ABSTRACT
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures math achievement among 15-year-old students from over 60 countries, along with an array of student background characteristics and measures of various school resources. Most students in the US sample would be in tenth grade.
Descriptive analyses using PISA math scores for US students yield results that are broadly similar to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) analysis in Chapter 5. Most of the variance in student achievement occurs within schools. Moreover, although some of the PISA measures of student and school characteristics differ from those used for NAEP, correlations for student characteristics are about twice as strong as those for school resources.
Similarly, consistent with NAEP results, most of the school resource characteristics measured in PISA are weakly related to student achievement within the US sample after controlling for student background. One important exception is hours of math instruction per week with the largest effect of 0.12 compared to just 0.01 in the NAEP analysis. The different grade levels could explain the differing effects. Broadening the sample to include the nine large developed countries on par with the United States, the analysis yields similar results.
