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Parental qualification
Students were asked to indicate their parents’ highest level of education against a list of nationally appropriate educational levels to ensure local relevance. Each of these levels was also mapped to International Standard Classification Levels (ISCED 2011) so that consistent comparisons across countries could be made.
Highest levels of parental education
As seen in Table STT1.3, 46% of students in Papua New Guinea reported at least one of their parents’ highest levels of education was above secondary education and 54% of students had at least one parent with a university education.
University-level parental education and student performance
This information was compared with student achievement in the PILNA assessments. To simplify the analysis, parents’ highest level of education was grouped into two categories: below university level and university level. Table STT1.4 shows student performance in the PILNA domains by their parents’ highest level of education.
From Table STT1.4 we see that, in the reading and writing domains, the grade five students who had at least one parent with a university level education had higher average performance in the PILNA assessments than those who did not. For grade three students, this positive association was not observed in reading and writing, but was observed in mathematics.
What does this mean?
In general, students with at least one university educated parent tended to perform better than students without a university educated parent. For grade three students, this was observed in their numeracy performance and for grade five students, it was observed in their reading and writing performance. This suggests that higher levels of parental education may be associated with higher performance and that students belonging to families with less education may be at a disadvantage compared to their peers.
A similar association was observed regionally, indicating that students with at least one university education parent tended to perform better than students without a university educated parent.
