Is Canada really an education superpower? The impact of exclusions and non-response on results from PISA 2015

The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the students who take the test must be representative of the whole population of interest. In this paper we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high-performing in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our analysis illustrates how the PISA 2015 data for Canada suffers from a much higher rate of student exclusions, school non-response and pupil non-response than other high-performing countries such as Finland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea. We discuss how this emerges from differences in how children with Special Educational Needs are defined and rules for their inclusion in the study, variation in school response rates and the comparatively high rates of pupil test absence in Canada. The paper concludes by investigating how Canada’s PISA 2015 rank would change under different assumptions about how the non-participating students would have performed were they to have taken the PISA test.