IEA INSIDER 2025
Exclusions and Participation Rates in IEA Studies: Striving for More Inclusiveness
BY UMUT ATASEVER AND SABINE MEINCK
IEA is committed to fair and inclusive assessments to best capture data on learning and education for all students. However, increasing rates of exclusions and non-responses pose significant challenges to the validity, representativeness, and comparability of our data. To highlight this important topic, we organized a symposium at the IRC 2025 which brought together international experts to explore trends, challenges, and strategies for fostering greater inclusiveness in IEA studies. In the first presentation, Umut Atasever (IEA) focused on the analysis of 30 years of trends in exclusion rates in IEA assessments. Results showed modest but persistent variation in exclusion rates across countries in all IEA studies over the past three decades. For example, looking at grade
four, one third of the countries participating in PIRLS 2021 and even half the countries in TIMSS 2023 did not meet the determined maximum threshold for exclusions, that is, they excluded more than 5 percent of their student population. While school-level exclusion rates have remained relatively stable, exclusion of students within schools, otherwise deemed eligible, have increased, especially when examining the most recent study cycles. Unfortunately, similar trends are observed regarding participation rates, which are declining.
“While school-level exclusion rates have remained relatively stable, exclusion of students within schools, otherwise deemed eligible, have increased.”
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