The purpose of large-scale international assessments is to compare educational achievement across countries. For such cross-national comparisons to be meaningful, the participating students must be representative of the target population. In this paper, we consider whether this is the case for Canada, a country widely recognised as high performing in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Our analysis illustrates how the PISA 2015 sample for Canada only covers around half of the 15-year-old population, compared to over 90% in countries like Finland, Estonia, Japan and South Korea. We discuss how this emerges from differences in how children with special educational needs are defined and rules for their inclusion in the study, variation in school participation rates and the comparatively high rates of pupils’ absence in Canada during the PISA study. The paper concludes by investigating how Canada’s PISA 2015 rank would change under different assumptions about how the non-participating students would have performed were they to have taken the PISA test.

中文翻译：

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加拿大真的是教育超级大国吗？不参与对 PISA 2015 结果的影响

大规模国际评估的目的是比较各国的教育成就。为了使这种跨国比较有意义，参与的学生必须代表目标人群。在本文中，我们考虑加拿大是否是这种情况，加拿大是一个被广泛认为在国际学生评估计划 (PISA) 中表现出色的国家。我们的分析说明了加拿大的 PISA 2015 样本仅涵盖了 15 岁人口的一半左右，而芬兰、爱沙尼亚、日本和韩国等国家的这一比例超过 90%。我们讨论了如何从具有特殊教育需求的儿童的定义方式以及将他们纳入研究的规则的差异中得出这一结论，在 PISA 研究期间，学校参与率的变化和加拿大学生缺勤率相对较高。这篇论文最后调查了加拿大的 PISA 2015 排名在不同的假设下会如何变化，这些假设是关于未参加 PISA 测试的学生将如何表现。