What works in education - PISA revisited

Leading education researchers Ludger Woessmann and Thomas Fuchs have re-examined the latest PISA results to look at what factors, internationally, affect student achievement.

A summary of their findings follows:

• Consistent with theory as well as previous evidence, school autonomy is related to superior student performance in personnel management and process decisions such as the hiring of teachers, textbook choice and deciding budget allocations within schools.
• The performance effects of school autonomy tend to be more beneficial in systems where external exit exams are in place, emphasising the role of external exams as "currency" of the school system.
• Students in public schools perform worse than students in private schools. However, holding the mode of private versus public operation constant, the same is not true for students in schools that receive a larger share of private funding, and in maths, the share of private funding is actually statistically significantly related to weaker performance.
• While smaller classes do not go hand in hand with superior student performance, better equipment with instructional material and better-educated teachers do.
• External exit exams are statistically significantly and positively related to student performance in maths, and marginally so in science.
• Institutions account for roughly one-quarter of the international variation in student performance. Thus, institutional structures of school systems are again found to be important determinants of student educational performance.

Meanwhile, an earlier paper by Ludger Woessmann argues that positive effects on student performance stem from centralised examinations, school autonomy, competition from private educational institutions, scrutiny of achievement, and teacher influence on teaching methods. A large influence of teacher unions on curriculum scope has negative effects on student performance.

The PISA paper, "What Accounts for International Differences in Student Performance? A Re-Examination Using PISA Data", can be downloaded from this web page.

The earlier paper, "Schooling Resources, Educational Institutions, and Student Performance: The International Evidence", can be downloaded from this web page.

A range of other papers by Ludger Woessmann is at this web page and also this web page.