DATA IN ACTION
PIAAC: Status, Innovation, and Challenges
BY TIM DANIEL
The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), commissioned by the OECD, examines the skills of adults as a way of investigating the link between skills and outcomes in educational, social, and labor-market contexts. It is run by the PIAAC consortium, led by ETS, and consists of IEA, Westat, cApStAn, the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) of the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, and the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS). IEA takes responsibility for all data management related activities and tasks, provides standards for those as well as the coding of occupations, conducts training sessions for both, and develops and hosts the PIAAC Dashboard. The PIAAC consortium and the OECD had developed a contingency plan to address issues around low response rates in multiple countries and to ensure that as many countries as possible were included in the international analysis and reporting. This contingency plan split the data processing at the international level at IEA into three batches, concluding in final data sets for analysis and weighting in October 2023. The plan was successfully conducted, and it was possible to prepare all participants’ data in time for weighting and to include them in international pooled data analysis. Weighting and analysis commenced commenced in March through to May 2024, and IEA brought together all data produced by partner organizations, merged them onto the countries’ data files, and created first preliminary national
data files that countries reviewed for completeness, consistency, and national variables. IEA then implemented feedback from country reviews and prepared updated national data files in time for the 8th meeting of National Project Managers and the adjacent training on PIAAC data tools (the IEA IDB Analyzer and the PIAAC Data Explorer) which took place in early June in Porto, Portugal. During the meeting, countries received all necessary information from the weighting and analysis process to start preparations for their national reporting, as for the suppression review process. Many countries have legal restrictions for the sharing of certain data due to confidentiality concerns, and some data collected and used in analysis will not be made available to the public. IEA will take care to implement the suppression requests in countries’ data files and will be producing the first draft international public-use files for countries final review and sign-off through the months of August to October this year. The National Project Managers will meet for the last NPM meeting at the end of August where final results will be discussed and a workshop on how to analyze the international public-use files will be offered. The international release of the public use file and international report from the OECD is scheduled for 10 December 2024. ■
45
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker