Visualising education policy reforms and inequality indicators in Europe since 2000

G. Filandrianos${}^a$, M. Symeonaki${}^b$ and G. Stamou${}^a$

${}^a$National Technical University of Athens, ${}^b$Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
The increasing availability of large-scale comparative data on education systems creates new opportunities for analysing the relationship between policy reforms and educational assessment outcomes. However, these data are often dispersed across separate sources and presented independently, making it difficult for researchers and policymakers to explore potential connections between policy interventions and indicator trends. This paper presents the STRIDE interactive map, a visual analytics platform that integrates longitudinal education inequality indicators with a comprehensive database of education policy reforms across European countries. The map extends earlier indicator visualisation work on digital skills and attitudes towards ICT [3]. In the current study, education inequality indicators are estimated from raw microdata drawn from four large-scale international assessment surveys, i.e., PISA, ICILS, TIMSS, and PIRLS, and harmonised to produce comparable measures across countries and over time. Indicators are further disaggregated by key dimensions of inequality, including gender, socio-economic status, migration background, and school location [2]. In parallel, the platform incorporates a database of more than 430 education policy reforms implemented in European countries since the early 2000s [4, 1]. The platform is organised into two complementary visual environments: an indicators environment, presenting longitudinal trends in education indicators, and a reforms environment, providing an overview of policy activity across countries, years, education levels, evaluation status, coverage and reform types. The linkage between the two environments is implemented in the indicators interface, where policy reforms are visualised as temporally aligned events along indicator trends. Indicator pages display time-series data for a selected indicator for a specific country while simultaneously visualising reforms as typed events aligned with the temporal axis. Reforms are categorised by policy type and can be interactively explored through a details-on-demand interface providing contextual information about each reform. By combining interactive mapping, temporal indicator visualisation and policy event annotation, the platform enables exploratory analysis of links between policy interventions and educational inequalities.

Keywords: Visual analytics, Social Sciences, Application Motivated Visualisation, Cartography and Maps, Visual Representation Design

Funding This work was conducted in course of the STRIDE project (Strategies for Achieving Equity and Inclusion in Education, Training and Learning in Democratic Europe), which is co-funded by the European Union (GA 101132339) and UK Research and Innovation (GA 10108849).