The concept of opportunity to learn (OTL) in international comparisons of education

Abstract

Items addressing the Opportunity to Learn (OTL) construct, the idea that the time a student spends in learning something is related to what that student learns, was included in the mathematics portion of PISA 2012 for the first time. Several questions on the student survey were designed to measure students’ opportunity to learn important concepts and skills associated with the assessed mathematical literacy. This chapter traces the development of this type of information in international comparisons of education and discusses four types of items that have been developed for this purpose. It also discusses the unique challenge of measuring this concept in PISA as it focuses on literacy, the knowledge students have acquired over their schooling to date, rather than on the content knowledge students have gained from schooling during a particular year or at a particular grade level. The specific OTL items and their purpose are identified from the Student Questionnaire section of Appendix A in the PISA 2012 Assessment and Analytic Framework.