Conference Agenda

The educational landscape in Europe faces a range of challenges, and this symposium proposal highlights affective issues in education such as students’ expectations, confidence, well-being, and student-reported instructional quality. The overall aim is to investigate how these factors vary across students and their relationship with student achievement. Four contributions from international scholars use data from the international assessments PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) to address these issues. We highlight the European perspective and draw on specific examples from more than 20 European and even more countries outside Europe.

While the majority of studies conducted with ILSA data focus on student achievement, there is also an affective component of school adjustment that should not be ignored. The first two papers take a comparative perspective focusing on student math confidence. Using the TIMSS 2019 data for 8th graders across 39 countries, the first contribution provides a cross-national analysis of math-specific affective aspects like confidence, enjoyment, and value in math education, focusing on gaps in gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and immigrant status. The second paper, focusing on the Nordic countries, provides another related student perspective on math confidence. This study, using TIMSS 2019 data for fourth graders, examines how students perceive the quality of their instruction and its relation to their mathematics confidence and achievement. It shows that clear and effective teaching are associated with students’ confidence in math.

The other two papers provide specific examples from North Macedonia and Slovenia. The contribution from Slovenia focuses on both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes by exploring the role of students’ wellbeing in academic motivation and achievement. The PISA 2022 results showed that Slovenian students feel less well-being compared to their peers in other OECD countries, which corresponds with lower literacy skills. The research highlights the importance of positive relationships between teachers and students, emotional support, and a sense of belonging at school for academic success. These findings suggest that improving students’ overall well-being could greatly enhance their motivation and achievement in school. In North Macedonia, the PISA 2018 and 2022 results show many students struggling to reach basic levels in essential subjects. This problem is exacerbated by cuts in education funding, both in terms of GDP and government spending. The youth job market is particularly troubling, with high unemployment rates. This reflects a gap between what the education system teaches and what employers need. Despite these challenges, students in North Macedonia have high hopes for their education and careers, but there is a clear gap between these aspirations and their actual school performance. This contribution sheds light on the factors that can explain this misalignment between student achievement and career expectations.

The session consolidates research on a theme that often receives too little attention. Collectively, these studies show the complex relationship between education policies, student well-being, academic performance, and job market outcomes. In summary, tackling educational challenges requires a comprehensive approach that looks at both cognitive and non-cognitive factors. These factors are essential for preparing students to meet their goals and contribute positively to society. The session investigates these issues both comparatively and in relation to specific countries to provide lessons learned from the international assessments. It is divided into six parts: four presentations, a discussion by a renowned expert, and an open discussion.

Equity in education is defined as the guarantee that all students are provided with the opportunities to benefit from their educational system regardless of their gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and family background (OECD, 2014). In the last decades, investments have been made to identify and monitor educational gaps and to better understand the phenomenon of inequality across several groups, such as gender, SES, and immigrant background (e.g., Strello et al., 2023), and to identity the most urgent needs of intervention in diminishing educational inequality. However, these efforts have been predominantly based on achievement, although school adjustment is not defined only as achievement but instead as a child’s success in dealing with all struggles and tasks faced within the school environment (Ladd, 1989). Adding to the achievement components of schooling, there is also an affective component of school adjustment which, we argue, should not be ignored. Hence, the goal of this study is to give a cross-national overview of the affective gaps based on gender, SES, and immigrant status, by focusing on three indicators of math-specific affective adjustment – confidence, enjoyment, and value. We analyzed the TIMSS 2019 dataset for 8th-grade students in the math domain. Thirty-nine countries were considered, amounting to a total of 224.080 students. Using regression analysis, we estimated gaps throughout different groups – male versus female (i.e., gender), high SES vs. low SES, and native versus non-native (i.e., immigrant background), on three different math-related affective outcomes – confidence, enjoyment, and value, leading to a set of 9 regression analyses. Analyses were performed for each country considering student weights. Although not the focus of this investigation, achievement gaps were also assessed and controlled for. In what concerned gender, there seems to be a rather consistent affective gap benefitting boys, especially in their confidence towards mathematics, even when controlling for achievement. As for SES, results replicate those of achievement, in the sense that students with high SES score higher on math-related affective components of learning in the vast majority of countries – however, this gap diminishes significantly when controlling for achievement. Finally, when looking into immigrant status, results are rather mixed, especially for math confidence. As for enjoyment and math value, non-natives show a slight tendency for higher scores, and this tendency holds even while controlling for achievement. Detailed results, implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are presented and discussed in light of existing research, policies, and strategies regarding inequalities in education.

Ladd, G. W. (1989). Children’s social competence and social supports: Precursors of early school adjustment? In B. H. Schneider, J. Nadel., & R. Weissberg (Eds.), Social competence in development perspective (pp. 271-291). Amsterdam: Klumer Academic Publishers. OECD (2014). Excellence through equity: Giving every student the chance to succeed. Results from PISA 2012. OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-volume-II.pdf Strello, A., Strietholt, R., & Steinmann, I. (2023). Mind the gap… but which gap? The distinctions between social inequalities in student achievement. Social Indicators Research, 170, 399-425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03196-5

Existing research recognizes the significant role of teaching quality in influencing students' academic (mathematics achievement) and affective outcomes (e.g., mathematics confidence) (Hattie, 2009). Teaching quality can both enhance or diminish the impact of student background characteristics on cognitive achievement (Fauth et al., 2014; Hattie, 2009). Observing, quantifying, and accurately measuring differences in teaching quality presents theoretical and methodological challenges, which could potentially introduce bias and affect study validity (Nilsen et al., 2016). This underscores the need for more empirical research on the relationships between teaching quality and learning outcomes, particularly among primary school students where such research is still limited. This study aims to provide empirical evidence by comparing the relations between student-perceived instructional quality and mathematics achievement and confidence, and examining differences between classrooms in four Nordic countries. The Nordic context is chosen due to the similarities in culture, school systems, and resources among these countries, making it a suitable setting for this comparative analysis (Kavli, 2018). Utilizing data from the 2019 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (Mullis & Martin, 2017), the study involves 15,839 fourth graders from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It focuses on the relevance of student-perceived instructional quality (Kyriakides & Creemers, 2008) in relation to both cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, as well as examining variations across classrooms. The concept of instructional quality in this research encompasses two main constructs: classroom management and instructional clarity. Classroom management involves teachers' structural-organizational activities to engage students in learning and establish a conducive learning environment, while instructional clarity pertains to the effectiveness of pedagogical techniques for clear instruction and support (Nilsen & Gustafsson, 2016). Employing Multilevel Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MCFA) and Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling (MSEM), the study examines the relationships between instructional quality and two outcome variables: mathematics confidence and mathematics achievement. Considering the cultural and educational similarities across the Nordic countries, alongside their varied results in international large-scale assessments, the study is guided by two research questions: 1. What are the relations between student-perceived instructional quality (classroom management and instructional clarity) and students’ mathematics confidence and achievement in the Nordic context? 2. What are the relations to student background factors? The results indicate a positive relationship between instructional clarity and mathematics confidence at the student level across all four countries. At the classroom level, mathematics confidence is positively related to instructional clarity. Student background factors demonstrate weaker correlations with mathematics confidence than with mathematics achievement.

Fauth, B., Decristan, J., Rieser, S., Klieme, E., & Büttner, G. (2014). Student ratings of teaching quality in primary school: Dimensions and prediction of student outcomes. Learning and instruction, 29, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2013.07.001 Hattie, J. (2009). Visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge. Kavli, A.-B. (2018). TIMSS and PISA in the Nordic countries In N. C. o. Ministers (Ed.), Northern Lights on TIMSS and PISA 2018. Nordic Council of Ministers. https://www.norden.org/en/publication/northern-lights-timss-and-pisa-2018 Kyriakides, L., & Creemers, B. P. M. (2008). Using a multidimensional approach to measure the impact of classroom-level factors upon student achievement: a study testing the validity of the dynamic model. School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 19(2), 183-205. https://doi.org/10.1080/09243450802047873 Mullis, I. V. S., & Martin, M. O. E. (2017). TIMSS 2019 Assessment Frameworks Retrieved from Boston College, TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center website: http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2019/frameworks/ Nilsen, & Gustafsson (Eds.). (2016). Teacher Quality, instructional Quality and Student Outcomes: Relationships Across Countries, Cohorts and Time (Vol. 2). Springer Open. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41252-8. Nilsen, T., Gustafsson, J.-E., & Blömeke, S. (2016). Conceptual Framework and Methodology of This Report. In T. Nilsen & J.-E. Gustafsson (Eds.), Teacher Quality, Instructional Quality and Student Outcomes: Relationships Across Countries, Cohorts and Time. Springer Open.

Recently, the discourse surrounding the role of students’ well-being and its effects on learning motivation and academic achievement has gained more and more attention in the national and international research community and on the stakeholders’ level. Quality teacher-student relationships, social-emotional support from teachers, a sense of belonging at school, and achievement-related anxiety are often highlighted as important aspects of students’ well-being and have been confirmed in various studies (e.g. Barosso et al., 2020; Harding et al., 2019; Kozina, 2020; Shriver & Buffett, 2015) as significant predictors of both academic motivation and achievement. The latest PISA 2022 results for Slovenia show that, compared to their OECD peers, Slovenian 15-year-olds reported significantly below-average levels of all mentioned aspects of well-being. Since Slovenia also witnessed a significant decline in all three literacy domains in PISA 2022, the article fills the research gap in investigating the role of different aspects of students’ well-being in explaining students’ academic motivation and achievement. For the data analysis, we used the data from the PISA 2022 survey, which in Slovenia includes a representative sample of 6.721 students aged 15. From the 2022 questionnaire, we used separate scales addressing students’ well-being: perceived quality of teacher-student relationships, teacher support in mathematics class, sense of belonging at school, mathematics-related anxiety, and mathematics effort and persistency scale as an indicator of student’s academic motivation. For academic achievement, we used plausible values for all three PISA literacy domains scales. The internal consistency parameters and the multicollinearity between the variables were checked in the Slovenian sample. We used the linear regression procedure to analyse the size effects of different predictors when explaining students’ academic motivation and achievement using the statistical program IEA IDB Analyzer (Version 5.0.23), which, due to two-stage sampling in the PISA study, allows the use of individual students and sample weights. The results show that all four aspects of students’ well-being were confirmed as significant predictors of students’ academic motivation, with the highest effect sizes for the quality of teacher-student relationships and math-related anxiety. The results also showed that the quality of teacher-student relationships is the most significant predictor of academic achievement on all three PISA literacy scales. Following these findings, it is thus crucial to establish a system for strengthening the social-emotional competencies of Slovenian teachers and students and shift an education strategy to a more holistic approach that supports the strengthening of different aspects of students’ and teachers’ well-being.

Barosso, C., Ganley, C. M., McGraw, A., Geer, E., Hart, S. A., & Daucourt, M. (2020). A meta- analysis of the relation between math anxiety and math achievement. Psychological Bulletin 147(2), 134–168. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000307 Harding, S. et al. (2019). Is teachers’ mental health and wellbeing associated with students’ mental health and wellbeing? Journal of Affective Disorders, 242, 180–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2018.08.080 Kozina, A. (Ed.) (2020). Social, emotional and intercultural competencies for inclusive school environments across Europe: Relationships matter. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač. Shriver, T., & Buffett, J. (2015). The uncommon core. In J. A, Durlak, C. E. Domitrovich, R. P. Weissberg, & T. P. Gullota (Eds.). Handbook of social and emotional learning: Research and practice (pp. 15–16). New York, London: The Guilford Press.

North Macedonia has one of the highest proportions of students failing to demonstrate basic proficiency (Level 2) in all three domains of science, mathematics and reading among PISA-participating countries (52.2% in PISA 2018 testing; 57.4% in PISA-2022). Young citizens of North Macedonia continue to leave education with among the lowest learning outcomes in Europe. On the other hand, between 2018 and 2023, North Macedonia’s public spending on education as a percentage of GDP fell from 2.80% to 2.72%. The share of total government expenditure allocated to education also declined. While poverty rates have fallen in recent decades, low educational performance is limiting the employment and life opportunities of many individuals and impeding national development. The activity of youth in the labor market of North Macedonia is relatively low (46.7% in the first three quarters of 2022), either compared to the adults or their peers from the EU countries. One in four people over 15 are unemployed, compared to less than one in ten across OECD countries. Low activity of youth illustrates generally low employment probabilities in the country, and the difficulty of school-to-work transition, that can be attributed to (i) unwillingness of employers to bear the costs of on-the-job training of inexperienced youth (ii) skills mismatch between employer’s needs and skills produced by the education system, as well as (iii) the increasing tendency of youth to stay longer in formal education. Students’ academic performance on the PISA 2022 testing is not aligned with their expectations for further education and career. They hold ambitious expectations of future education, 72% of students expect to complete tertiary degree (34% expect to finish doctoral studies, ISCED 8). Students (83%) reported that they have a clear idea of their future job, and they expect to work in high-skill occupations, such as software developers, medical doctors, managing directors and chief executives. This research aims to define the factors that can explain this misalignment between education and career expectations within students’ academic performance. More specifically, data show that there are statistically significant differences in students’ education and career expectations when we compare them based on student’s academic achievement in math, science and reading, Index of economic, social, and cultural status, gender, and language of instruction (Macedonian and Albanian). Data from the research is further discussed with students in focus group discussions. Recommendations from the research will be shared with the state representatives responsible for the reforms in secondary education.

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