How much do students’ scores in PISA reflect general intelligence and how much do they reflect specific abilities?

Pokropek, Artur; Marks, Gary; Borgonovi, Francesca

doi:10.1037/edu0000687

Cited by 29 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 75 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Rindermann and Baumeister (2015) stress that PISA tests in all domains require good reading skills. Later research such as Flores-Mendoza et al ( 2021) and Pokropek et al (2022) confirmed the strong relationships between PISA and general cognitive ability. Hence, when aiming to understand what drives PISA scores, it is pertinent to examine cognitive abilities aggregated to the country level (Boman, 2022a).…”

Section: Cognitive Ability Ses and Pisamentioning

confidence: 83%

Is the SES and academic achievement relationship mediated by cognitive ability? Evidence from PISA 2018 using data from 77 countries

Boman

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

IntroductionEarlier research has suggested that that the international large-scale assessment, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), may be looked upon as a form of school test that is mostly explained by participating students’ socioeconomic status, non-cognitive factors, and various school factors, whereas another strand of research focuses on the similarities between PISA and cognitive ability assessments such as IQ tests. The latter position does also highlight the strong relationships between PISA scores and IQ test scores, typically aggregated to the country level. The current article adds to this scholarly debate by examining the latest PISA survey from 2018.MethodsCorrelation, regression, moderator, and mediation analyses were run for aggregated country-level data (N = 77) from PISA 2018.ResultsThe results indicate that PISA scores indeed are strongly associated with both cognitive ability test scores and socioeconomic status indicators such as average annual national income.DiscussionA more nuanced position suggests that PISA should be labelled a test that measures cognitive school skills rather than a proxy of national IQ, as the link between country-level abilities and school age abilities is neither causal, nor theoretically and empirically palpable, yet partly robust.

show abstract

Section: Cognitive Ability Ses and Pisamentioning

confidence: 83%

Is the SES and academic achievement relationship mediated by cognitive ability? Evidence from PISA 2018 using data from 77 countries

Boman

2023

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Bifactor analyses of Polish 2009 PISA data found that student responses to test items are largely accounted for by general cognitive ability, with little variance accounted for by independent reading, mathematics and science factors. The correlations of ESCS were highest with g ( r = 0.37) and much lower with the mathematics ( r = 0.07), reading ( r = 0.03) and science ( r = 0.02) factors (Pokropek et al, forthcoming). The small correlations between ESCS and the achievement domains are inconsistent with the SES model which emphasises the importance of the family and school for domain specific skills.…”

Section: Accounting For Empirical Phenomenamentioning

confidence: 99%

Inadequacies in the SES–Achievement model: Evidence from PISA and other studies

Marks

O’Connell

2021

Review of Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Students' socioeconomic status (SES) is central to much research and policy deliberation on educational inequalities. However, the SES model is under severe stress for several reasons. SES is an ill-defined concept, unlike parental education or family income. SES measures are frequently based on proxy reports from students; these are generally unreliable, sometimes endogenous to student achievement, only low to moderately intercorrelated, and exhibit low comparability across countries and over time. There are many explanations for SES inequalities in education, none of which achieves consensus among research and policy communities. SES has only moderate effects on student achievement, and its effects are especially weak when considering prior achievement, an important and relevant predictor. SES effects are substantially reduced when considering parent ability, which is causally prior to family SES. The alternative cognitive ability/genetic transmission model has far greater explanatory power; it provides logical and compelling explanations for a wide range of empirical findings from student achievement studies. The inadequacies of the SES model are hindering knowledge accumulation about student performance and the development of successful policies.

show abstract

“…Unfortunately, due to the small number of factors, comparison between a correlated group factor model and a higher order one could not be conducted. It was assumed that a higher-order model was better since this is generally what works out in intelligence test data, and the data here are largely unidimensional in the sense that most of the reliable variance is attributable to the general factor and there is little residual reliable variance in the group factors, a typical finding for intelligence test data (Benson et al, 2018;Pokropek et al, 2021).…”

Section: Figure 2 Exploratory Graph Analytic Resultsmentioning

confidence: 90%

Training Does not Affect Reaction Time Correlations with General Intelligence

Lasker¹

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Practice is a widely discussed topic in intelligence research and individual differences in scholastic test performance are frequently assumed to result from differences in how and how much people practice. A great deal of research has found that practice effects distance pen-and-paper test performance from general intelligence and cause memory to become a more important explanation for test performance. Other research has found that practice affects performance on reaction time tests, which are not laden with memory content. Both cap after a moderate amount of practice. This observation supports the existence of two types of practice effects: one related to learning how to perform tasks and the other related to repeating learned test content. It is presently unknown whether practice also distances reaction time performance from general intelligence. The present study analyzed whether more practiced reaction time tests given to a sample of 264 American trainee airmen were less related to general intelligence and found that they were not. The implications for understanding intelligence are considerable.

show abstract

How much do students’ scores in PISA reflect general intelligence and how much do they reflect specific abilities?

Abstract: How much do students' scores in PISA reflect general intelligence and how much do they reflect specific abilities?

Cited by 29 publications

References 75 publications

Is the SES and academic achievement relationship mediated by cognitive ability? Evidence from PISA 2018 using data from 77 countries

Is the SES and academic achievement relationship mediated by cognitive ability? Evidence from PISA 2018 using data from 77 countries

Inadequacies in the SES–Achievement model: Evidence from PISA and other studies

Training Does not Affect Reaction Time Correlations with General Intelligence

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About