THE ROLE OF CULTURE IN PREDICTING STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

We amended the rich PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) data to include culture measures of power distance; uncertainty avoidance; individualism-collectivism; masculinity-femininity; and long- and short-term orientation based on country. The added scores of each country on the culture components were obtained from the extensive studies of Hofstede and colleagues (2010). The dependent variables in our study are students’ achievements in the fields of reading, math, and science from various countries taken from PISA data. There are three proposed research questions: Do the various aspects of culture have an effect on students’ achievement internationally? Which of the culture measures explains a significant proportion of the variance of reading, math, and/or science achievement scores? Are the values specifically explanatory for one type of achievement over another? In order to answer our research questions, we have created a series of regression equations that regress achievement scores on a series of control variables as well as country culture scores.

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