Determinants of the Spanish students’ performance in Mathematics in PISA: a multilevel analysis

ABSTRACTResults of the PISA 2018 tests show that the average score in mathematics of the Spanish students is below the European Union and the OECD averages. These differences may be caused by factors related to the student or by those related to the school the student belongs to. The aim of this work is to identify the variables causing the differences in the mathematical performance of the Spanish students. Taking into account its hierarchical structure, a methodology based on the two-level multilevel regression has been applied to the Spanish data of the PISA 2018 study. According to our results, the socioeconomic and cultural index, the gender of the student, the repeater status, being immigrant, the language spoken at home and the student-teacher ratio have a significant effect on the mathematical performance of the students.KEYWORDS: Mathematical performanceeducational assessmentmultilevel analysisPISA Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Data availability statementPISA data are publicly available (http://www.oecd.org/pisa/data/)Additional informationFundingThis work was partially supported by the Faculty of Education, Economics and Technology Ceuta of the University of Granada.Notes on contributorsDavid Molina-MuñozDavid Molina-Muñoz is Assistant Professor at the Department of Didactics of Mathematics at the University of Granada. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Granada. His main line of research is the analysis and exploitation of data from educational surveys, such as TIMSS or PISA.José Miguel Contreras-GarcíaJosé Miguel Contreras-García is Associate Professor in the Department of Didactics of Mathematics at the University of Granada. He holds a PhD in Didactics of Mathematics and a PhD in Mathematics and Statistics. His research focuses on statistical education, with special interest in civic statistics. He has participated in numerous research projects (being principal investigator in some of them). He is the author of more than 60 publications related to his line of research.Ana María Lara-PorrasAna María Lara Porras is a retired Lecturer in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Granada. She holds a PhD in Mathematics. She has published more than 30 scientific articles. Her research focuses on data analysis and statistical design of experiments.María del Mar Rueda-GarcíaMaría del Mar Rueda García is Professor in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of Granada. She holds a PhD in Mathematics. She has supervised 8 doctoral theses, in addition to having published 90 articles in journals included in the JCR in Sciences or Social Sciences to date. She has participated in more than 100 communications at conferences. Her research focuses mainly on the statistical analysis of data and more specifically on the design and analysis of surveys.