Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth, 2015 cohort (Version 9.0)

In 2015 a nationally representative sample of about 14,500 15 year-old students was selected to participate in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). This group of young people became the sixth cohort of the LSAY program (LSAY Y15). As part of PISA, assessments in mathematical literacy, reading literacy and scientific literacy were administered to schools to provide information on student achievement. Students also completed a background questionnaire about themselves, their families, their views on a range of science-related issues, the environment, educational and vocational expectations, attitudes to school and learning, attitudes towards information and communications technology, and their habits and life in and outside of school. In 2016, members of the Y15 cohort were contacted for the first of their annual LSAY interviews. The questionnaire for their 2016 interviews included questions about their activities during the last 12 months, school, post-school study, engagement in education, career aspirations and decision-making, employment, job satisfaction, job search experiences, income, soft skills, personality, and wellbeing. From 2016, respondents were given the option to complete their interviews by telephone or online. Response rates for the 2016 interviews were lower than expected due to a high rate of missing or unusable contact details provided at the time of PISA. To address this, recruitment of a top-up sample of Year 12 students was conducted in 2017 to ensure that future waves of the survey remain representative of the 15-year-old population in 2015. See Notes (in the Social Science and Humanities section of Metadata) for version details about this dataset.