Looking forward to PISA

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Tomorrow, the OECD will publish the 2015 PISA results. The world’s premier global metric for education will tell us which countries have the best school systems, based on the performance of 15-year-olds in science, mathematics and reading over a two-hour test. 

PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) was introduced in 2000 and held every three years since. The test is of skills, not knowledge: what you can do with what you know is what counts. But over time the emphasis has shifted. The focus today is whether students can think like a scientist, reason like a mathematician and distinguish between good and bad arguments in a written text. We live in an era of unimaginable technology breakthroughs, conflicting values and threatened political norms. Literacy, in all three of the foundational domains, is the key to making sense of the world and shaping it for the better - for everyone, not just elites.

The value of PISA lies in comparison. Countries look beyond their borders for evidence of effective policy and PISA provides a yardstick for evaluating success. It ranks the performance of countries on quality, equity and efficiency. And by picking out the characteristics of high-performing systems, it allows educators to identify successful policies and adapt them to local contexts.   

In the last PISA round, in 2012, the best performing countries were in Asia. Asian countries took the top five spots in both mathematics and reading and the top four in science (with Finland in fifth place). But behind the headlines lie important insights. In Estonia and Finland there were only small variations in student scores, showing that quality can go hand-in-hand with inclusion. In Canada, Macao and Hong Kong, socio-economic disadvantage among students had relatively less impact on individual performance: poverty is one thing, destiny quite another.  

So what will we learn from PISA 2015? For the first time in a decade, the report concentrates on science. Has science education improved? Around the world, have 15-year-olds got better at explaining phenomena scientifically, designing scientific enquiry and interpreting data scientifically? Is the gender gap in science education closing? Have poorer students caught up? And where countries have maintained high performance or improved from where they were, what were the factors? Where should the balance lie between additional investment, great teaching and coherent long-term leadership?

The global stakes are high, first because of growing demand for scientists in the workplace, second because every one of us needs a scientific perspective. The demand for scientists comes from the transformational impact of science and technology. Given the accelerating pace of invention and innovation, its vital that countries prepare more young talent for more jobs in hard science - and for many other jobs with a science dimension. The broader need for scientific literacy stems from the centrality of science to everyday decisions. Whether buying toothpaste, recycling household waste or attending a meeting on the local effects of global warming, we are all subject to science-based claims and counter-claims. Can we separate substance from spin, identify misrepresentations and assess levels of uncertainty and trustworthiness?  Post-truth politics is the neologism of the year and in some quarters expertise itself has become a dirty word. It is time to stand our ground – to insist on education as the key to civilised societies.

In many countries, educators are talking not only about skills but also values and attitudes. Singapore, Australia, Canada, Estonia and Finland – all of them among the top performing countries in previous PISA cycles - are rebuilding curricula around new forms of competence, such as critical and inventive thinking, global awareness and collaboration. They see values such as tolerance and respect as foundational. PISA too is developing rapidly. Next year we will publish the results of an additional 2015 assessment of collaborative problem solving, and we have advanced plans for assessing inter-cultural sensitivity in 2018. Creativity, entrepreneurship and ethical thinking are all under consideration for future cycles.

But with the seventy PISA countries and economies, the OECD believes that the bedrock of a good education should continue to lie in science, mathematics and reading. Literacy in all three offers prosperity, fulfilment and a chance to contribute to the well-being of others. Tomorrow, PISA 2015 will tell the world about its progress.  

PISA 2015 Global launch events

The OECD and Education Policy Institute will host a global launch event in London at the Institute of Directors with OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría and Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills.

The event will be live streamed from 09:45 – 12:20 GMT

This will be followed by on online public Q & A session starting at 2:00 GMT with Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills. Questions in advance of the session will be welcome, using the #OECDPISA hashtag on Twitter and via the OECD PISA Learning Community

Links:
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

PISA 2015 Results (Volume I): Excellence and Equity in Education

PISA 2015 Results (Volume II): Policies and Practices for Successful Schools

Photo credit: © OECD

The challenges of widening participation in PISA

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
Claudia Costin
Senior Director, Education Global Practice, World Bank

Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been measuring the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in over 70 countries. PISA does not just examine whether students have learned what they were taught, but also assesses whether students can creatively and critically use what they know.

Of course, such international comparisons are never easy and they aren’t perfect. But they show what is possible in education, they help governments to see themselves in comparison to the education opportunities and results delivered by other education systems, and they help governments to build effective policies and partnerships for improving learning outcomes.

But as the number of countries joining PISA kept rising, it became apparent that the design and implementation models for PISA needed to evolve to successfully cater to a larger and more diverse set of countries, including a growing number of middle-income and low-income countries who want to participate in the assessment.

In response to these challenges, the OECD and the World Bank just released a report titled The Experience of Middle-Income Countries Participating in PISA 2000-2015, which provides valuable lessons and insights based on the experiences of more than 40 PISA-participating countries. It establishes a strong rationale and foundation for enhancing PISA to make it more relevant to a wider range of countries. It also provides insights for the World Bank and other development partners on how to better support countries to participate in these exercises and to analyse and use the data in effective ways.

The report shows that while demand for participation in PISA among middle-income countries is increasing, these countries face both financial and technical obstacles to participating, including the need to translate and manage the assessment, and code student responses. The report also shows that the political, regulatory, and cultural environment of these countries can also affect whether, and how easily, the assessment can be conducted.

To maximize the benefits of participating in PISA, the report recommends that the OECD take five actions:

1. Adjust the PISA test instruments to better measure differences between the highest- and lowest-performing students and, in particular, distinguish performance differences at the lowest levels of proficiency;
2. Revise the contextual questionnaires so they are more relevant to low-income country contexts and policy issues;
3. Evaluate the impact of PISA participation on middle-income countries’ capacity to conduct international assessments; 
4. Tackle financial and technical challenges through partnerships with donors and through capacity building; and
5. Extend outreach to local stakeholders in these countries.

Action is already being taken on these recommendations through the PISA for Development initiative. This project is already working to enhance the PISA instruments and will undertake field trials in seven developing countries during 2016. The final results of PISA for Development, which are expected in 2018, will provide local policy makers with new evidence to diagnose shortcomings in their education systems and inform new policies. In the meantime, the PISA for Development countries will benefit from peer-to-peer exchanges with other members of the PISA global community. The enhanced PISA instruments will be made available to all countries for the 2021 cycle of the assessment.

The OECD remains committed to working with the World Bank and other partners in maintaining and developing PISA as a global yardstick for measuring success in education. This is especially relevant in the context of the recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals as PISA provides valuable information about the level and distribution of quality and equity within a country’s education system.

Together, we will continue to contribute our expertise and platforms to encourage international collaboration on education through the PISA surveys, and to assist policymakers and practitioners throughout the world to use them more productively. 

Links:

The Experience of Middle-Income Countries Participating in PISA 2000-2015
Network on Education Quality Monitoring in the Asia-Pacific

For more on PISA for Development, visit: www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/pisafordevelopment.htm
Related Working Papers:

• Towards the development of contextual questionnaires for the PISA for development study 
• PISA for Development Technical Strand C: Incorporating out-of-school 15-year-olds in the assessment
• PISA in Low and Middle Income Countries

Photo credit: © Istockphoto/Henk Badenhorst