WHAT Do the PISA Results Tell Us About the Education Quality and Equality in the Pacific Rim

Student perceptions of their school and classroom environments have been the subject of much interest and research in recent decades. This paper reports on the use of the OECD/Programme for International Student Assessment as a way of measuring students ’ perceptions of school and classroom environment and relating those perceptions to their results in PISA in the countries around the Pacific rim. A Hierarchical Linear Modelling- HLM (Bryk & Raudenbusch, 1992) approach is used to analyse the data, and significant relationships have been found that will provide useful information for teachers, policy-makers and researchers. There are two sources of data relating to school and classroom environment in PISA – the Student Questionnaire, which the students complete in the same testing session as the cognitive items and the School Questionnaire, which the principal completes. The data analysis for PISA led to the creation of some constructed variables which are explored in this paper and described in the international reports (OECD, 2001) (OECD/UNESCO, 2003). The variables include students ’ perceptions of disciplinary climate, achievement press the amount of teacher support, student/teacher relationships and the students ’ sense of belonging at school. Th