What We Learned from PISA

The outstanding performance of East Asian societies in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is one of the most widely discussed topics in international assessments. PISA is a worldwide study of scholastic performance, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), of 15-year old pupils in mathematics, science and reading.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive view on the excellent performance of students in Hong Kong and East Asian societies based on solid empirical data from the first five cycles of the PISA study from 2000 to 2012. Adopting a broad perspective, this book links the performance of students to themselves, their families and respective schools — the three major selves and social contexts that exert powerful influence on young people in Hong Kong.

It is unique that the book does not only define student outcomes narrowly as cognitive performance on various tests in PISA, but also employs a number of affective indicators, such as students' self-regulated learning, their self-concept measures, and attitudes towards learning. The book argues that schooling is a complex enterprise, and the relationships between school outcomes and the larger families, schools, and societal contexts are even more complex. The book utilizes summary statistics and multivariate methods to investigate how various measures of student outcomes are influenced by these contextual factors.