Using international surveys of achievement and literacy: a view from the outside

Download

Description/Abstract

The paper reports on experience of using three international surveys of learning
achievement or functional literacy: TIMSS, PISA and IALS. The continued
development of new surveys means that it is all the more important for users to
share their knowledge of the sources. A range of issues are considered of which
the most important are (i) the robustness of results to the method used for
aggregating the answers for each individual into a single score; (ii) the methods
that can be used for presenting summary statistics; and (iii) the need to
systematically compare the basic results of the different surveys.