IEA Insider 2024

IEA INSIDER 2024

TALIS 2024 Enters the Homestretch

At the beginning of July, data collection in the northern hemisphere was completed for 40 of 48 participating countries or territories. The extension of the data collection period for some countries was a deliberate decision made in consultation with the OECD to enable countries to achieve the highest possible participation rate with a threshold of 75 percent of original schools and childcare facilities. The corresponding adjustments to the schedules and data deliveries were discussed with the countries. On the other hand, in close cooperation with two TALIS participants from the northern hemisphere, who joined the TALIS field trial late, the study direction succeeded in integrating these countries/territories into the schedule of the main survey despite a very short time for the field trial.

BY ANJA WASCHK, STEFFEN KNOLL, & RÜDIGER KREBS

Conducting the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) is not a sprint, but rather a marathon that requires endurance. The necessary conceptual preparatory work for the fourth cycle of TALIS began in 2021. The IEA- led consortium is working together with partners Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER, Australia), Research and Development (RAND) Europe (Cambridge, UK) and cApStAn (Brussels, Belgium). TALIS 2024 is not only characterized by the fact that seven more countries and territories are participating than in the previous cycle. In addition, the online survey platform IEA StudyExpert was used for the first time to investigate the teaching environment and the working conditions of teachers in schools and their principals as well as the staff and leaders of Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings. This online platform was also used to adapt and translate the questionnaires into the respective local languages. Following the successful field trial conducted with IEA StudyExpert in 2023, some of the 55 participating countries and territories expressed the wish to further improve the survey software. These wishes ranged from the ability to adjust the font size in the IEA StudyExpert to status overviews of questionnaire processing. Not only were the countries grateful for these improvements, but they also resulted in simplified workflows for IEA, for example for the adaption verifiers. The consortium partner cApStAn, responsible for linguistic quality control of the translations, also expressed its satisfaction with these adjustments. As a result, IEA StudyExpert has has significantly improved the functionality and statistical report features and the interface between IEA StudyExpert and IEA's internal data processing program Data Processing Expert (DPE) functions much more smoothly. The following key milestones were achieved after the field trial: • The national questionnaires were completed, • The main survey was prepared and implemented, • Data collection started in the northern hemisphere (NH) on 1 February and in the southern hemisphere (SH) on 1 June.

“The online survey platform IEA StudyExpert was used for the first time to investigate the teaching environment .”

Achieving the targeted participation rates can be a challenge for some TALIS participants. If case target participation rates are not met, a non-response bias analysis (NRBA) will be conducted by the national center. In order to keep to the tight TALIS schedule for data weighting and scaling, participants in the southern hemisphere are requested to finish data collection by the end of August 2024. A good three quarters of the overall TALIS 2024 project tasks will have been completed by the end of 2024. In July, around 70 percent of the data had already been processed—mainly based on the survey data from the countries/territories in the northern hemisphere. By September, this data will be processed, weighted, and prepared for further analysis by the teams in IEA's International Studies Unit, the Sampling Team, and the Research and Analysis Team before the same steps are taken for the data from the southern hemisphere from October. Overall, TALIS 2024 is well on track to achieve the goal of successfully crossing the finish line in October 2025 with the first publications of the study results of the fourth TALIS cycle. ■

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