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Which schools and pupils respond to educational achievement surveys? A focus on the English PISA sample

Which schools and pupils respond to educational achievement surveys? A focus on the English PISA sample
Which schools and pupils respond to educational achievement surveys? A focus on the English PISA sample
Non-response is a major problem facing research in the social sciences including in education surveys. Hence, research is needed to better understand non-response patterns as well as non-response as a social phenomenon. Findings may contribute to improvements in the future designs of such surveys. Using logistic and multilevel logistic modelling we examine correlates of non-response at the school and pupil level in the important educational achievement survey ‘Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)’ for England. The analysis exploits unusually rich auxiliary information on all schools and pupils sampled for PISA, whether responding or not, from two large-scale administrative sources on pupils’ socio-economic background and results in national public exams. This information correlates highly with the PISA target variable. Findings show that characteristics associated with non-response differ between the school and pupil levels. Our results also indicate that schools matter in explaining pupil level response, which is often ignored in non-response analysis. Our findings have important implications for future education surveys. For example, if replacement schools are used to improve response, our results suggest that it may be more important to match initial and replacement schools on the socio-economic composition of their pupils than on any of the factors currently used.
0964-1998
Durrant, Gabriele
14fcc787-2666-46f2-a097-e4b98a210610
Schnepf, Sylke
c987c810-d33c-4675-9764-b5e15c581dbc
Durrant, Gabriele
14fcc787-2666-46f2-a097-e4b98a210610
Schnepf, Sylke
c987c810-d33c-4675-9764-b5e15c581dbc

Durrant, Gabriele and Schnepf, Sylke (2017) Which schools and pupils respond to educational achievement surveys? A focus on the English PISA sample. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A: Statistics in Society. (doi:10.1111/rssa.12337).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Non-response is a major problem facing research in the social sciences including in education surveys. Hence, research is needed to better understand non-response patterns as well as non-response as a social phenomenon. Findings may contribute to improvements in the future designs of such surveys. Using logistic and multilevel logistic modelling we examine correlates of non-response at the school and pupil level in the important educational achievement survey ‘Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)’ for England. The analysis exploits unusually rich auxiliary information on all schools and pupils sampled for PISA, whether responding or not, from two large-scale administrative sources on pupils’ socio-economic background and results in national public exams. This information correlates highly with the PISA target variable. Findings show that characteristics associated with non-response differ between the school and pupil levels. Our results also indicate that schools matter in explaining pupil level response, which is often ignored in non-response analysis. Our findings have important implications for future education surveys. For example, if replacement schools are used to improve response, our results suggest that it may be more important to match initial and replacement schools on the socio-economic composition of their pupils than on any of the factors currently used.

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paper re-revised_2017_6_on website - Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 22 September 2017
e-pub ahead of print date: 18 December 2017

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 414397
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/414397
ISSN: 0964-1998
PURE UUID: d1a1741d-c201-460b-ab1c-459c3a703dc8
ORCID for Gabriele Durrant: ORCID iD orcid.org/0009-0001-3436-1512

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Date deposited: 28 Sep 2017 16:31
Last modified: 18 May 2024 04:01

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Author: Sylke Schnepf

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