Christian Monseur

Study design and methodology

A considerable body of recent literature describes the profound changes occurring as societies move from agricultural and industrial economies to a highly interconnected global knowledge economy (see, for example, Dertouzos, 1997; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). In the industrial age, the pace at which new knowledge evolved was relatively slow and a major role of schooling was to ensure that students mastered a well-defined set of knowledge and skills. However, with the advent of the 21st century, people are finding such abilities no longer sufficient when facing the everyday realities of the workplace. These realities demand making rapid decisions based on incomplete information when tackling novel situations, an aptitude for working through a plethora of information of varying levels of accuracy when tackling ill-defined problems, and the capacity to collaborate with a diverse team that may be distributed globally when endeavoring to accomplish personal and organizational goals (Peters, 1997). A strong theme running through these projects is that curricular and pedagogical changes need to take place if schools are to successfully help students develop these learning outcomes. The role of ICT is envisaged not simply as a technical skill or as a means of improving learning effectiveness but also as a way of transforming the goals and processes of education. In fact, there is increasing evidence that young people who have always been surrounded by and interacted continuously with ICT develop a different approach to learning and knowledge management from students who have not had this opportunity (Pedro, 2006). The OECD is conducting a study on these “new millennium learners” to examine the challenges they pose and the extent to which their emergence will contest prevailing views of interpersonal communications, knowledge management, and learning within schools.

Gender Gap in Comparative Studies of Reading Comprehension: to what extent do the test characteristics make a difference?

In this article we discuss how apparently indicators that may appear straightforward, such as gender differences, need to be interpreted with extreme care. In particular, we consider how the assessment framework, and the methodology of international surveys, may have a potential impact on the results and on the indicators. Through analysis of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data we show how increases or decreases in the achievement of some groups of students (either of whole countries or population subgroups like males and females) can, at least partially, result from variations in the framework or the methodology of the respective assessments. The analyses provide evidence that the gender gap is larger for open-ended questions, for continuous texts and for more cognitively demanding reading tasks.

PISA Student Nonresponse Adjustment Procedures

Large-scale surveys experience nonresponse that might result in biases in the results. In educational surveys, nonresponse can occur at three levels, i.e. the school, the student and the item. Traditionally, large-scale surveys in education have compensated for unit nonresponse, both at the school and at the student level, by applying survey weight adjustments.