Aletta Grisay former senior researcher at University of Liè ge, Belgium and consultant to the PISA consortium As a part of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international survey was conducted in 2000 to assess the Reading, Mathematics and Science literacy of 15-year-old students in 31 countries (see McQueen and Mendelovits, this issue; see Grisay, 2002). The article describes the procedures implemented by the PISA International Co-ordination Centre for the development of national versions of the assessment instruments in all instruction languages used in the participating countries. It also presents data (collected during the eld trial of the instruments) that provide some empirical information on the effectiveness of these procedures. The International Centre developed two source versions (in English and French) of the instruments. It was recommended that the national adaptation teams produce two independent translations (one from the English and the other from the French source version) of the assessment material into the language of instruction in their country and that they reconcile them into a single national version. A group of international veri ers appointed and trained by the International Centre then checked the equivalence of all national versions against the source versions.
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Academic self-concept and achievement are positively related among students from the same school and country. Yet negative associations between these variables may be found at the level of schools and countries. In the present article, we propose how this apparent paradox can be explained in terms of reference group effects, in which high standards, norms, or benchmarks act to decrease academic self-concept, whereas low ones have the contrary effect. Multilevel regression analyses of the PISA 2006 data consisting of 353,403 students, 13,886 schools from 53 countries revealed an interesting pattern of relationships. Within schools, students’ science achievement and science self-concept were positively related although the size of this relationship varied considerably between countries, whereas between schools and between countries, this association was negative. Consistent with our hypothesis, the size of the between-school relationship was larger in countries with a higher percentage of selective schools. At the country level, the negative relationship between country mean achievement and self-concept was explained by country differences in educational benchmarks, standards, and norms next to country differences in response styles. In this article, we also discuss the implications for the validity of cross-cultural comparisons of self-concept.
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