Teacher Qualification Deficits and Mathematics Achievement in Uzbekistan: Multilevel Evidence from PISA 2022

Uzbekistan took part in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for the first time in 2022, achieving a mean mathematics score of 364 points against an OECD average of 472, with 81% of fifteen-year-old students failing to meet the minimum proficiency benchmark. Despite this result, no prior study has examined the school- and student level determinants of mathematics performance in Uzbekistan using analytically appropriate approaches for hierarchically structured large-scale assessment data. To address this gap, the study draws on the PISA 2022 Uzbekistan dataset (n = 7,293 students; 202 schools) and employs a four-model econometric sequence. The analysis proceeds through: an unconditional two-level HLM for variance decomposition; an OLS baseline with Fay’s Balanced Repeated Replication variance estimation; a full two-level HLM with student- and school -level predictors; and simultaneous quantile regression across five quantiles. To account for measurement uncertainty, all models were estimated across ten plausible values and combined following Rubin’s (1987) rule for multiply imputed data. Four key findings emerge from the analysis: (a) the intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.181 revealed that a meaningful share of the variation in mathematics performance lies between schools rather than within them, warranting the use of multilevel modelling; (b) at the student level, mathematics self-efficacy, sense of belonging, gender, teacher support, socioeconomic status, and disciplinary climate all showed significant associations with mathematics performance; (c) at the school level, inadequately qualified teaching staff was the only variable that held a consistent and significant negative association with performance across all ten plausible values (β = −10.17, p < 0.05); and (d) a rural subsample analysis revealed that this penalty was 3.4 times larger in rural schools (β = −20.37) than in urban schools (β = −5.93), indicating that where students have little access to learning support outside the classroom, the cost of poor teacher quality is far harder to absorb. For Uzbekistan and other transitional education systems, the findings make a case for directing teacher qualification reform where the need – and the cost of inaction- is greatest: rural and undeserved schools.