Why digitalize the Turkish National Educational Assessment System?

Background

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s education practice is responsible for administering international assessment surveys, such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Turkey, as a OECD member is also a participant in these exams. The repors generated based on the OECD data is published and available through the Turkish ministry of education’s website. However, the Ministry of Education in Turkey does not have a central website implemented and operated through an agency responsible for handling national education statistical data through which the assessments are accessible online. Adopting such a system and offering it as a service could be very useful for think tanks, practitioners or students in academia.

The Need for Digital Access to Data

However, if the ministry of education creates a medium to digitize Turkey’s national assessment data, this would provide the following outcomes:

1) In most cases, Turkish researchers in the higher education system will have gone through formal training in English. However, having a downloadable database with variables in Turkish will eliminate a further step of translation.

2) For a small number of researchers or education practitioners (administrators, teachers) there is a likelihood that they will not have received training in English. Thus, a data explorer similar to OECD’s will be an important resource for those who want to conduct exploratory analysis or an independent research project.

3) Finally, the way these international assessments work is that certain questions or variables are adapted to the context in Turkey. Or a certain variable is created just in Turkey. The OECD data explorer will not provide access to these variables as the only variables available for analysis are those in the core exam.

Thus, the education sector in Turkey could highly benefit from a centralized Turkish interactive data tool/database accessible to the public.

Why the organization cannot transform?

The lack of easy access to Turkish national data could be twofold. One reason could easily be political. It is the case that we do not do well in these international assessment exams. In fact, among OECD countries, we are at the very bottom. And such assessment surveys are a huge leverage for politicians who are in the opposition to criticize present authorities. If the government invests in a digital tool that makes this data accessible to public, by logic, this would be followed by significant investments in advertising and promoting the tool.

In Turkey’s political climate, given the horrible performance from the PISA 2015 cycle (announced in 2016) there was minimal coverage in the news outlets (majority of them are government controlled) of Turkey’s performance. Thus, it seems counterintuitive for the government to take on an objective of making this data as widely announced and as accessible as possible.

The second reason why we might not be seeing such a digital service or transformation is simply the lack of investment/ funding, given this is a service which can be very expensive to implement, develop and administer.

What would a successful transformation look like?

A successful transformation would imitate the OECD Data Explorer where the digital tool allows for 1) display of the present and trend data 2) descriptive statistics 3) significance tests to compare Turkey’s performance to other countries as well as compare the performances of different groups within the country based on gender, socio-economic status and other demographic variables within the country 4) options to make the data visual through charts, diagrams and maps.

Finally, in order to advance the opportunities for researchers, a service that is offered by National Center for Education Statistics in the US, is to provide databases of the OECD surveys in SPSS and SAS format — with US specific variables incorporated in the database. Thus, a similar service through a Turkish statistical bureau would be extremely valuable.

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