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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, 71% of students reported at least one of their parents’ highest levels of education was above secondary education, and 56% 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.
In both year levels for the reading and writing domains, student performance was higher for students who have at least one parent with a university level education than students who did not have a parent with a university level education.
No associations between numeracy performance and parental education were found in the numeracy domain.
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 in reading and writing. No performance differences were found in the numeracy domain. These findings suggest that having a more educated parent may be associated with better performance in literacy topics but not numeracy.
