Examining the Effects of Students and School Variables on PISA 2012 Problem-Solving Achievement in Turkey

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Emine Yavuz
Hakan Yavuz Atar

Abstract

Problem-solving skills are very important in ensuring effective participation in public life regard and schools play an important role in helping students develop problem-solving skills. The purpose of this study is to determine the student and school level variables that effect students’ problem solving skills using a two-level Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). The data in this study is belongs to 4848 students in 170 schools who participated PISA 2012. Gender, school attendance, openness to problem-solving and perseverance to reach solution variables constituted the student level variables whereas school type, educational resources, dropout rates and student/math teacher ratio variables constituted the school level variables. The findings indicated that all the variables but openness and pers

everance have statistically significant effect on students’ PISA 2012 problem-solving achievement scores. The results of the analysis indicate that 54 percent of the variability in the problem-solving achievement scores is attributed to the differences between the mean achievement of the schools.

 

Keywords: PISA; Problem solving; School effect; Two-level Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) 

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Yavuz, E., & Atar, H. Y. (2017). Examining the Effects of Students and School Variables on PISA 2012 Problem-Solving Achievement in Turkey. New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(5). Retrieved from https://un-pub.eu/ojs/index.php/pntsbs/article/view/1124
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