Teacher support for student learning

Reader’s guide

The PISA 2022 database includes data from 81 countries and economies. The test was originally planned to take place in 2021 but was delayed by one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The exceptional circumstances throughout this period, including lockdowns and school closures in many places, led to occasional difficulties in collecting some data. While the vast majority of countries and economies met PISA’s technical standards (available online), a small number did not. In prior PISA rounds, countries and economies that failed to comply with the standards, and which the PISA Adjudication Group judged to be consequential, could face exclusion from the main part of reporting. However, given the unprecedented situation caused by the pandemic, PISA 2022 results include data from all participating education systems, including those where there were issues such as low response rates (see Annexes A2 and A4 in OECD (2023[1])).

Adjudicated entities not meeting the sampling standards

The results of those adjudicated entities (i.e. countries, economies and regions within countries) listed below will be reported with annotations. Caution is required when interpreting estimates for these countries/economies because one or more PISA sampling standards listed below were not met.

The entities with annotations are comprised of the two following groups:

(i) entities that submitted technically strong analyses, which indicated that more than minimal bias was most likely introduced in the estimates due to low response rates (falling below PISA standards): Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom;

(ii) entities that did not meet one or more PISA sampling standards and for whom is not possible to exclude the possibility of more than minimal bias based on the information available at the time of data adjudication: Australia, Denmark, Hong Kong (China), Jamaica, Latvia, the Netherlands, Panama and the United States.

An asterisk (*) next to the name of a country or economy indicates that caution is required when interpreting estimates because one or more PISA sampling standards were not met.

Data underlying the figures

The data referred to in this paper are presented in Annex B of this report. Two symbols are used to denote missing data:

• c: There were too few observations to provide reliable estimates (i.e. there were fewer than 30 students or fewer than 5 schools with valid data).

• m: Data are not available. There was no observation in the sample; these data were not collected by the country or economy; or these data were collected but subsequently removed from the publication for technical reasons.

Coverage

This publication features data from 81 countries and economies, including all OECD Member countries except Luxembourg, and 44 non-OECD Member countries and economies.

The designation “Ukrainian regions (18 of 27)” refers to the 18 PISA-participating jurisdictions of Ukraine: Cherkasy Oblast, Kirovohrad Oblast, Poltava Oblast, Vinnytsia Oblast, Chernihiv Oblast, Kyiv Oblast, Sumy Oblast, the City of Kyiv, Zhytomyr Oblast, Odesa Oblast, Chernivtsi Oblast, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Lviv Oblast, Rivne Oblast, Ternopil Oblast, Volyn Oblast and Zakarpattia Oblast. Due to Russia’s large-scale aggression against Ukraine, the following nine jurisdictions were not covered: Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Donetsk Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, Luhansk Oblast, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Kherson Oblast, Mykolaiv Oblast, the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.

International averages

The OECD average corresponds to the arithmetic mean of the respective country estimates. It was calculated for most indicators presented in this report.

In this publication, the OECD average is generally used when the focus is on comparing performance across education systems. In the case of some countries, data may not be available for specific indicators, or specific categories may not apply. Therefore, readers should keep in mind that the term “OECD average” refers to the OECD Member countries included in the respective comparisons. In cases where data are not available or do not apply for all sub-categories of a given population or indicator, the OECD average is not necessarily computed on a consistent set of countries across all columns of a table.

In analyses involving data from multiple years, the OECD average is always reported on consistent sets of OECD Member countries, and several averages may be reported in the same table. For instance, the “OECD average-36” includes only 36 OECD Member countries that have non-missing values across all the assessments for which this average itself is non-missing. This restriction allows for valid comparisons of the OECD average over time.

The number in the label used in figures and tables indicates the number of countries included in the average:

• OECD average: Arithmetic mean across all OECD Member countries except Luxembourg.

• OECD average-36: Arithmetic mean across all OECD Member countries excluding Costa Rica and Luxembourg.

• OECD average-30: Arithmetic mean across all OECD Member countries excluding Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Estonia, Israel, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Slovenia.

• OECD average-29: Arithmetic mean across all OECD Member countries excluding Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Estonia, Israel, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Slovenia.

The analyses based on data from the PISA 2022 teacher questionnaire use an international average calculated across all countries and economies with available data. This includes Australia, Baku (Azerbaijan), Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong (China), Korea, Kosovo, Macao (China), Malaysia, Morocco, Panama, Peru, Portugal, and the United Arab Emirates.

Rounding figures

Because of rounding, some figures in the tables may not add up exactly to the totals. Totals, differences and averages are always calculated on the basis of exact numbers and are rounded only after calculation.

All standard errors in this publication have been rounded to one or two decimal places. Where the value 0.0 or 0.00 is shown, this does not imply that the standard error is zero, but that it is smaller than 0.05 or 0.005, respectively.

Reporting student data

The report uses “15-year-olds” as shorthand for the PISA target population. PISA covers students who are aged between 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months at the time of assessment, and who are enrolled in school and have completed at least 6 years of formal schooling, regardless of the type of institution in which they are enrolled, and whether they are in full-time or part-time education, whether they attend academic or vocational programmes, and whether they attend public or private schools or foreign schools within the country.

Reporting school data

The principals of the schools in which students were assessed provided information on their schools’ characteristics by completing a school questionnaire. Where responses from school principals are presented in this publication, they are weighted so that they are proportionate to the number of 15-year-olds enrolled in the school.

Focusing on statistically significant differences

This volume discusses only statistically significant differences or changes. These are denoted in darker colours in figures and in bold font in tables. Unless otherwise specified, the significance level is set to 5%.

A difference is referred to as “statistically significant” if it is unlikely that such a difference can be observed in the estimates based on samples when, in fact, no true difference exists in the populations from which the samples are drawn. The results of the PISA assessments are “estimates” because they are obtained from samples of students rather than from a census of all students (which introduces a “sampling error”), and because they are obtained using a limited set of assessment tasks rather than all possible assessment tasks (which introduces a “measurement error”).

It is possible to determine the magnitude of the uncertainty associated with the estimate and to represent it as a “confidence interval”, i.e. a range defined in such a way that if the true value lies above its upper bound or below its lower bound, an estimate different from the reported estimate would be observed only with a small probability (typically less than 5%). The confidence interval needs to be taken into account when making comparisons between estimates so that differences that may arise simply due to sampling error and measurement error are not interpreted as real differences.

Acronyms and abbreviations

ESCS	PISA index of economic, social and cultural status
Score dif.	Score-point difference
S.D.	Standard deviation
S.E.	Standard error
% dif.	Percentage-point difference