Jin Songli, a PhD student from the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Education (FED), received an Excellent Paper Award (Best Four Oral Presentations) at the 2017 Global Chinese Conference on Educational Information and Assessment and Chinese Association of Psychological Testing Annual Conference. The paper has great implications for understanding educational quality and equity of the high-performing education systems of Chinese communities around the world.

The awarded paper, titled ‘The Last Can Be the First: Important Factors Discriminating Between Academic Resilient and Non-Resilient Students of China in PISA 2015’, was jointly authored by Jin and her two PhD supervisors, namely Prof Cheung Kwok Cheung and Dr Sit Pou Seong from the FED. This paper pioneered the use of a contemporary data-mining tool to identify pertinent schooling and environment factors in descending order of relative importance influencing the academic resiliency of adolescents in China in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 Study. The findings have significant implications for the stakeholders to understand educational quality and equity of the high-performing Chinese education systems for informed policy making.

Held at the Taichung University of Education, the conference attracted more than 100 scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and the United States. This is the second time a PhD student supervised by Prof Cheung and Dr Sit has won a Best Paper Award at the conference. In the big data era, a new paradigm of secondary data analysis is urgently needed to handle the large quantity of questionnaire and test data collected in large-scale international studies of student assessment. Jin and her supervisors have recently developed this new research paradigm to analyse the international PISA data, and through in-depth analyses the quality and equity of the Chinese basic education system can be studied from international comparative education perspective.