Francesca Borgonovi

University College London | UCL · Institute of Education

This first edition of the UNESCO Global Outlook on Racism and Discrimination addresses the critical lack of comparable global equity data. It leverages an innovative, AI-driven approach that identifies and analyzes over 600,000 articles on racism and discrimination, published online from January 2021 to May 2024. A continuum of harm emerges, rangin...

Process data are becoming more and more popular in education research. In the field of computer-based assessments of collaborative problem solving (ColPS), process data have been used to identify students’ test-taking strategies while working on the assessment, and such data can be used to complement data collected on accuracy and overall performan...

This paper investigates the demand for language skills using data on online job vacancies in 27 European Union member countries and the United Kingdom in 2021. Evidence indicates that although Europe remains a linguistically diverse labour market, knowing English confers unique advantages in certain occupations. Across countries included in the ana...

Effective collaborative problem solving comprises cognitive dimensions, in which men tend to outperform women, and social dimensions in which women tend to outperform men. We extend research on between-country differences in gender gaps by considering collaborative problem solving and its association with two indicators of societal-level gender ine...

Socio-emotional and motivational skills are routinely measured using self-reports in large-scale educational assessments. Measures exploiting test-takers' behaviour during the completion of questionnaires or cognitive tests are increasingly used as alternatives to self-reports in the economics of education literature. We compute behavioural measure...

We use longitudinal data from over 1.5 million Italian students to examine differences in the mathematics and reading achievement of students who completed primary and lower secondary school in 2020-21 (COVID cohort) and those who completed it in 2018-19 (non-COVID cohort). We also examine the evolution of inequalities by gender and socio-economic...

Background Data‐driven investigations of how students transit pages in digital reading tasks and how much time they spend on each transition allow mapping sequences of navigation behaviours into students' navigation reading strategies. Objectives The purpose of this study is threefold: (1) to identify students' navigation patterns in multiple‐sour...

This paper examines between-country differences in why education promotes trust using data from 29 countries (and 146 regions) participating in the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC). Results indicate that education is strongly associated with trust and that individuals’ literacy, income, and occupational prestige are important mediators of this...

The technological advancements and globalization of the 21st century require a broad set of skills beyond traditional subjects such as mathematics, reading, and science. Research in psychological science should inform best practice and evidence-based recommendations for teaching these skills.

Psychometricians working on International Large Scale Assessments (ILSAs) typically specify latent ability factors with distinct and correlated constructs for test domains, such as reading, mathematics and science. A construct for general ability is not specified. However, several country-specific studies conclude that ILSAs largely reflect general...

We examine the effect of Covid-19 on students’ achievement in mathematics and reading in primary and lower secondary schools in Italy. We use longitudinal, population level data from the INVALSI assessment. We compare the math and reading achievement of students in grades 5 and 8 in academic year 2020-21 with the achievement of students in the same...

In many countries, schools and classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse along a variety of dimensions, including migration; ethnic groups, national minorities and Indigenous peoples; gender; gender identity and sexual orientation; special education needs; and giftedness. To navigate this diversity, adopting a multidimensional and intersectional...

International Large-Scale Assessments (LSA) allow comparisons of education systems’ effectiveness in promoting student learning in specific domains, such as reading, mathematics, and science. However, it has been argued that students’ scores in International LSAs mostly reflect general cognitive ability (g). This study examines the extent to which...

International Large-Scale Assessments (LSA) allow comparisons of education systems’ effectiveness in promoting student learning in specific domains, such as reading, mathematics, and science. However, it has been argued that students’ scores in International LSAs mostly reflect general cognitive ability (g). This study examines the extent to which...

Introduction Educational attainment is associated with important life outcomes including labour market performance, health status, well‐being, civic and political participation. An important question is whether it is possible to identify early those students who lack the achievement motivation that is needed to complete a higher education degree....

Many school-level policies, such as school funding formulae and teacher allocation mechanisms, aim at reducing the influence of students’ low socio-economic condition on academic achievement. Benchmarks and indicators based on large-scale international assessments can be used to measure academic success and identify if and when disadvantaged studen...

Data from international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) of schooled populations indicate that boys have considerably poorer literacy skills than girls. New evidence from a household-based ILSA—Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)—indicates that the gender gap in literacy is negligible, even though its...

This paper examines the evolution of 15-year-old students’ use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for fun and for learning at school and at home between 2009 and 2018. It also considers how the association between ICT use and reading achievement evolved over the same period. Results indicate that ICT use increased and that the incr...

This study contributes to the literature by examining the evolution of socio‐economic disparities in literacy skills between age 15 and 27. It uses combined cross‐sectional data from the Programme for International Student Assessment and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies in 20 countries and adopts a synthetic coho...

Numeracy and literacy are important foundation skills which command significant wage premia in modern labour markets. The existence of gender differences in these skills is therefore of potential concern, and has spurred a large amount of research, especially with respect to numeracy skills. Still, little is known about the moment in which such gap...

We use county level data from the United States to document the role of social capital the evolution of Covid-19 between January 2020 and January 2021. We find that social capital differentials in Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations depend on the dimension of social capital and the timeframe considered. Communities with higher levels of relational...

The role of digital technology in shaping attention and cognitive development has been at the centre of public discourse for decades. The current review presents findings from three main bodies of literature on the implications of technology use for attention and cognitive control: television, video games, and digital multitasking. The aim is to id...

This paper illustrates how process data can be used to identify behavioral patterns in a computer-based problem-solving assessment. Using sequence-mining techniques, we identify patterns of behavior across multiple digital tasks from the sequences of actions undertaken by respondents. We then examine how respondents’ action sequences (which we labe...

Lack of comparable cross-country data on access to and participation into higher education (HE) among disadvantaged and marginalised communities prevents a comprehensive examination of the role of education in shaping social mobility and how this has changed following educational expansions. We use data from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, the Pro...

Introduction Prior research indicates that female students express higher fear of failure than male students and that fear of failure is associated with lower social and emotional well‐being and higher levels of stress, anxiety, burnout and depression. Fear of failure also leads individuals to limit their choices and take fewer risks than would be...

Social capital describes the social bonds that exist within a community and comprises norms of reciprocity and trust as well as social relationships and social networks. We use data from counties in the United States to identify if community level responses to COVID-19 during the early phase of the pandemic (February 17 – May 10) depended on levels...

The role of digital technology in shaping attention and cognitive development has been at the centre of public discourse for decades. The rapid evolution of the technological landscape in recent years has made it increasingly difficult to study how digital devices might interact with cognition in a way that directly informs the present generation o...

We measure the effect of a single test practice on 15-year-old students’ ability to solve mathematics problems using large, representative samples of the schooled population in 32 countries. We exploit three unique features of the 2012 administration of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a large-scale, low-stakes internation...

Gender differences in teaching career expectations were explored among 15-year-old students in 49 countries participating in the 2015 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Results revealed that boys were generally less likely than girls to expect to work as teachers, but the magnitude of the gender gap varied across co...

This paper examines the association between how distant the language spoken by non-native-speaking immigrant students is with respect to the language of instruction and their outcomes using data on 15-year-old students participating in the Programme for International Student Assessment (N = 21,618). Linguistic distance is associated with achievemen...

The study compares empirical results on the coronavirus SARS‐CoV‐2 (causing COVID‐19) fatality risk perception of US adult residents stratified for age, gender, and race in mid‐March 2020 (N1 = 1,182) and mid‐April 2020 (N2 = 953). While the fatality risk perception has increased from March 2020 to April 2020, our findings suggest that many US adul...

Understanding what factors foster young people's aspirations to work as teachers is critical for designing effective recruitment policies, and for ensuring that enough youngsters enter the teaching profession. We examine what factors explain between‐country differences in the percentage of 15‐year‐old students who expect to work as teachers as adul...

In order to provide time critical information on the social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic, we relate levels of trust in science with government responses to the pandemic and the extent to which populations reduced mobility, a measure identified by epidemiologists as critical to halt the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We used...

Although digital transformations can help narrow existing gender gaps in labour market outcomes, this change depends, among several factors, on the extent to which females have the skills to make the most of new opportunities. An important such skill is problem solving. We examined gender gaps in cognitive and attitudinal dimensions of problem solv...

The report on “The role of education and skills in bridging the digital gender divide – Evidence from APEC economies”, produced by the OECD with the support of Chile in the context of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), explores the root causes of the gender digital divide; the demands of the workforce for digital skills of women; the ski...

The gender gap in maths favouring boys at school has garnered considerable attention throughout the last decades. Since maths skills are critical for STEM academic studies and for properly integrating in math-related occupations in the labour market, the gap is a source of social concern. The existence and origin of this gender gap were highly deba...

This article presents the pseudo‐equivalent group approach and discusses how it can enhance the quality of linking in the presence of nonequivalent groups. The pseudo‐equivalent group approach allows to achieve pseudo‐equivalence using propensity score reweighting techniques. We use it to perform linking to establish scale concordance between two a...

The paper examines the dynamics of native populations’ opposition to migration and the role of education in shaping such opposition in European countries using data from the last four editions of the European Social Survey between years 2010 and 2016. We examine both the direct association between education and opposition to migration as well as th...

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), used computers as the main assessment deliver platform. This enabled the Programme to collect data not only on whether respondents were able to solve specific tasks, but also on how they approached the problems at hand and how...

Migration is a shared condition of all humanity. We have all been strangers in a strange land. All humanity lives today as a result of migration, by themselves or their ancestors. Migration is a matter sometimes of choice, often of need, and always an inalienable right. All helpless people deserve to be helped. Offering such help is a commandment a...

The paper examines the role of education in shaping individuals’ attitudes towards migration in European countries using data from the 2012, 2014 and 2016 editions of the European Social Survey (rounds 6, 7 and 8).

Numeracy and literacy skills have become increasingly important in modern labour markets. The large gender differences that several studies have identified have therefore sparked considerable attention among researchers and policy makers. Little is known about the moment in which such gaps emerge, how they evolve and if their evolution differs acro...

Last month, Tokyo Medical University (TMU) announced Yukiko Hayashi as its first female president. This comes on the heels of discovering that the insitution had manipulated entrance exam scores for many years to curb female enrollment. Hayashi may be an attempt by TMU to restore its reputation, but the scandal should be a wake-up call for Japanese...

As is the case in most OECD countries, boys in Norway are more likely to have lower levels of academic achievement and attainment than girls. While this phenomenon is not recent, it has become increasingly pronounced in recent years and, as a result, is attracting considerable attention from policy-makers in many countries. This paper develops evid...

Countries’ education systems are often compared using academic achievement measures from large-scale assessments like PISA. These exercises are criticized because achievement is but one of the aims of education and comparisons don’t take into account each country’s socio-demographic composition, cultural and historical background and organizational...

The paper estimates the effect of students’ position in the classroom register on their academic performance. We use a unique dataset from Poland which contains information on the academic outcomes of students in the humanities, science and mathematics lower secondary school exams as well as the position students occupy in their classroom register....

Educational Impact and Implications Statement Bandura’s social-cognitive theory indicates that expectations of personal efficacy are based on performance accomplishments, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. Our results indicate that exposure-induced familiarity is also crucial in shaping 15-year-old students’ mathema...

This paper reports on a pilot study that used eye tracking techniques to make detailed observations of item response processes in the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). The lab-based study also recorded physiological responses using measures of pupil diameter and electrodermal activity. The study tested 1...

Resilience refers to the capacity of individuals to prosper despite encountering adverse circumstances. This paper defines academic resilience as the ability of 15-year-old students from disadvantaged backgrounds to perform at a certain level in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in reading, mathematics and science that enabl...

Objectives: To assess the relationship between general literacy proficiency and self-rated poor health by analyzing data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, an international survey conducted from 2011 to 2015 in 33 high- and upper middle-income countries and national sub-regions. Methods: Logistic regressio...

This study examines between-country differences in the degree to which teachers’ working conditions, salaries, and societal evaluations about desirable job characteristics are associated with students’ teaching career expectations. Three-level hierarchical generalized linear models are employed to analyze cross-national data from the Programme for...

Large-scale international assessments rely on indicators of the resources that students report having in their homes to capture the financial capital of their families. The scaling methodology currently used to develop the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) background indices is designed to maximize within-country comparability o...

This paper uses data from PISA and the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to examine the evolution of socio-economic and gender disparities in literacy and numeracy proficiency between the ages of 15 and 27 in the sample of countries that took part in both studies. Socio-economic disparities are exacerbated between the age of 15 and 27 and the soc...

We examine between-country variations in overall levels of external political efficacy and disparities in political efficacy by parental socio-economic status (SES). Furthermore, we identify the mediating role of individuals' cognitive abilities and own SES, as well as how contextual characteristics determine the importance cognitive abilities and...

Demand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professionals is on the rise worldwide. To effectively meet this demand, many governments and private organizations have revamped STEM education and promoted training to enhance math and science skills among students and workers. Education and training programs typically focus on i...

In this chapter, we discuss the changing role of large-scale educational assessments, specifically their increased focus on measuring psychosocial skills in addition to student achievement. We present a schema that can serve as a helpful guide for distinguishing the different kinds of variables measured in large-scale assessments. In addition, hist...

Video games are a favorite leisure-time activity among teenagers worldwide. This study examines cross-national gender differences in reading achievement and video gaming and whether video gaming explains gender differences in reading achievement and differences in performance between paper-based and computer-based reading. We use data from a repres...

We examine the contribution of human capital to health in 23 countries worldwide using the OECD Survey of Adult Skills, a unique large-scale international assessment of 16-65 year olds that contains information about self-reported health, schooling, cognitive skills and indicators of interpersonal trust, which represents the cognitive dimension of...

Descriptive statistics of core variables. (PDF)

Country level characteristics. (PDF)

Gradients for health. (PDF)

The mediating and moderating role of social capital. (PDF)

Research on educational outcomes conceptualizes socio-economic condition as a multidimensional construct. Quantitative empirical investigations are generally based on single, composite indicators. However, the use of single, composite indicators does not reveal what mechanisms determine inequalities. We use multigroup confirmatory factor analysis a...

The paper explores how PISA data can be used to analyze cross-country variations in the gender gap in academic performance and the attitudes and behaviors of 15-year-old boys and girls. Concern about gender differences in education in much of the twentieth century focused on the disadvantage and underachievement of girls. More recently, however, th...

In this article we explore the relationship between education and levels of trust and tolerance in Europe. More specifically we assess whether the relationship between years of schooling and the extent to which individuals trust others in their communities and are tolerant towards immigrants varies across European countries and attempt to identify...

Studies have highlighted the beneficial effects of parental involvement in children’s educational lives. Few studies, however, analyse parental involvement in a cross-national perspective and few evaluate a wide array of forms of involvement. In 2009, 14 countries and economies implemented the parental questionnaire option in the PISA 2009 cycle. T...

An epidemic of obesity has been developing in virtually all OECD countries over the last 30 years. Existing evidence provides a strong suggestion that such an epidemic has affected certain social groups more than others. In particular, a better education appears to be associated with a lower likelihood of obesity, especially among women. This paper...

Les pays de l’OCDE s’intéressent de plus en plus à l’engagement civique et social (ECS) de leurs citoyens, en raison non seulement de sa valeur intrinsèque, mais aussi de ses effets bénéfiques potentiels sur la société. L’éducation peut-elle contribuer à renforcer l’engagement civique et social? D’un côté, les liens de causalité mis en évidence sug...

OECD countries have become increasingly interested in their citizens’ civic and social engagement, not only because of its intrinsic value but also because of the potential benefits they bring to the society. Can education play a role in raising civic and social engagement? On the one hand, the available causal evidence suggests that secondary scho...

I examine to what extent social capital can promote individual well-being in the form of good physical and mental health. Our analysis is based on multiple waves of data from the National Child Development Survey and the British Cohort Study, two large cohort studies following the lives of children who were born in Britain in one particular week in...

In this article we explore the relationship between education and alcohol consumption. We examine whether the probability of abusing alcohol differs across educational groups. We use data from the British Cohort Study, a longitudinal study of one week's birth in Britain in 1970. We analysed data collected at age 34 (in 2004) and complement it with...

This article examines the impact of education on political participation in 15 European countries. We use data from the European Social Survey and find that education is positively associated with voter turnout and information acquisition about politics and currents affairs. However, when we use exogeneous changes in compulsory schooling to instrum...

The study examines whether social capital fosters resilience among individuals who are at a high risk of developing mental distress in adulthood. Results suggest that social capital is not associated with a reduction in the probability that high-risk individuals will experience mental distress, while one form of social capital, membership in groups...