level of trust, respect, self-determination, and obedience. Justifying the choice of these cultural characteristics, the authors argue thus,

These traits serve as rules governing interaction between individuals, including market production and entrepreneurs...