Impacts of innovation school system in Korea: a latent space item response model with Neyman–Scott point process

Abstract South Korea’s educational system has faced criticism for its lack of focus on critical thinking and creativity, resulting in high levels of stress and anxiety among students. As part of the government’s effort to improve the educational system, the innovation school system was introduced in 2009, which aims to develop students’ creativity as well as their non-cognitive skills. To better understand the differences between innovation and regular school systems in South Korea, we propose a novel method that combines the latent space item response model with the Neyman–Scott point process model. Our method accounts for the heterogeneity of items and students, captures relationships between respondents and items, and identifies item and student clusters that can provide a comprehensive understanding of students’ behaviours/perceptions on non-cognitive outcomes. Our analysis reveals that students in the innovation school system show a higher sense of citizenship, while those in the regular school system tend to associate confidence in appearance with social ability. A comparison with exploratory item factor analysis highlights our method’s advantages in terms of uncertainty quantification of the clustering process and more detailed and nuanced clustering results. Our method is made available to an existing R package, lsirm12pl.