Exploring the relationship among new literacies, reading, mathematics and science performance of Turkish students in PISA 2012

Abstract

Turkish students on average had lower scores than OECD countries on mathematics, science, and reading at international assessment programs. As PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students are prepared to handle the challenges they may encounter in their future lives, and evaluates students’ ability to reflect and to apply their knowledge and experience to real-life situations, low scores on this assessment should be investigated carefully. Therefore, in this study we aimed to explore the relationships between new literacy skills, reading, mathematics, and science performance of Turkish students. The results showed that new literacy skills measured in PISA had two dimensional structure including at and outside of school new literacy skills. These new literacy skills were shown to predict reading performance significantly, at school negatively and outside of school positively. It was also shown that reading performance and new literacy skills were effective in the prediction of both mathematics and science performances.

Keywords

• PISA 2012
• new literacies
• reading performance
• mathematics performance
• science performance.