School effectiveness and PISA tests. Factors of school success

Abstract

The academic performance's assessment has always been a topic of great interest in the field of educational research. For this reason, for some decades now, different international organisations have been trying to measure academic performance in order to adjust educational policies in the search for improved performance and school efficiency. One of the international bodies that has devoted a great deal of time and effort to the assessment of academic performance has been the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), aimed at evaluating the acquisition of key competences by 15-year-old students. This thesis is proposed with the objective of generating a common framework of best practices in education related to the effectiveness of schools at an international level based on the analysis of the results obtained by students in the PISA 2018 tests. To this end, we will apply a mixed model integrating a quantitative approach of multilevel analysis and a qualitative approach. The quantitative approach will help us to detect those aspects that have the greatest influence on school performance, by developing a statistical model for each of the key competences measured in PISA. In addition, we will seek to highlight those contextual factors associated with school effectiveness by going deeper through the collection of qualitative data and their analysis. We include here the first results regarding the factors associated with academic performance based on the 2018 PISA report, as well as an approach to the state-of-the-art and the basic concepts on which the thesis will be built.