Analyzing Large-Scale Studies: Benefits and Challenges

摘要

The analysis of (inter)national large-scale assessments (LSAs) promises representativity oftheir results and statistical power and has the ability to reveal even minor effects. LSAs’international grounding verifies previous findings that might previously have been biased by theirfocus on Western and industrialized countries. This contribution will discuss these promises,contextualizing them via methodical challenges and interpretation caveats that are able to tapthe potential of LSAs for educational psychology. Evidence of this contribution is grounded inprevious analyses of Program for International Student Assessment (PISA; Schleicher, 2019) andProgram for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC; OECD, 2013), twointernationally repeated cross-sectional studies. Many aspects we bring up can also apply to severalother international large-scale studies, such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and ICILS.1 We also refer to thenational longitudinal study German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS; Blossfeld et al., 2011)to include a perspective on longitudinal studies in this paper. Implications for large-scale studieswithin the context of learning and teaching round off our paper in its closing section.