The purpose of the study: to provide impartial information for the school, its students, and their parents (caregivers, foster parents) about the achievements to make decisions on the further improvements of teaching and studying on student, teacher, class, school, municipality, and national level.
The objectives of National Survey of Student Achievement (NASA):
- to collect the information for monitoring the national students’ achievements, planning the novelties, and implementing the novelties for monitoring the success;
- to evaluate the educational content, and substantiating students’ achievement criteria based on collected data;
- to prepare the necessary tools (i.e., standardized tests, etc.) for students and teachers for the impartial evaluation of their work results;
- to prepare the necessary tools (i.e., standardized tests, etc.) for the municipality’s education subdivisions and school principals for collecting the required data of work result assessments and planning of activities.
National Survey of Student Achievement, first implemented in 2002, became the responsibility of the Education Supply Centre. Due to economic reasons, the assessments were not provided from 2009 to 2011. In 2012, the renewed assessment implementation was consigned to the National Examination Centre. Since the 2nd of September, 2019, the National Agency of Education took over the activities of the National Examination Centre and continues to carry them on to this day.
During the 2014 National Assessments of Student Achievements, grade 8 students received notebooks with 9 types of tests. To pinpoint the personal peculiarities as well as home, class, and school context, etc., the student questionnaires were used for the research of educational context. One student got to fill out only one notebook which consisted of tests from two different subjects and a student questionnaire. The questionnaires provided in different types of notebooks consisted of general questions and a questionnaire from one or two objective fields.
One line in SPSS Statistics from the 2014 National Survey of Student Achievement coincides with the achievements or questionnaire answers of one particular student or a teacher. The information provided in databases is impersonal - a student or a teacher is identified based on code, without providing the class or school’s name. Each school that has participated in the 2014 National Survey of Student Achievement received a unique five-number school code. The code used for identifying the schools of both grade 4 and grade 8 students and teachers consists of a school code and the numbers identifying a class and a student. The class code in the student’s database coincides with the code in the teacher’s database. To connect these databases, the variable named “ID_klase” would have to be used as an identifier.
Dataset "NSSA 2014: 8th Grade Students Study, 2014" metadata and data were prepared implementing project "Disparities in School Achievement from a Person and Variable-Oriented Perspective: A Prototype of a Learning Analytics Tool NO-GAP" from 2020 to 2023. Project leader is chief research fellow Rasa Erentaitė. Project is funded by the European Regional Development Fund according to the 2014–2020 Operational Programme for the European Union Funds’ Investments, under measure’s No. 01.2.2-LMT-K-718 activity “Research Projects Implemented by World-class Researcher Groups to develop R&D activities relevant to economic sectors, which could later be commercialized” under a grant agreement with the Lithuanian Research Council (LMTLT).