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Does a school’s physical infrastructure influence student performance? Data collected by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) does not provide a clear answer. PISA is a collaborative effort among OECD member countries that measures how well 15-year-olds approaching the end of compulsory schooling are prepared to meet the challenges of today’s knowledge society.
The strength of PISA is its capacity to relate internationally comparable data on student outcomes to contextual factors using sophisticated statistical analyses. Data on student outcomes are measured using student assessment scores. In PISA 2003, students completed a two-hour paper-and-pencil assessment that covered reading, mathematical and scientific literacy, and problem solving, with a primary focus on mathematical literacy. Data on contextual factors derive from short questionnaires completed by school principals and students on, for example, students’ family background, students’ learning of mathematics, school characteristics and pedagogical practices.
In the PISA 2003 study, school principals in 41 countries were asked the extent to which they perceived that their school’s capacity to provide instruction is hindered by a shortage or inadequacy of 20 variables related to educational resources and infrastructure, such as qualified teachers, instructional materials and school buildings and grounds.
An index of the quality of school physical infrastructure was constructed using three of these variables: school buildings and grounds, heating/cooling and lighting systems, and instructional space (e.g. classrooms). Chart 1 shows the average index value for each country that participated in PISA 2003. This index has an average of zero and a standard deviation of one across all OECD countries. A negative value indicates a lower quality of physical infrastructure compared to the OECD average.
On average across OECD countries, the PISA index of quality of the school’s physical infrastructure explains 1% of the variation in mathematics performance. Although there are some differences in students’ scale scores in mathematical literacy between the top and bottom quarters of the index, most of the differences in OECD countries are small and not statistically significant.
When interpreting these results, it is important to remember that data rely on the judgment of school principals rather than on external observations or the views of students and teachers. Principals do not necessarily provide objective measures of the condition of physical infrastructure. Indices based on responses by principals rely on a comparatively small number of observations, on average, in PISA 2003, 250 schools per country. In addition, data may be subject to social desirability of responses and to cross-cultural and linguistic differences.
At its first meeting in September 2006, the PEB ad hoc Working Group on Evaluating Quality in Educational Facilities will consider how PISA could be employed to shed greater light on the relationship between the quality of educational facilities and student performance.
For further information on PISA, consult www.pisa.oecd.org.
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