Publications

Outcomes and Causal Inference in International Comparative Assessment European Training Network (OCCAM-ETN) has launched a blog site with the aim to disseminate research related to international large-scale assessments, such as PISA, TIMSS, PIRLS, and ICCS.

Rebecca Vukovic, in her article, writes about the recent published results of TALIS 2018 study. She focuses on describing the objectives of the study of to measure the state of the teaching profession. The assessment of teachers' performances was measured against different indicators such as the teaching time in a classroom, their assessment practices, and their teaching pedagogy for innovative learning.

John Holden describes in his article that the gender gap in reading is considerable where statistics from multiple studies show that girls are more avid readers and likely to be better at it than in math, where as boys are found to be better in math than in reading.

In his article, Prue Anderson describes how high vocabulary skills help reading and listening comprehension from early years. He states that exposure of children at an early age to sophisticated vocabulary develops their language skills and higher level of literacy in later years.

The PIRLS 2016 International Database has been made available for individuals interested in the data collected and analyzed as part of PIRLS 2016.

The authors of this article summarize the findings from their research paper 'Literacy and Growth: Policy Implications of New Evidence From PIAAC' that discusses the impact of differences in average adult literacy and numeracy skills and the distribution of literacy skill by proficiency levels on labor productivity and GDP. This research paper uses data from the PIAAC study.

In the article, 'Gender gap in STEM fields could be due to girls’ reading skills, not math ability', the author, Stephanie De Marco, states that it is not that girls are poor in their math skills, it is because they are more inclined towards reading and this is why there are fewer girls in the STEM field careers. This became apparent from a study conducted by Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp using data from the PISA study.

This article, written by Volante et al., shares the authors' opinion that literacy is beyond what it was known for in the past. They claim, it is much more than just reading, writing, speaking and listening, referring to including skills and knowledge to the definition of literacy. The competencies of literacy have increased in the global age of today where digitization and knowledge is growing immensely. The authors, therefore, suggest that the large-scale assessment studies must come up with new techniques to test literacy in which skills and knowledge is also adequately measured.

In his article, Jason Richwine discusses, based on data from OECD's PIAAC data, that the skill level of college graduates differs across countries. He bases this observation on the indicators that immigrant college graduates in the US hold lower-skilled jobs than the native college graduates. This opinion is furthered by the observation that the immigrants are still lacking behind in poverty, welfare and income measures despite increasing numbers of immigrant college graduates.