What Lies Behind Global Education Rankings? New Ways to Compare Educational Outcomes
The Open Seminars at the Institute of Education continue to serve as a platform for discussing cutting-edge educational research. One of the latest sessions featured Professor Kit-Tai Hau from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who talked about “Rethinking international educational comparisons of non-cognitive measures: from league tables of means to slopes.”
Professor Kit-Tai Hau is a leading scholar in Educational Psychology and former Choh-Ming Professor and Vice-President of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has contributed extensively to OECD and IEA projects, including PISA and TIMSS expert groups. With over 41,000 Google citations, his research spans academic motivation, international educational comparisons, assessment, and well-being.
In his presentation, Professor Hau examined how large-scale international assessments, including the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), are typically interpreted through country rankings based on average scores. While such comparisons are widely used in policy debates, they can oversimplify the complexity of non-cognitive outcomes such as motivation, resilience, and student well-being.
Drawing on PISA 2018 data covering over 600,000 students in 80 countries, he demonstrated that, while there are substantial differences in academic performance between education systems, cross-national differences in non-cognitive indicators are comparatively small. Furthermore, the relationship between attitudes and achievement can be reversed depending on the level of analysis. For example, although students who report enjoying reading tend to perform better individually, countries with higher average enjoyment of reading may demonstrate lower national reading scores.
Professor Hau explained that such patterns may reflect ecological fallacies, cross-cultural response styles, or unobserved contextual factors. In order to better understand educational outcomes, he proposed shifting the focus from national averages to examining the relationships, or 'slopes', between variables such as socioeconomic status, gender, resilience and achievement across countries.
The discussion emphasised the significance of methodological choices in shaping international educational narratives and policy conclusions. Participants reflected on how comparative research could better take into account context, culture and school-level dynamics when analysing non-cognitive data.
The HSE Open Seminar on Education was first held in 2005 under the guidance of Professor Anatoly Pinsky. Since then, the seminar has provided a space to discuss key research findings and practical projects that are important for education and human development. There are no restrictions on the research area, topic, or mode of presentation, as long as the main criteria are met. These include novelty of ideas, the benefits for a wide range of researchers (within the social sciences and economics), or practical significance for those who work in the field of education.