University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

The purpose of the study was to examine the impact of school and student related factors on scientific literacy skills of Turkish students in the Programme for International Student Assessment &amp / #8211 / PISA 2006. 4942, 15 year-old Turkish students from 10 primary schools, 88 general high schools and 66 vocational high schools participated in this assessment. Among the student factors considered were gender, student background, motivational factors, science self belief, value belief regarding science, science-related careers, science teaching and learning, scientific literacy and the environment. Some of the school factors discussed were proportions of girls at school, school size, school academic selectivity, teacher-student ratio, school activities for learning environmental topics and learning of science, quality of educational resources, teacher shortage (negative scale), general high school &amp / #8211 / vocational high school and average class size. The responses of Turkish students and principals from the database of the PISA assessment were used in Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The result of the study showed that the impact of school and student related factors on scientific literacy skills of the Turkish students varied from school to school. It was observed that the PISA index of economic social and cultural status, general value of science and science self-efficacy impacted on every aspects of the scientific literacy. In addition, it is evident that the general high school students were more successful than the vocational high school students after adjusting for selected student and school characteristics.

This study investigates the students&rsquo / characteristics and school characteristics and their influences on scientific literacy skills of 15-year-old students across Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, through the use of data from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development&rsquo / s (OECD&rsquo / s) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006. The purpose of this study is to gain a more complete understanding of the effect of human and physical resource allocations and their interaction on students&rsquo / scientific literacy skills using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques. By PISA 2006 results, in terms of scientific literacy, Canada is a high performing country whereas Turkey is far below the average and Sweden has a rank in the average. For modeling scientific literacy, student-level characteristics determined by student questionnaire, and school-level characteristics determined by school questionnaire were used. Results of the present study indicated that there were significant between-school differences in scientific literacy skills of students for all three countries. Turkey had the highest between-school variance and it was more than half of the total variance whereas in Canada and Sweden they were far lower. School type and size were common school factors affecting students&rsquo / scientific literacy skills in Canada and Sweden / however, in Turkey school admittance policies, educational resources, science promotional activities, and teacher qualities were school characteristics which have impact on scientific literacy. Enjoyment of learning science, self-efficacy in science, general value given to science, awareness of environmental issues, responsibility for sustainable development, and confidence in use of information technologies were common student factors affecting development of scientific literacy skills in the three countries. Finally, in all three countries cross-level interactions of student and school characteristics for developing scientific literacy skills were observed.

The aim of this doctoral dissertation project has been to investigate and describe the reading comprehension of digital texts related to the reading of traditional texts by gender differences, computer-game playing, and socioeconomic background factors. The dissertation is based on four studies. In the first study, the results from a reading comprehension test delivered on screen is compared to a test delivered on paper and administered to 235 Swedish students 14-15 years of age. The students managed the test in the paper mode slightly better than that in the screen mode. The difference was particularly evident for boys. The second study used Swedish data from the PISA 2009 survey in an analysis conducted with a structural equation modelling technique. A digital reading factor nested within the overall reading was identified. A gender difference in favour of boys was found in this factor. This difference was perfectly mediated by the larger amount of time that the boys spent on computer-game playing. The third study, conducted on Swedish and Norwegian PISA data from 2009, focussed on equity aspects in reading comprehension and indicated that the unique aspects of digital reading were not influenced by cultural capital, neither on the student nor on the school level, in contrast to what was the case for traditional reading comprehension. The fourth study, using qualitative data, aimed at exploring the abilities and skills important for digital reading. The analysis resulted in five categories: traditional literacy, multimodal literacy, pathfinding, IT abilities, and information abilities. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, the overall conclusion drawn from the results of the four studies was that reading comprehension of digital texts has unique aspects in addition to those required for reading comprehension of traditional texts. Three other important conclusions were pointed out as well. The first was that reading comprehension is influenced by the context of the texts; the second was that particular skills and abilities are required for digital reading; and the third was that there seems to be less of an influence of background factors on the performance of digital reading compared to traditional reading among Swedish (and Norwegian) youth. The results are discussed in relation to a Dual Level Theory formulated by Leu et al., as well as the validity issues with an outset in Bachman’s conversation analysis. The implications for schooling have been considered.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the factors affecting mathematical literacy of 15-year-old students in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) across different cultural settings. The present study was conducted across three countries. These countries are Brazil, Japan and Norway. The countries were selected on the basis of their rankings in PISA 2000 study. Japan represented a high performing country with an average score of 557, Norway represented an average performing country with an average score of 499, and Brazil represented a low performing country with an average score of 334. The study explored how mathematical literacy is stimulated by predictors related to the students, the families and the school. A separate factor analysis was carried out for each questionnaire such as student questionnaire and cross curricular competencies questionnaire within the data of each country. Since the results of factor analyses of three countries were parallel, the observed variables representing the latent variables were selected from the student questionnaire and cross curricular competencies questionnaire administered in PISA 2000 in order to be used in the structural equation modeling. The included factors affecting mathematical literacy in PISA 2000 are attitudes towards reading, student-teacher relations, climate, communication with parents, usage of technology and facilities, attitudes towards mathematics and reading literacy. The proposed model was tested using structural equation modeling across three different cultures with different performance levels in PISA 2000. The findings of the study show that the latent independent variable having the strongest effect on mathematical literacy is the usage of technology and facilities in Brazil, communication with parents in Japan and attitudes towards reading in Norway. Moreover, the results were as follows: (1) Reading literacy significantly and positively influences mathematical literacy in all three countries. (2) There is a reciprocal relationship between the attitudes towards mathematics and mathematical literacy. In Brazil, the influence of attitudes towards mathematics on mathematical literacy is higher. However, the influence of mathematical literacy on attitudes towards mathematics is higher in Norway. (3) The attitudes towards reading have a negative direct effect and a positive indirect effect on mathematical literacy. (4) The student-teacher relations have a positive effect on mathematical literacy in Japan and Norway. But, in Brazil, this effect is negative. (5) The student-related factors affecting school climate are significantly and positively related to mathematical literacy in Brazil. On the other hand, the effect of climate on mathematical literacy is negative in Japan and non-significant in Norway. (6) Communication with parents significantly and positively influences the mathematical literacy in all three countries. (7) The usage of technology and facilities significantly and positively affects mathematical literacy in Brazil. However, this effect is negative in Japan and non-significant in Norway.

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that are related to scientific literacy of 15-year old students in Turkey in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Two groups of variables were considered for the analyses. In the first group / number of books at home and attendance to preschool, attitudes towards school, student-teacher relation, feeling of loneliness, remedial study and homework and attending out-of-school courses were taken as variables that are related to scientific literacy. In the second group, basically, variables that are related to computer literacy and usage were considered. These variables are: frequency of using internet, frequency of using computer, basic computer skills, advanced computer skills and attitudes towards computer. The results indicated that quality of student-teacher relation, the number of books at home and attendance to preschool education, use of internet and basic computer skills are positively related to scientific literacy measures of the students. As expected, student feeling of loneliness has negative impact on literacy skills. Remedial classes conducted by schools and homework assignments have positive effect on school related attitude, but they cannot contribute scientific literacy skills of the students. Outside school private courses has positive relation with the scientific literacy, but this effect rather seems coming from family background characteristics. Use of internet and basic computer skills might have positive relation with both attitudes towards computer and scientific literacy, but use of software programs and advanced computer skills indicated negative relationship with the scientific literacy measures of the students.

Differential Item Functioning Analyses investigates whether individuals with same ability in different groups also show similar performance on an item. In matching the individuals of the same ability, most of the methodologies use total scores of the tests which are usually constructed to be unidimensional. th purpose of the present study is evaluating the PISA 2003 mathematics literacy items through the use of DIF methodology which uses a multidimensional approach in matching students instead of single total score, improve the matching for DIF analyses. In the study factor structure of the tests will be determeined via both exploratory and confirmatory analyses in a complimentary fashion. then DIF analyses conducted using Logistic regression (LR) and Mantel -Haenszel methods.Analyses showed that the matching criterion improved when multivariate analyses were used. the number of DIF items was decreased when the matching criterion is defined based on multiple criterion scores such as mathematical literacy and problem solving scores or two different mathematical literacy subtest score. In addition, qualitative reviews and examination of the distribution of DIF items by content categories, cognitive demands, item types,item text, visual-spatial factors and linguistic properties of items were analyzed to explain the differential performance. Curriculum, cultural and translation differences were the main criteria for the qualitative analyses of DIF items. The results imply that curriculum and translation differences in items might be causing the DIF across Turkish and English versions of the tests.

Thesis advisor: Henry I. Braun / Secondary analyses of international large-scale assessments (ILSA) commonly characterize relationships between variables of interest using correlations. However, the accuracy of correlation estimates is impaired by artefacts such as measurement error and clustering. Despite advancements in methodology, conventional correlation estimates or statistical models not addressing this problem are still commonly used when analyzing ILSA data. This dissertation examines the impact of both the clustered nature of the data and heterogeneous measurement error on the correlations reported between background data and proficiency scales across countries participating in ILSA. In this regard, the operating characteristics of competing modeling techniques are explored by means of applications to data from PISA 2012. Specifically, the estimates of correlations between math self-efficacy and math achievement across countries are the principal focus of this study. Sequentially employing four different statistical techniques, a step-wise model refinement approach is used. After each step, the changes in the within-country correlation estimates are examined in relation to (i) the heterogeneity of distributions, (ii) the amount of measurement error, (iii) the degree of clustering, and (iv) country-level math performance. The results show that correlation estimates gathered from two-dimensional IRT models are more similar across countries in comparison to conventional and multilevel linear modeling estimates. The strength of the relationship between math proficiency and math self-efficacy is moderated by country mean math proficiency and this was found to be consistent across all four models even when measurement error and clustering were taken into account. Multilevel multidimensional mixture IRT modeling results support the hypothesis that low-performing groups within countries have a lower correlation between math self-efficacy and math proficiency. A weaker association between math self-efficacy and math proficiency in lower achieving groups is consistently seen across countries. A multilevel mixture IRT modeling approach sheds light on how this pattern emerges from greater randomness in the responses of lower performing groups. The findings from this study demonstrate that advanced modeling techniques not only are more appropriate given the characteristics of the data, but also provide greater insight about the patterns of relationships across countries. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Research, Measurement and Evaluation.

Im Rahmen von drei Teilstudien wurde mathematische Schülerleistung aus einer differentialpsychologischen Perspektive untersucht. Die hierfür verwendeten Daten stammten von 29.386 deutschen Neuntklässlern, die am Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) im Jahr 2000 teilnahmen. In Studie 1 wurden ausgehend von Strukturtheorien kognitiver Fähigkeiten verschiedene Strukturmodelle mathematischer Schülerleistung konfirmatorisch geprüft. So wurde mathematische Schülerleistung in Form eines Nested-Faktormodell als additive Funktion einer mathematikspezifischen Fähigkeit (M´) und der allgemeinen kognitiven Fähigkeit (g) spezifiziert. Dieses Modell wies einen besseren Modellfit auf als das in der psychologischen Forschung dominierende Standardmodell. Für Letzteres wurde angenommen, dass Maße mathematischer Schülerleistung nur von einer generellen mathematischen Fähigkeit (M) beeinflusst werden. In Studie 2 wurden Schulformunterschiede mit konfirmatorischen Mehrgruppen-Faktormodellen untersucht. Schulformspezifische Mittelwertunterschiede in M waren im Standardmodell wesentlich stärker ausgeprägt als bei M´ im Nested-Faktormodell. Weiterhin wurde eine schulformspezifische Differenzierungshypothese für M´ untersucht. Entgegen der Erwartung konnte diese nur sehr eingeschränkt von den Daten gestützt werden. In Studie 3 wurde die Validität mathematischer Schülerleistung im Hinblick auf soziodemografische und motivationale Schülermerkmale sowie Schulnoten analysiert. Bei Verwendung des Nested-Faktormodells resultierte ein im Vergleich zum Standardmodell wesentlich differenzierteres Befundmuster. So waren Geschlechterunterschiede (zu Gunsten der Jungen) in M´ im Nested-Faktormodell deutlich stärker ausgeprägt als bei M im Standardmodell. Implikationen und Perspektiven der drei Teilstudien werden für die psychologische Forschung, die Lehr-Lernforschung, die Konzeption von Schülerleistungsstudien sowie für die pädagogische Praxis diskutiert. / Three studies investigated mathematics achievement from an individual differences perspective, using data from 29,386 German ninth graders who participated in the 2000 cycle of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In study 1, different structural models of mathematics achievement were derived from structural theories of cognitive abilities, and tested empirically using confirmatory methods. In a nested-factor model, mathematics achievement was specified to be an additive function of specific mathematical ability (M´) and general cognitive ability (g). This model provided a better fit than the standard model that predominates in psychological research, which assumes that measures of mathematical achievement are only influenced by general mathematical ability (M). In study 2, differences between types of schools were analyzed using confirmatory multigroup factor analytic models. Mean differences in M in the standard model were much stronger than in M´ in the nested-factor model. A school-type-specific differentiation hypothesis for M´ was also investigated. Contrary to predictions, the data provided only limited support for this hypothesis. Study 3 analyzed the validity of mathematics achievement with respect to sociodemographic and motivational student characteristics and school grades. The nested-factor model yielded a much more differentiated pattern of results than the standard model. For example, gender differences (in favor of boys) were much more pronounced in M´ in the nested-factor model than in M in the standard model. The implications and future perspectives of studies 1 to 3 are discussed with respect to psychological and educational research, design of large-scale achievement studies, and educational practice.

Syftet med denna studie är att utveckla kunskap om hur diskussionerna kring avskaffandet eller behållandet av särskolan som skolform i relation till Carlbeck-kommitténs arbete har förts i Lärarförbundets (LF) tidningar. Studien ingår i forskningsprojektet From Salamanca to PISA. The professionalizations of special needs educators since 1990 from a comparative perspective. Projektet bedrivs i Stockholms universitets regi, lett av Wieland Wermke och Gabriella Höstfält.  Arbetet bygger på en kvalitativ innehållsanalys av artiklar från fackliga tidskrifter. Det empiriska materialet utgörs dels av artiklar i Lärarförbundets tidskrifter Specialpedagogen och Specialpedagogik och dels av Carlbeck-kommitténs del-, och slutbetänkande. I arbetets historiska bakgrund och forskningsöversikt identifieras två historiska spår gällande synen på organisation av undervisning för elever med intellektuell funktionsnedsättning. Arbetets resultat påvisar att dessa historiska spår även fortlöper under den studerade tidsperioden. Vidare visar resultatet en tydlig avsaknad av engagemang i frågan om skolformens existens från professionen och fackliga företrädare. Möjliga orsaker till detta presenteras i diskussionsdelen. Studiens resultat indikerar hur särskolan blivit en säkerhetsventil för att avlasta den starkare målstyrda grundskolan. En av de slutsatser som framkommer i arbetets diskussion är att Carlbeck-kommitténs arbete utgjorde ett försök att föra samman Salamancadeklarationens tanke om en skola för alla med PISA:s mer målinriktade intention. / The aim of this study is to develop knowledge of how the discussions about the abolition or retention of special school in relation to the Carlbeck Committee have been conducted in the Swedish Teachers' Association's (LF) magazines. The study is part of the research project From Salamanca to PISA. The professionalizations of special needs educators since 1990 from a comparative perspective . The project is run under the auspices of Stockholm University, led by Wieland Wermke and Gabriella Höstfält.  This study is based on a qualitative content analysis of articles from LF member magazines. The empirical material consists partly of articles in LF member magazines Specialpedagogen and Specialpedagogik and partly of the Carlbeck Committee's partial and final report. In this study's historical background and research overview, two historical traces are identified regarding the view of the organization of teaching for students with intellectual disabilities. The results of the study show that these historical traces also continue during the studied period. Furthermore, the results show a clear lack of commitment to the issue of the existence of special schools for students with intellectual disability from the profession and union representatives. Possible reasons for this are presented in the discussion section. The results of the study indicate how the special school has become a safety valve to relieve the stronger goal-oriented primary school. One of the conclusions that emerges in the discussion of the work is that the work of the Carlbeck Committee was an attempt to bring together the Salamanca declaration's idea of a school for all with PISA's more goal-oriented intention. / From Salamanca to PISA. The professionalizations of special needs educators since 1990 from a comparative perspective .