If you read or listen to news reports about education you've probably noticed periodical surge of interest in wich country students do best in
readings or mathematics or science and where your country fits into the grand scheme of things
you have probably also heard, or read the word PISA, in connection with some of these reports. What
is PISA? PISA is an achronym that stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It's
the brain child of the OECD, and what's the OECD? It's another achronym that stands for the Organization
for the economic cooperation and development. The OECD brings toghether 34 countries, with the aim of developing
better policies for better lives. In the late 1990's countries that are members of the OECD came up with
the idea to measure whether fifteen years olds around the world are well prepared to participate in society.
We choose fifteen years olds rather than twelve or seventeen year olds because most fifteen years old are about
to complete their compulsory education. Experts in the fields of education from around the world worked
toghether to create a two hour test, that focuses on core subjects like reading mathematics and science.
Participating countries deciced to administer this test every three years and to rotate the main focus
of the test among the core subjects. All very well, but testing students is nothing new, so what's so
special about PISA? PISA surveys are design to find out whethet students can use what they have learned
in school, and apply that knowledge to real live situations and problems. PISA is less interested in
knowing whether students can repeat like parrots what they have been thaught in class. Rather the survey
is designed to find out whether, for example, students can use their reading skills they have learned
in schools, to make sense of the information they find in a book, a newspaper, on a government form,
or in an instruction manual, but the point of PISA is not to tell each individual student how well he
or she has mastered the set of skills. Instead, PISA results are extrapolated and analysed to the national
level. Picture one student sitting at a desk, in a classroom somewhere, taking the PISa test, now zoom
out as though you are on a space shuttle, and you can see the entire country in wich that student is
sitting. That's what PISA does with its test results, PISA shows countries where they stand, in relation
to other countries, and just by themself, in how effectively they educate their children. What PISA doesn't
say: this education policy or practice causes that effect, it shows what's possible, and show similarities
and differences between education systems around the world. That helps governments rethink their own
policies and design new ones to improve their student performance in school. It also helps government
educators, and parents track their country's progress towards a more succesful education system. In fact
many countries now set national goals, and benchmarks based on PISA international results. Pisa considers
and education system succesful not only if its students achieve high scores on the PISA surveys, but
also if all students, from all backgrounds perform well on the test. Not just those who come from
wealthier, or more intellectual, or more culturally sophisticated families. For example a relatively
large percentage of disadvantaged students in places like Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea, and Finland achieve
some of the highest scores in PISA. Analysts there look at the PISA test results along with responses
to questionnaires that are given to students and school principals, and try to determine the main characteristics
of these succesful education systems. Are teachers in the system paid more? Are classes generally larger
or smaller? Do individual schools get to decide what their teachers teach? Or is their curriculum determined
by a central government authority? Once a profile of a of a succesful system emerges, it can be used
as a model for others. So what's the test like? Here are a couple of problems that students have to solve.
The first one was part of the reading assessment. Students were shown a graph and an accompanying text.
that read: figure one shows changing levels of Lake Chad, in Saharan Nord Africa. Lake Chad disappeared completely in about 20000 B.C. during the last ice age. In about 11000 B.C. it
reappeared. Today its level is about the same as it was in A.D. 1000. Students whare asked why has the
author chosen to start the graph at this point. This was considered a rather difficult question. In fact,
across OECD countries, only 37% of students answered it correctly. Those students showed ana ability
not only to read, but to think about what they read, and draw some conclusion from it. They figured out,
that the reason the graph starts at around 11000 B.C. is because that's when Lake Chad reappeard after
having disappeared completely, during the ice age. The second problem was part of the mathematics assessment,
it sets the scene. In a pizza restaurant you can get a basic pizza, with two toppings: cheese and tomato.
You can also make up your own pizza with extra toppings, you can choose from four different extra toppings.
Olives, ham ,mushrooms and salami. Ross wants to order a pizza with two different extra toppings. Students
where then asked: how many different combination can Ross choose from? Now this is a problem we can all
relate to. To answer the question students had to show their ability to make connections. In this case
juggling several food stuff and realize that the choices are not, in fact, infinite, much as the students
might like them to be. This was also a relatively tought problem for students to solve. Just 49% of students
could calculate that only six different variation where possible. So when we take individuals score in
PISA and the responses to those questionnaires that we circulate with the test and then zoom out to see
a whole country, what kinds of things do we learn. Well, one thing we've learned is girls do better in reading
than boys in every country that participates in PISA, and among the countries that are members of the OECD
girls do so much better than boys in reading, it's as if they have gone through an additional year of
school. We also find out that boys generally do better than girls in mathematics, and that there is no
real difference between boys and girls in how they do in science. We also found out that some school
policies may not be very good for students. For example, early tracking of students, wich means deciding that
some students should go through an academic program, while others should go through a vocational program
is not associated with better overall performance, tracking is also related to greater inequalities
between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Students are often tracked in the mistaken believe that
not everyone can learn the same things, that only some children are gifted and reach for the stars, but
PISA results show that if given the opportunity and support to excel, all children have the potential
to do so. Having students repeat grades is also not associated with high scores in PISA. School system
that invest in helping strudents learn their subjects the first time around do much better than those
where teachers know that they can ,if necessary drill the same material, year after year, after year
into the heads of the same struggling students. As we mentioned before the most successful schools according to
PISA are the ones whose students do well regardless of where they come from. Still results from PISA
show that home background has a major influence on student success in school. In many ways this finding
is all too obvious. We know for example that by the time they are three, children in advantaged families
are exposed to many more word than their less advantaged peers. In fact, a recent study in USA put their
number at around thirty million more words, and in general if there are no books at home, or if their
children don't see their parents reading they'll be less inclined to read themself. Pisa results alo
show that regardless of their own background, student who attend schools that have a largely disadvantaged
population tend to do worse than students who attend schools with relatively advantaged peers. Why would
this be so? Well, there are many possible reasons, for example PISA found that in most OECD countries
disadvantaged students have access to the same number of teachers and to sometimes even more teachers than their more advantaged peers.
The problem though is that more isn't necessarily better. In fact, the best teachers are often found in
schools attended by advantaged students who generally do well on their subjects anyway, but not in disadvataged
schools where high quality teachers are most desperately needed. Governments around the world can be inspired
by two significant finding from PISA. The first is that a country doesn't have to be wealthy to provide
high quality education to its students. Shanghai and Poland , for example, score well above the OECD average inreading,
but rank below OECD average in measures of national wealth, and the countries PISA ranking is not carved in
stone. Trends in PISA have revealed a great capacity for all countries to improve. Countries as diverse
as Chile, Germany, Poland and Portugal among others, showed improvements in student reading performance
between 2000 and 2009, although it seems obvious, it's still worth reminding ourselves. Successful education
systems make education a priority, they share the belief that skills can be learned and that all students
can achieve at high levels. They show that they value the teacheing profession by investing in it, so
that they can attract highly qualified candidates, train them well and retain the best teachers among
them. Just as every student has the potential to achieve, every country has the potential to raise the
standards of their education, so PISA is about a lot more than test scores. Sure countries that participate
in the PISA survey are keen to know where their students rank compared to students in other countries.
but PISA's ultimate aim is not to create a competition for its own sake, its aim it's to encourage
all participating countries to use the survey findings to improve their own teaching and student performance.
To give their students the best opportunities to achieve the best possible results.