Tomáš Lintner presented at EARLI SIG 2026
Tomáš Lintner presented his research at the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) 2026 conference.
SΛTIS members Markéta Žáková and Tomáš Lintner have published a new study called Academic resilience in 75 education systems: how operationalization and threshold choices shape findings on protective factors.
Drawing on PISA 2018 data from 75 education systems, the study distinguishes between two related but distinct dimensions of measuring academic resilience: operationalization — the underlying logic used to define who counts as resilient (identifying top-achieving disadvantaged students, identifying students who outperform SES-based expectations, or modeling achievement continuously within a disadvantaged sample) — and threshold choice, defined as the specific cutoff level applied to demarcate disadvantage and/or high achievement within a given operationalization.
Using thirteen model specifications applied to openly accessible PISA administrative and assessment records, the authors examined how these choices jointly shape estimated prevalence, cross-country rankings, and the associations of four candidate protective factors — gender, self-perceived reading competence, reading enjoyment, and attitude toward learning — with academic resilience. Prevalence estimates varied nearly fivefold across operationalizations, and country rankings correlated only moderately to weakly across definitions that shared a threshold logic but differed in reference population. When associations were pooled across all 75 systems, predictor effects appeared broadly stable; when examined country by country, as is standard practice in PISA-based research, consistency held in only 20–72% of systems depending on the predictor, and threshold level alone altered conclusions in 3–37% of cases.
The findings suggest that the conclusions drawn about protective factors depend not only on whether an association is detected but on the definitional architecture — operationalization and threshold — within which that association is estimated, a distinction that carries particular weight for cross-national comparisons and policy borrowing. A complementary, threshold-free interaction analysis further shows that some motivational factors are linked to a flatter socioeconomic gradient in achievement while others are linked to a steeper one, a pattern the threshold-based definitions cannot detect on their own. The results contribute to ongoing debates about how academic resilience should be measured and raise questions about which methodological choices leave certain conclusions — and certain education systems — persistently dependent on the definition used to produce them.
Read the full article here.
