Today’s the day

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

The latest results from PISA are released today. Before you look to see how well your country performed on the triennial test of 15-year-olds students around the world, consider this: only 20 short years ago, there was no such thing as a blog. If it weren’t for science and technology, not only would you not be reading this right now, but there wouldn’t be the device on which you’re reading it – or countless other gadgets, medicines, fibres, tools… that have become all but indispensable in our lives.

Obviously, we don’t all have to be scientists to live in the 21st century. But an understanding of some basic principles of science – like the importance of experiments in building a body of scientific knowledge – is essential if we want to make informed decisions about the most pressing issues of our time (or even if we just want to choose the “healthiest” option for lunch).

PISA 2015 focused on students’ performance in and attitudes towards science. More than half a million 15-year-olds (representing around 29 million students) in 72 countries and economies sat the test. Today is the day we find out whether students around the world can take what they have learned in school and use it to solve problems they might encounter in “real” life.

What do the results tell us? For an easily digestible summary of the findings and their implications, see this month’s special edition of PISA in Focus or watch the video above. (And if you’re not sure you really understand how PISA works, or what influence it might have over education policy, check out these animations: How does PISA work? and How does PISA help shape education reform?) But if you want to dig deeper, the first two volumes of the PISA 2015 Results (Volume I, Volume II), published today, present all of the results, and examine how student performance is associated with family background, the learning environment in school, and the policy choices governments make. (And we have science and technology to thank for enabling you to sample any or all of these by just tapping your finger.)

So tap into the world’s most comprehensive set of data on learning. You’ll probably learn something, too.

Links:
PISA 2015 Results (Volume I): Excellence and Equity in Education
PISA 2015 Results (Volume II): Policies and Practices for Successful Schools
PISA 2015 Results in Focus
PISA 2015 Résultats à la loupe
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)

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

New insights on teaching strategies

by Pablo Fraser
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Education’s purpose is to prepare children for a fast-moving, ever-changing world. Teaching faces the additional challenge of classrooms becoming increasingly more culturally diverse. Now, more than ever, this requires an adaptation of current teaching strategies.

The recent OECD working paper Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data seeks to be a contribution to this debate, by providing information about the teachings strategies used by mathematics teachers in eight countries.

What is the TALIS-PISA link database?

In TALIS 2013, participating countries and economies had the option of applying TALIS questionnaires to a PISA 2012 subsample with the purpose of linking data on schools, teachers and students. We call this option the "TALIS-PISA Link" database. The TALIS-PISA Link provides us with valuable information about teaching strategies and their relationship with the characteristics of the school, the classroom and student's outcomes. A better understanding of these relationships can help teachers, schools, education policy makers to design more effective policies with the aim of improving the learning achievements of all students.

What are the most common used strategies used by teachers?

The analysis of the data showed that teaching practices can be classified in three groups:

• Active learning strategies, which consist of promoting the engagement of students in their own learning. They typically include practices such as group work, use of information and communication technology, or student self-assessment.
• Cognitive activation, which consists of practices capable of challenging students in order to motivate them and stimulate higher-order skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving and decision making.
• Teacher-directed instruction, which encompasses practices based on lecturing and rely to a great extent on a teacher’s ability to deliver orderly and clear lessons.

It would be inappropriate, however, to favour one form of strategy over another, since all of them contribute towards student learning – depending on the student’s skills and the context. For example, data has shown that students exposed to teacher-directed strategies are slightly more likely to respond to the less complex items in the PISA mathematics evaluation, while cognitive activation strategies seem to be moderately related to solving more complex maths items. However, these associations appear to be tenuous and further explorations on the association of these strategies with student learning are needed.

The results of the report showed that teacher-directed practices and cognitive activation practices are the strategies more often reported. Three out of four teachers reported presenting “a summary of recently learned content” (teacher-directed practice) or that they “go over homework problems that students were not able to solve” (cognitive activation practices). However, only around one-third of teachers reported engaging frequently in active learning strategies. Indeed, the frequency in which active learning practices are used seems to be particularly low for mathematics teachers. The lack of engagement in these strategies may indicate that the necessary support and policies that would allow teachers to develop these strategies are not in place.

What are the policies and the support that could foster the use of active learning strategies?

The working paper evaluated the association of active learning with a myriad of factors located at the school, the classroom and the teacher levels. One of the most interesting results is that in all the eight participating countries, teacher self-efficacy showed as being positively associated with the implementation of active learning practices: the more the teacher feels confident in his or her ability to provide quality instruction, the more likely he or she will be to engage in active learning strategies. Indeed, teachers must feel confident in their abilities in order to implement relevant teaching strategies.

Also, when teachers dialogue, support and exchange materials with their colleagues, they are more likely to engage in active learning practices. Teachers should not work as isolated agents, but rather to engage in professional networks and in collaboration with colleagues.

What education policies can best support teachers’ self-efficacy?

Results from TALIS 2013 have shown that the level of self-efficacy among teachers in a country is highly correlated with teachers’ participation rates in professional development. The more teachers participate in training activities, the more confident they feel about their ability to teach, and the more they use active learning strategies. If professional development is not available at the school, school leaders could try to foster other types of initiatives, such as mentoring programmes.

What can schools do to promote collaboration among their teachers?

School leaders can provide opportunities for fostering relationships among their staff in school by giving them a physical space where teachers can meet, or allowing time away from administrative work for teachers to meet and develop a relationship with their colleagues.

Teachers everywhere are committed to helping their students achieve the best they are capable of. The OECD, through the study of the TALIS-PISA Link data, seeks to provide guidelines on how to support them. The study findings can inspire teachers and school leaders to co-operate using a wider palette of techniques to meet the needs of students with varying abilities, motivation and interests. The insights provided here can also inspire education policy makers to design teaching policies that could foster the implementation of innovative teaching strategies.

Links:
OECD Education Working Paper No. 148: Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data
OECD Education Working Paper No. 130: How teachers teach and students learn: Successful strategies for school
OECD Education Working Paper No. 115: Examining school context and its influence on teachers: linking TALIS 2013 with PISA 2012 student data
Teaching strategies for instructional quality: Insights from the TALIS-PISA Link data brochure
Asia Society (2016), Teaching and leadership for the twenty-first century: The 2016 International Summit on the Teaching Profession
TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning
A Teachers’ Guide to TALIS 2013: Teaching and Learning International Survey
Ten Questions for Mathematics Teachers ... and how PISA can help answer them
Icon credit: teacher by Hadi Davodpour, CC0 1.0, table source: OECD.

Complex mathematics isn’t for everyone (but maybe it should be)

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Put a complicated algebraic equation or geometry problem in front of a 15-year-old student (or, for that matter, just about anyone) and you can almost see the brain at work: I. Can’t. Do.This.

Most of us have found ourselves in this situation at one point or another. But many students, particularly students from disadvantaged backgrounds, have never seen these kinds of mathematics problems; their teachers have decided they’re not up to the challenge.  Some might call these students “lucky”; but this month’s PISA in Focus argues otherwise.

Results from PISA 2012 show that while weaker students report higher anxiety when confronted with complex mathematics problems, if their teachers work with them individually, without “dumbing down” the mathematics lesson, these students tend to develop more positive beliefs in their own abilities to solve mathematics problems.

PISA 2012 finds that, on average across OECD countries, about 70% of students attend schools where teachers believe that it is best to adapt academic standards to students’ capacities and needs. Teachers in disadvantaged schools are more likely than those in advantaged schools to agree that the content of instruction should be adapted to what students can do. In Germany, for example, 51% of principals of disadvantaged schools reported that teachers are willing to adapt their standards, while only 13% of principals of advantaged schools reported so.

Most of these teachers choose to adapt their instruction to their students’ abilities because they want to be sure that all students can follow the lessons. But differentiating course content, based on students’ abilities, could deny low achievers access to the same learning opportunities that their higher-achieving peers enjoy. And that, in turn, could lead to the same kind of segregation of low-performing students that is the usual result of early tracking or grade repetition.

The best way to avoid this outcome is to offer struggling students individual support so that they can “catch up” with the rest of the class – and gain some self-confidence along the way. If teachers believe that some differentiation is necessary, they can opt to use teaching methods that do not segregate weak students further, such as making students work in groups that are frequently reconfigured on the basis of students’ needs and progress.

We may not all be born mathematicians, but we all need to learn how to work hard and persevere to achieve our goals – whether those are solving difficult equations or writing a novel or repairing a car engine. We all need to be challenged – and we all, from time to time, need guidance and support from teachers who can help us meet those challenges.

Links:
PISA in Focus No. 65: Should all students be taught complex mathematics? by Mario Piacentini
Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All
Find out more about PISA:oecd.org/edu/pisa
Photo credit:  Male teacher writing various high school maths and science formula on whiteboard@Shutterstock

Understanding how the brain processes maths learning

by Francesca Gottschalk
Consultant, Directorate for Education and Skills, OECD

Numbers are universal and constantly confronting us in daily life. In fact, they are so omnipresent that most of us perform basic mathematical calculations every single day without even realising it – when we glance at the clock, count change for a morning coffee, or even when we check the calendar to plan the weeks ahead.

It is, therefore, no surprise that student performance in maths is not only a key indicator for potential academic achievement, but also of future employability and overall participation in our “knowledge economy” society. Without the ability to make sense of the numbers that surround us, one would be completely lost in our modern world (even with a smartphone in hand!).

The question of how we actually learn maths and whether everyone has the ability to do so is thus a crucial one and should be of interest to parents, teachers and policy-makers alike. A new Education Working Paper entitled “The Neuroscience of Mathematical Cognition and Learning” explores the development of numerical cognition and explains that numeracy is actually an innate skill, inherent in humans from birth and further enhanced through formal education. Research indicates that babies as young as one day old are able to judge whether different quantities of objects are equal or not, and by the age of six months, infants often have the ability to discriminate up to three or four objects. It is then through schooling that children learn basic numerical principles –  for example addition and subtraction tables – and the more their ability to process these becomes automatic, the more they are able to devote brain resources (such as attention and working memory) to more complex numerical tasks.

Another way in which we can see the development of innate numeracy skills is through language, as language and maths learning go hand in hand. In literate cultures, number symbols and counting are integral for learning more complicated maths functions that go beyond approximation and simple counting. Illiterate cultures have also developed various trading and counting systems, allowing them to quantify objects and carry out basic maths operations. French researcher Pierre Pica, who spent time examining Amazonian groups, reported that although these groups are illiterate and cannot count, they still exhibit basic trading and approximation systems (illustrated through their daily transactions). This suggests the universality of basic maths systems in the human brain and the importance of the development in tandem of advanced maths and literacy skills. In order to effectively perform arithmetic operations and subsequently learn more complex functions, we need to have culturally transmissible and understood number symbols, which presuppose literacy within a population.

If our numerical abilities are innate, and literacy rates across OECD countries are relatively high, why then are there so many people who struggle with maths? The answer lies in the complexity of learning more advanced maths, which involves many regions of the brain. While it may seem that learning addition and subtraction tables should be a breeze for many students, when we start looking at the complicated processes involved in these different systems, we can understand that disruptions in these pathways can have huge impacts on learning abilities. We can see these effects, for example, in students with developmental dyscalculia (DD) or maths anxiety. In DD, it is thought that there is a deficient level of connectivity between various brain regions, whereas maths anxiety involves a number of cognitive processes such as emotion regulation and attitudinal factors that can hinder maths performance and learning. For example, results to questions about anxiety towards mathematics in the 2012 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that students in low-performing countries tended to report higher levels of anxiety towards maths in comparison to countries scoring above the OECD average.

What does this mean for the teaching of maths in schools? This paper highlights the fact that there are neither “good” nor “bad” math learners. While there is the potential for students to suffer from various missteps in the maths path, the innate ability for humans to understand numbers and gain numerical skills shows promise even for those students who struggle to grasp basic mathematical concepts, and this is encouraging. For example, the new PISA report, “Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All”, illustrates how the use of innovative teaching methods can foster students’ motivation to overcome barriers in maths learning. If teachers and policy-makers better understand how maths learning occurs in the brain, we can start to uncover and implement new strategies to assist students in need, helping them keep their maths path as clear as possible.

Links:
Working paper No. 136: The Neuroscience of Mathematical Cognition and Learning, by Chung Yen Looi, Jacqueline Thompson, Beatrix Krause, and Roi Cohen Kadosh
Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science
Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All
Photo credit: Book shelf in form of head on formulas backgrounds @Shutterstock

Making all students count

by Chiara Monticone
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills
Mario Piacentini
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Films about mathematicians have become incredibly popular: many of us now know about John Nash’s beautiful mind. Fewer people have heard the extraordinary story of Srinivasa Ramanujan, a genius of comparable stature to Nash. Ramanujan was nothing more than a promising 16-year-old student from a poor family in South India when he came across A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics, a compilation of thousands of mathematical results used by English students. Starting from the textbook, Ramanujan taught himself mathematics. After failing to get into university in India, he sent a letter to one of the great scholars of that time, Godfrey Harold Hardy, who noticed his talent and invited him to Cambridge.  Hardy quickly understood that, in spite of his amazing feats in mathematics, Ramanujan lacked the basic tools of the trade of a mathematician. If he was to fulfil his potential, he had to acquire a solid foundation in mathematics. The Cambridge mathematician worked tirelessly with the Indian genius to harness his creativity to the then-current understanding of the field without destroying his confidence. One good textbook and one outstanding teacher changed the fate of a man and the evolution of number theory and analysis.

There are poor students like Ramanujan who show that achieving great results in their education and professional life is possible. But “possible” is not sufficient: education and social policy should make poor students’ success “probable”. This month’s PISA in Focus and a new OECD report, Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All show that millions of students around the world – especially those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds – often have few opportunities to develop their mathematics skills.

Many students who participated in PISA 2012 reported that they have hardly been exposed to fundamental concepts in mathematics, like arithmetic means or linear equations, which form the basis of the numeracy skills that they will need to thrive as adults. Disadvantaged students are even less exposed to these concepts. For example, the share of advantaged students who reported that they know well or have often heard the concept of quadratic function is 20 percentage points larger, on average across OECD countries, than the share of disadvantaged students who reported so; and the difference between these two groups of students is larger than 30 percentage points in Australia, Austria, Belgium, France, New Zealand, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and Uruguay. The relationship between the content covered during mathematics class and the socio-economic profile of students and schools is stronger in countries that track students early into different study programmes, that have larger percentages of students in selective schools, and that transfer less-able students to other schools.

Exposure to formal mathematics tasks and concepts (involving equations or functions, for example) has an impact on performance, particularly on the most challenging PISA tasks; and differences in familiarity with mathematics are strongly related to the performance gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students.  On average across OECD countries, differences in familiarity with mathematics account for about 19% of the performance difference between these two groups of students. In Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, Korea, Portugal, Switzerland, Thailand and the United States, more than 25% of the performance difference between advantaged and disadvantaged students is related to familiarity with mathematics. The report shows that exposure to applied mathematics tasks (like working out from a train timetable how long it would take to get from one place to another) has a weaker association with performance in PISA, but can stimulate engagement with mathematics and boost self-confidence, particularly among low-achieving students.
 
Widening students’ opportunities to learn mathematics is not an impossible task, but it may require certain readjustments, from reforming the structure of the education system to improving curriculum focus and coherence, and sharing teaching practices that use time more effectively. For example, Finland, Germany, Poland and Sweden have reformed their school tracking systems to reduce the impact of socio-economic status on students’ access to mathematics and achievement. At the school level, some charter schools in the United States have shown that longer instruction time, individualised support to students, strict behaviour norms, a strong work ethic among students and high expectations for all students can improve the achievement of students in low-performing, disadvantaged schools. Teachers need to be supported in using pedagogies, such as flexible grouping of students or co-operative learning, that increase learning opportunities for all students in mixed-ability classes.

In the end, disadvantaged students’ success in mathematics should become a common tale, not a hyped, romantic screenplay for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Links:
Equations and Inequalities: Making Mathematics Accessible to All
PISA in Focus No. 63: Are disadvantaged students given equal opportunities to learn mathematics? Chiara Monticone and Mario Piacentini
PISA à la Loupe No. 63: Les élèves défavorisés bénéficient-ils des mêmes possibilités d’apprentissage en mathématiques? (French version)
Getting beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City
Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Students and Schools

No gain without (some) pain

by Bonaventura Francesco Pacileo
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills

When Tim Duncan, captain of the the US National Basketball Association’s San Antonio Spurs, was spotted wearing a T-shirt saying “4 out of 3 people struggle with math”, everyone realised that he was counting himself among those who have a hard time with fractions, making the joke even funnier. What is less funny, though, is that PISA 2012 results show that more than one in four 15-year-old students in OECD countries are only able to solve mathematics problems where all relevant information is obvious and the solutions follow immediately from the given stimuli.

As a professional basketball player, Tim Duncan would probably agree that hard work is a prerequisite for attaining individual goals. Working hard is also important in education. According to this month’s PISA in Focus and the recently published report Low-performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How to Help Them Succeed, most low-performing students share a common trait: they lack perseverance.

In most PISA-participating countries and economies, when students are asked to solve problems requiring some effort, low-performing students are more likely to report that they give up easily. Across OECD countries, 32% of low-performing students reported that they give up easily when confronted with a difficult mathematics problem compared to only 13% of top performers. Differences between the two groups are largest in Jordan, Portugal, Qatar, the Slovak Republic and the United Arab Emirates. This might lead us to conclude that these struggling students are largely responsible for their own academic failures, since they have ultimate control over how much effort they invest in their schoolwork.

But evidence from PISA tells another narrative: low-performing students may be less engaged at school because they believe their efforts do not pay off. This disengagement is obvious when students are asked about the returns to their efforts. While 81% of top performers agreed that they feel “prepared for mathematics exams”, only 56% of low performers agreed with that statement. Low-performing students seem to quit studying when they see their work as an unproductive and unprofitable waste of time. But at the same time, low-performing students often engage in activities that require numeracy skills. Perhaps surprisingly, they are actually more likely to play chess or to be members of a mathematics club.

The good news is that these kinds of activities may be exactly what could help low-performing students develop better study habits. PISA finds that interest in mathematics is greater among students who do mathematics as an extracurricular activity compared to students who do not, and this positive association is stronger among low-performing students. These additional learning opportunities, which could help students gain self-confidence and find enjoyment in mathematics, could be exploited to narrow performance gaps among students.

As Tim Duncan would put it, students need a proper training court where they can learn how to become champions.

Links:

PISA in Focus No. 62: Are low performers missing learning opportunities? by Alfonso Echazarra

PISA á la loupe No. 62: Les élèves peu performants manquent-ils de possibilités d’apprentissage?

Low-Performing Students: Why They Fall Behind and How to Help Them Succeed

PISA 2012 Results

Photo credit: Net Ball just before hitting the rim of the hoop @Shutterstock

How much time is spent on maths and science in primary education?

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Compulsory instruction time per subject in primary education, in hours per school day (2015)

Primary school is a fundamental stage in children’s education. Yet it is often neglected in education research and policy debates, somehow squeezed between the seemingly more important stages of early childhood education and secondary education. The purpose of primary education is to build a solid foundation on which an entire life of learning can thrive. Cognitive processes such as working memory, attention, self-regulation, as well as character traits, communication skills, motivation and meta-learning attitudes grow enormously during the first years at school. And the primary school curriculum lays out the basic constituents of human knowledge by introducing students to its core disciplines.

Historically, the relative importance of the core subjects in primary school has always been a contentious issue. Many social interests and political opinions converge in the decision-making process, often resulting in an overcrowded curriculum prioritising expected social outcomes over children’s education needs and potential. A sound primary school curriculum should have sufficient “air” and flexibility to provide the space for children’s autonomous learning, for playful learning and for self-directed discovery of the world. Still, the relative weight of some of the core subjects in the curriculum is worth serious consideration.

The new Education Indicators in Focus brief presents the instruction time given to each of the main subjects in primary school across OECD countries in 2015. On average, primary school students receive 4.3 hours of instruction time per day. But as shown in the chart above, the differences across OECD countries are huge. More than one quarter of that time, 1.1 hours, on average, is spent on reading, writing and literature in the language used at school, ranging from almost two hours in France to .6 hours in Poland. France also devotes a relatively large amount of time to language instruction: no less than 37% of total instruction time.

Of course, language instruction is core to primary education. Reading and writing are foundation skills that are conventionally learned in the first years of primary school. Language instruction also supports wider cognitive development as well as social and communication skills.

But what about mathematics? And natural sciences? In most OECD countries, apart from some basic arithmetic, maths and science only made their way into the curriculum after the second industrial revolution. Curriculum reforms of the 1920s and 1930s provided space for maths and science education, often combined with new pedagogical approaches inspired by the child-centred pedagogy and the emerging field of cognitive psychology. In the second half of the 20th century it became generally accepted that basic mathematical understanding, or numeracy, and a basic knowledge of the natural world were as important foundation skills, to be mastered by every child, as literacy.

In 2015 on average across OECD countries, maths counted for 45 minutes of instruction time per day in primary education, and natural science for another 20 minutes. In relative terms, this translates to 17% of time devoted to maths and 8% devoted to science. So, on average primary schools across OECD countries spent approximately the same amount of instruction time on maths and science combined as on language. Thus, the core subjects of language, maths and science account for half of the total instruction time in primary education.

Yet, again, the differences among countries are huge. Korea and Poland provide less than half an hour per day of mathematics, while France, Mexico and Portugal devote more than one hour per day to maths at the primary level. The instruction time spent on maths and science outweighs that for language instruction by more than 25% in Chile, Portugal and Poland, while it counts for 25% or less time than for language instruction in Hungary, the Slovak Republic and Turkey.

Will the third and fourth industrial revolutions shake up the primary school curriculum again, leading to an increase in the time available for maths and science education? Contemporary concerns about STEM education have provoked new interest in the policy discussion on primary school curricula and the relative importance given to maths and science. To equip all students with the basic mathematical and scientific knowledge and understanding, sufficient time should be made available in the curriculum. Of course, time is only one of the variables in curriculum design. Even with all the time in the world, an uninspiring curriculum taught with bad pedagogies will yield poor results. And a badly designed curriculum that puts students under a lot of stress could reinforce maths anxiety and will dissuade students from pursuing maths education later on. Maths and science curricula need to be challenging, pedagogies need to focus on active learning and engagement, and children need sufficient time to understand the basics of maths and science. 

Links:
How is learning time organised in primary and secondary education? Education Indicators in Focus, issue No. 38, by Eric Charbonnier
Les indicateurs de l'éducation à la loupe, issue No. 38 (French version)
Photo credit: © OECD

What students don’t want to be when they grow up

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Education and Skills Directorate

Who wants to be a teacher? As this month’s PISA in Focus shows, in many countries the teaching profession is having a hard time making itself an attractive career choice – particularly among boys and among the highest-performing students.

PISA 2006 asked students from the 60 participating countries and economies what occupation they expected to be working in when they are 30 years old. Some 44% of 15-year-olds in OECD countries reported that they expect to work in high-status occupations that generally require a university degree; but only 5% of those students reported that they expect to work as teachers, one of those professional careers.

The numbers are even more revealing when considering the profile of the students who reported that they expect to work as teachers. If you read our report on gender equality in education published earlier this year, you may remember that girls tend to favour “nurturance-oriented” careers more than boys do – and teaching is one of those careers. In almost every OECD country, more girls (6%) than boys (3%) reported that they expect to work as teachers. This statistic is particularly worrying when you recall that the majority of overall low achievers in school are boys, who could benefit from the presence of more male role models at school.

PISA in Focus also reveals that the highest-performing students in reading and mathematics do not necessarily aim to become teachers. For example, in Argentina, Australia, Israel, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal and Turkey, students who aspire to become teachers score significantly lower in reading and mathematics than students who expect to work in professions other than teaching.

While PISA can’t follow these students into adulthood, the Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) gathers information on the literacy, numeracy and problem-solving skills of adults. The 2012 survey found that, in many countries, teachers have poorer literacy and, in particular, poorer numeracy skills than individuals who work in other professions. In Japan, however, not only do teachers have the highest numeracy skills among teachers working in all other countries that participated in the survey, they are also as proficient in numeracy as Japanese adults who work in other professions.

But maybe in this instance, as in so many others, it would be wise to “follow the money”. According to Education at a Glance, teachers earn significantly less, on average, than similar educated workers in other fields earn. For example, lower secondary teachers earn 86% and upper secondary teachers earn 91% of what tertiary-educated full-time workers in other fields earn. Which is not to say that students are only concerned about the size of their prospective bank accounts; in fact, many 15-year-olds probably don’t know how much their teachers earn. But pay is often a reflection of how socially valued different jobs are. Adolescents might be more inclined to aspire to become teachers if they see that their own teachers are highly valued members of society.

Links:

PISA in Focus No. 58 Who want to become a teacher? Francesca Borgonovi and Seong Won Han

PISA á la loupe No. 58 Qui veut devenir enseignant? (French version)
PISA in Focus No. 58 underlying data

Education at a Glance 2015: OECD Indicators 

The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence

Photo credit: Question mark on green blackboard / chalkboard. Nice chalk and texture @Shutterstock