ETF to study how classroom environment affects learning

The European Training Foundation (ETF) is preparing a detailed analysis of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2025 data from 20 of its partner countries participating in the assessment. The aim of the report, to be published at the end of this year, is to better understand the conditions in which learning takes place.

PISA has been collecting comparable evidence on student achievement and learning conditions for more than 25 years. Public discussion of PISA tends to focus on country rankings and average scores in reading, mathematics and science. Much less attention is paid to the wealth of information collected alongside the tests about the everyday experiences of students at school. Do they attend regularly? And if they do, can they concentrate in class and receive support from teachers? Or are they distracted by noise and digital devices?

What do students see that policymakers may not?

“Different people involved in education see different things,” says Mihaylo Milovanovitch, a senior human capital development expert at the ETF and project head.

“Policymakers tend to focus on resources and standards of achievement; those who develop curricula and textbooks focus on the content of what students are supposed to learn.

“But students see something else. What matters to them, first and foremost, is what actually happens in the classroom, day after day. This is important, because the conditions you are being taught are as central as the content and the teaching.”

“The classroom is often treated as a black box,” Milovanovitch adds. “We discuss what goes into education and measure what comes out, but pay much less attention to what happens in between. And the voices of those who experience it every day – the students themselves – are often missing from that discussion.”

What can PISA data tell us about conditions in education?

PISA does offer a way into that, the expert emphasises: careful analysis of its data can provide information that policymakers, skills trainers, school principals, parents and students themselves can use to better understand the conditions in education.

“The kind of information we have and can extract is really about attendance, classroom climate, the level of digital distraction, the teaching context… We have this information from PISA. It is evidence-based, but also very relatable.”

How do students’ experiences differ across partner countries?

Those glimpses into the way learning happens will “definitely not be uniform” across the 20 partner countries: in one country the key issue may be with teaching; in another, disruption in the classroom. The data the ETF is working with already suggest just how different those experiences can be. Here are some examples:

How much does school attendance vary?

Key stat: In Georgia, 69% of students reported missing at least one whole school day in the two weeks before the assessment, compared with an OECD average of 22%.

In neighbouring Armenia, the figure was 58%, even though students there reported considerably less classroom disruption than their OECD peers.

How much does classroom disruption vary?

Key stat: In Morocco, 41% of students reported noise and disorder in most or every science lesson, compared with an OECD average of 31%. In Kazakhstan, the figure was just 12%.

Both countries perform below the OECD benchmark, but the classroom-level challenges they have seem to be very different.

 Why students’ experiences matter for education policy 

Bringing out these often-overlooked aspects of the experiences of students is essential to giving policymakers a clearer picture of what needs to change. “We need to look into the student experience and what students say,” the expert says.