PISA data clusters reveal student and school inequality that affects results

PLoS One. 2022 May 11;17(5):e0267040. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0267040. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

The data from the PISA survey show that student performance correlates with socio-economic background, that private schools have higher results and more privileged students, and that this varies between countries. We explore this further and analyze the PISA data using methods from network theory and find clusters of countries whose students have similar performance and socio-economic background. Interestingly, we find a cluster of countries, including China, Spain and Portugal, characterized by less privileged students performing well. When considering private schools only, some countries, such as Portugal and Brazil, are in a cluster with mostly wealthy countries characterized by privileged students. Swedish grades are compared to PISA results, and we see that the higher grades in private schools are in line with the PISA results, suggesting that there is no grade inflation in this case, but differences in socio-economic background suggest that this is due to school segregation.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Brazil
  • China
  • Humans
  • Schools*
  • Students*
  • Surveys and Questionnaires

Grants and funding

The computations were enabled by resources provided by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at HPC2N partially funded by the Swedish Research Council through grant agreement no. 2018-05973. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.