Friday, June 28, 2019

IEA IRC 2019: Day 1

My first IEA IRC (the 8th IEA International Research Conference) took place in Aarhus University in June 2019. As this was my second conference in this venue, I was not surprised to find that the conference was actually in Copenhagen... However, unlike the ESU five years ago, this conference started with a song (allsang): "Svantes lykkelige dag" and "I Danmark er jeg født".

The first keynote was Christian Christrup Kjeldsen: "Global attitudes and perceptions of social justice among youth: When no (in)differences make the difference". He reminded us of the concept of fuzzy set, where elements can be a member of a set to different degrees. Becoming a subject is part of life, and (I suppose) people cannot always be put 100% into the fixed boxes. (He argued based on his reading of Bourdieu, but of course I'm not able to summarize that.) Part of his talk was on what is significant: the differences between (the continuum of) statistical significance, (the continuum of) substantial issues in a moral philosophical approach and (the continuum of) effect sizes. He argued for the concept of "substantian significance": differences in capabilities supporting a life that the individual has reason to value. When talking about effect size, he connected this to Hattie, who he claimed could serve as an inspiration. At the end, he talked about a case in which he merged results from different studies in a fuzzy way while trying to keep enough noise to not understate the variance. Again, hard to summarize.

I think there was food for thought there. Take gender as an example. Of course, we are well aware that gender is more complex than the oldfashioned binary "man"/"woman" concept. However, there are important differences between "men" and "women" in most fields of research, when treated as a binary concept. So which underlying concepts can be found that can explain the differences, without having to keep using a binary concept that we know is too simplistic?

As happens at conferences, I had to spend the next slot doing some last-week edits to our presentation with my colleague. For the after-lunch slot I chose to take part in the "Open source publishing with IEA" panel. Of course, if we are to do more analyses of international studies, we need to know as much as possible about the publishing possibilities.

The journal "Large-scale Assessments in Education" has had its fifth anniersary, and is now a Springer open source journal, giving it more visibility. Also, there is the IEA Research for Education Book Series,   often 80-150 pages long. Calls for proposals are published biannually. (The authors actually get 25 000 euro for each book.) Unsolicited applications are also considered. Only IEA studies can be used for the book series, while the journal is more forgiving. The full process from accepted proposal to finished printed book is usually about two years.

Finally, Seamus Hegarty talked about the review process for the Book Series: There is a pre-review, then review of each chapter (based on an annotated ToC, which is mandatory for proposals). The review is not double-blind - only the reviewers are anonymous.

He gave some examples of some usual editorial suggestions:
  • Do provide an argument about the significance of your work
  • Contextualise your work
  • Detail your methodology
  • Be rigorous and coherent (especially difficult to obtain coherence when different teams of authors write different parts of the book
  • Write clearly
  • Organise your own review! It is useful to use colleagues to do a "review" before the real review.

Then, for the final session of the day I decided to attend the session on "TIMSS and ICCS: Students' attitudes and achievement in TIMSS, TIMSS Advanced mathematics, and ICCS". The first paper was by Laura Palmerio and Elisa Caponera: "Relationship between students' attitudes and beliefs, and achievement in advanced mathematics". The TIMSS Advanced questionnaires and tests were supplemented by a national questionnaire given to the same students, on self-efficacy and anxiety. They found that self-efficacy is highly correlated with mathematics performance, not surprisingly. This could be a sign that we should work on students' self-efficacy.

A side note: they showed that "self-efficacy was the best predictor of mathematics performance" (according to the abstract). I think this is a good example of how the language of "predictor" can be problematic, as the relationship between self-efficacy and performance is of course going in two directions - performance leads to better self-efficacy and self-efficacy leads to better performance. (In the presentation it was very clear that self-efficacy and performance are part of a circular relationship which also includes behaviour and anxiety.)

The next talk was Michaelides and others: "Meaningful clusters of eight grade students in 2015 TIMSS mathematics using motivation variables". They focused on confidence, enjoyment and value (all three scales administered in 8th grade, the two first also in 4th grade), to look at what the interactions between them are. For instance, some students report that they value math but do not enjoy it. They did this across 12 jurisdictions, in TIMSS cycles 1995-2007. The analysis was based on a two-step clustering approach. These clusters were developed per country, and then the clusters' participants' achievement and gender composition was explored. In inconsistent clusters, value did not play much of a role for achievement - self-confidence and enjoyment was more important.

The third talk in this session was Dupont et al: "The role of parents' literacy attitudes on children's reading achievement (PIRLS 2016)". They had different hypotheses on the connection between parents' reading attitudes and the outcomes (students' reading motivation and students' reading achievement). Regression analyses were done, controlling for home resources for learning. They found high correlation between parents' attitudes and students' reading achievement. (Some of the diagrams here could be useful in my teaching on quantitative methods in our master courses.) The study underline the importance of parents' literacy practices on students' reading achievement and attitudes.

The final talk of the day was Kwong and Macaskill: "The relationship between student engagement and achievement across countries within regions using latent class analysis". They looked at Asia, Europe and Latin America as three regions. First used Exploratory Factor Analysis to explore relations among the attitude indices. Thereafter LPA was used - a two level LPA model used for the Asia region.  (Obviously, I can not summarize all the tables showing the results of these analyses.) Through lots of diagrams, we were shown how the three regions had different profiles, although for instance Taiwan seemed to stand out a bit from the other Asian regions included. (Sadly, complex diagrams with lots of small type do not work very well when sun is flooding the room, so it was hard to get the details.)

That ended the first day of the conference. It is a different experience than many other conferences, as I usually go to conferences where I can choose talks on topics I am very interested in. Here, I more often find myself listening to talks where the topic in itself is not that relevant to my interests, but where the methodological ideas can very well be useful for me to explore other topics. So it is a different focus.

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