Is Canada really an education superpower? The impact of exclusions and non-response on results from PISA 2015
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the students who take the test must be representative of the whole population of interest. In this paper we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high-performing in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our analysis illustrates how the PISA 2015 data for Canada suffers from a much higher rate of student exclusions, school non-response and pupil non-response than other high-performing countries such as Finland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea. We discuss how this emerges from differences in how children with Special Educational Needs are defined and rules for their inclusion in the study, variation in school response rates and the comparatively high rates of pupil test absence in Canada. The paper concludes by investigating how Canada’s PISA 2015 rank would change under different assumptions about how the non-participating students would have performed were they to have taken the PISA test.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it