8. Knowledge Discovery from the Programme for International Student Assessment

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide study that assesses the proficiencies of 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science every three years. Despite the high quality and open availability of the PISA data sets, which call for big data learning analytics, academic research using this rich and carefully collected data is surprisingly sparse. Our research contributes to reducing this deficit by discovering novel knowledge from the PISA through the development and use of appropriate methods. Since Finland has been the country of most international interest in the PISA assessment, a relevant review of the Finnish educational system is provided. This chapter also gives a background on learning analytics and presents findings from a novel case study. Similar to the existing literature on learning analytics, the empirical part is based on a student model; however, unlike in the previous literature, our model represents a profile of a national student population. We compare Finland to other countries by hierarchically clustering these student profiles from all the countries that participated in the latest assessment and validating the results through statistical testing. Finally, an evaluation and interpretation of the variables that explain the differences between the students in Finland and those of the remaining PISA countries is presented. Based on our analysis, we conclude that, in global terms, learning time and good student-teacher relations are not as important as collaborative skills and humility to explain students’ success in the PISA test.