PISA 2003: Student learning approaches for tomorrow’s world Publications
Publication Details
This PISA-03 thematic report tells us about the extent to which New Zealand 15-year-old students feel engaged in learning, display self-belief in learning particular subjects, and adopt various learning strategies.
Author(s): Ministry of Education
Date Published: November 2009
Attitudes towards school
Notes:
- Examples provided are a sub-set of the questions PISA asks students on each topic.
- Strongly agree/agree and strongly disagree/disagree responses have been collapsed into two categories
Figure 1a: Percentage of New Zealand students with overall positive attitudes to school
Note:
- Graph uses an index of responses to a set of questions and represents the percentage of students with an index value greater than zero (or students who gave more positive than negative responses).
Attitudes towards school: what the results show
Most 15-year-old New Zealand students recognise that school has brought them benefits and what they have learnt at school will be relevant to their futures. Nine out of ten students gave more positive than negative answers when asked about whether school had been worthwhile.However, a minority of students also expressed negative feelings about at least some aspects of their schooling. Around 8% thought that school had been a complete waste of time, and 30% said that it had done little to prepare them for adult life. This picture is similar to that in other countries; New Zealand students are equally as likely to express negative attitudes about school as the OECD average.
There is little variation in general attitudes to school by gender or ethnic group. Although these groups differ in terms of their motivation, self-belief, and learning strategies, they all show a strong recognition of the basic benefits of schooling. This demonstrates a solid foundation on which to improve approaches to learning; few students at age 15 are completely negative about their education.
Figure 1b: Relationship between mathematics performance and attitude towards school3
Figure 1a shows the extent to which positive and negative attitudes to school are associated with mathematics performance. For each group, the line shows the average performance of students at points on the index of attitudes to school scale. Students in most groups who are more positive about school are more likely to do well in mathematics, as Figure 1b illustrates. The exception is Pasifika students, for which there is no such relationship. For other ethnic groups and for boys and girls, students who are negative overall or comparatively less positive about school tend to perform below average. On the other hand, as shown in Figure 1b, there is little difference in performance at the positive end of the scale. This finding suggests that a focus on students with negative attitudes to mathematics may help to lift performance, apart from Pasifika students, where there is no clear relationship between attitudes to school and mathematics achievement.
Footnotes
- The units on the scale are standardised to give consistent meaning to the distribution of responses among New Zealand students (1 unit = 1 standard deviation). The numbers on the scale represent the average response by each student (from the 5th to the 95th percentile) to a series of questions about attitudes to school. Positive values on the scale indicate that students had more positive than negative responses to the set of questions on which the index is based.
Navigation
Where to find out more
Contact Us
Education Data Requests
If you have any questions about education data then please contact us at:
Email:
Requests Data and Insights
Phone:
+64 4 463 8065