Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), log files

Objective: The PIAAC 2012 study was the first fully computer-based large scale assessment in education. During the assessment, user interactions were logged automatically. This means that most of the users’ actions within the assessment tool were recorded and stored with time stamps in separate files called log files. The log files contain paradata for each participant in the domains literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments. The availability of these log files offers new opportunities to researchers, for instance to reproduce test-taking behavior of individuals and to better understand test-taking behavior.

Method: PIAAC 2012 was conducted August 2011-November 2012 among a representative international sample of around 166000 adults within 24 different countries. The following dataset includes the log files from 17 countries. Each country was allowed to choose their own sampling technique as long as the technique applies full selection probability methods to select a representative sample from the PIAAC target population. The countries were able to oversample particular subgroups of the target population. Persons aged 55-65 and recent immigrants were oversampled in Denmark and persons aged 19-26 were oversampled in Poland. The administration of the background questionnaires was conducted face-to-face using computer assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). After the questionnaire, the respondent completed a computer-based or paper-based cognitive under the supervision of the interviewer in one or two of the following competence domains: literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments.

Variables: With the help of the PIAAC LogDataAnalyzer you can generate a data set. The Log Data Extraction software is a self-contained system that manages activities like data extraction, data cleaning, and visualization of OECD-PIAAC 2012 assessment log data files. It serves as a basis for data related analysis tasks using the tool itself or by exporting the cleaned data to external tools like statistics packages. You can generate the following Variables: Number of Using Cancel Button, Number of Using Help Menu, Time on Task, Time Till the First Interaction, Final Response, Number of Switching Environment, Sequence of Switching Environment, Number of Highlight Events, Time Since Last Answer Interaction, Number of Created Emails, Sequence of Viewed Emails, Number of Different Email Views, Number of Revisited Emails, Number of Email Views, Sequence of Visited Webpages, Time-Sequence of Spent Time on Webpages, Number of Different Page Visits, Number of Page Visits, Number of Page Revisits.