Few other countries have been able to expand education and raise performance at the same pace as Türkiye has over the past two decades. The data presented in this report – from successive cycles of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement)Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – shed light on the extent of the performance improvements that have been achieved in Türkiye in recent decades.

This report presents analysis of Türkiye’s international assessment data to better understand how students in the country perform throughout schooling. It focuses on student performance in Türkiye as measured by two international assessments – PISA and TIMSS. It aims to understand how student performance has evolved over time and analyse whether factors related to student background – such as gender or socio-economic information – are associated with performance. In particular, through the analysis of PISA and TIMSS data, it seeks to answer the following questions:

Over the past two decades, participation in education in Türkiye has expanded significantly: participation in primary and lower secondary education is now universal and, in 2018, over 90% of 15-year-olds were enrolled in education.

This chapter provides information about the two international assessments – the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) – the analysis in this report is based on. It also gives details on the students the two assessments assess, the assessment frameworks, how performance is reported and the background information about students and their schools that each assessment collects.

This chapter provides an overview of student performance in Türkiye in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) international assessments from 2003 until 2019 in Grades 4 and 8, and at 15 years old. It explores how students performed on average in the latest round of each assessment – PISA 2018 and TIMSS 2019 – and then looks at how performance was spread across the student population, in particular across groups of low and high performers. Using data from previous cycles of PISA and TIMSS, it also looks at how student performance in Türkiye has evolved over time.

This chapter uses background information about students collected by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessments to explore how factors associated with a student’s background might be associated with their performance in Grades 4, 8 and at 15 years of age in Türkiye. Background factors analysed include a student’s socio-economic background, the language they speak at home, their gender and participation in early childhood education and care (ECEC).

This chapter explores associations between the characteristics of schools in Türkiye and student performance. Specific characteristics that are explored include the socio-economic composition of school and the national types of upper secondary school that students attend, of which there are eight in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) sample. The chapter also explores how different types of upper secondary schools in Türkiye differ in terms of student gender, school location, school resources, provision of study help and extracurricular activities. The chapter also looks at the performance and composition of private schools in Türkiye.

This chapter analyses students’ performance in Türkiye in different sub-domains and individual test items in Mathematics, Science and Reading in the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) assessments in Grades 4, 8 and at 15 years of age. It identifies content and cognitive areas of strength and weakness in Türkiye’s performance in comparison to the OECD average.

In PISA, a student’s socio-economic status is estimated by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS), a composite score based on three indicators: highest parental occupation, parental education, and home possessions. As no direct income measure has been available from the PISA data, the existence of household items has been used as a proxy for family wealth.