| Programme for International Student Assessment | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | PISA |
| Formation | 1997 |
| Purpose/focus | Comparison of education attainment across the world |
| Headquarters | OECD Headquarters |
| Location | 2 rue André Pascal, 75775 Paris Cedex 16 |
| Region served | World |
| Membership | 59 government education departments |
| Head of the Indicators and Analysis Division | Andreas Schleicher |
| Main organ | PISA Governing Body (Chair - Lorna Bertrand, England) |
| Parent organization | OECD |
| Website | PISA |
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide evaluation in OECD member countries (currently there are 65 member nations) of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance, performed first in 2000 and repeated every three years. It is coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with a view to improving educational policies and outcomes. Another similar study is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, which focuses on mathematics and science but not reading.
Contents |
PISA stands in a tradition of international school studies, undertaken since the late 1950s by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). Much of PISA's methodology follows the example of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS, started in 1995), which in turn was much influenced by the U.S. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The reading component of PISA is inspired by the IEA's Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).
PISA aims at testing literacy in three competence fields: reading, mathematics, science.
The PISA mathematics literacy test asks students to apply their mathematical knowledge to solve problems set in various real-world contexts. To solve the problems students must activate a number of mathematical competencies as well as a broad range of mathematical content knowledge. TIMSS, on the other hand, measures more traditional classroom content such as an understanding of fractions and decimals and the relationship between them (curriculum attainment). PISA claims to measure education's application to real-life problems and life-long learning (workforce knowledge).
In the reading test, "OECD/PISA does not measure the extent to which 15-year-old students are fluent readers or how competent they are at word recognition tasks or spelling". Instead, they should be able to "construct, extend and reflect on the meaning of what they have read across a wide range of continuous and non-continuous texts"[1]
| Programme for International Student Assessment (2009)[2] (Top 10; OECD members as of the time of the study in boldface) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maths | Sciences | Reading | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Developed from 1997, the first PISA assessment was carried out in 2000. The results of each period of assessment take about one year and half to be analysed. First results were published in November 2001. The release of raw data and the publication of technical report and data handbook took only place in spring 2002. The triennial repeats follow a similar schedule; the process of seeing through a single PISA cycle, start-to-finish, always takes over four years.
Every period of assessment focusses on one of the three competence fields reading, math, science; but the two others are tested as well. After nine years, a full cycle is completed: after 2000, reading is again the main domain in 2009.
| Period | Main focus | # OECD countries | # other countries | # students | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000 | Reading | 28 | 4 | 265,000 | The Netherlands disqualified from data analysis. 11 additional non-OECD countries took the test in 2002 |
| 2003 | Mathematics | 30 | 11 | 275,000 | UK disqualified from data analysis. Also included test in problem solving. |
| 2006 | Science | 30 | 27 | ||
| 2009 | Reading | 34 | 33? | Results made available on 7 December 2010 [3] |
PISA is sponsored, governed, and coordinated by the OECD. The test design, implementation, and data analysis is delegated to an international consortium of research and educational institutions led by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). ACER leads in developing and implementing sampling procedures and assisting with monitoring sampling outcomes across these countries. The assessment instruments fundamental to PISA's Reading, Mathematics, Science, Problem-solving, Computer-based testing, background and contextual questionnaires are similarly constructed and refined by ACER. ACER also develops purpose-built software to assist in sampling and data capture, and analyses all data. The source code of the data analysis software is not made public.
The students tested by PISA are aged between 15 years and 3 months and 16 years and 2 months at the beginning of the assessment period. The school year pupils are in is not taken into consideration. Only students at school are tested, not home-schoolers. In PISA 2006 , however, several countries also used a grade-based sample of students. This made it possible also to study how age and school year interact.
To fulfill OECD requirements, each country must draw a sample of at least 5,000 students. In small countries like Iceland and Luxembourg, where there are less than 5,000 students per year, an entire age cohort is tested. Some countries used much larger samples than required to allow comparisons between regions.
Each student takes a two-hour handwritten test. Part of the test is multiple-choice and part involves fuller answers. In total there are six and a half hours of assessment material, but each student is not tested on all the parts. Following the cognitive test, participating students spend nearly one more hour answering a questionnaire on their background including learning habits, motivation and family. School directors also fill in a questionnaire describing school demographics, funding etc.
In selected countries, PISA started also experimentation with computer adaptive testing.
Countries are allowed to combine PISA with complementary national tests.
Germany does this in a very extensive way: on the day following the international test, students take a national test called PISA-E (E=Ergänzung=complement). Test items of PISA-E are closer to TIMSS than to PISA. While only about 5,000 German students participate in both the international and the national test, another 45,000 take only the latter. This large sample is needed to allow an analysis by federal states. Following a clash about the interpretation of 2006 results, the OECD warned Germany that it might withdraw the right to use the "PISA" label for national tests.[4]
From the beginning, PISA has been designed with one particular method of data analysis in mind. Since students work on different test booklets, raw scores must be scaled to allow meaningful comparisons. This scaling is done using the Rasch model of item response theory (IRT). According to IRT, it is not possible to assess the competence of students who solved none or all of the test items. This problem is circumvented by imposing a Gaussian prior probability distribution of competences.[5]
One and the same scale is used to express item difficulties and student competences. The scaling procedure is tuned such that the a posteriori distribution of student competences, with equal weight given to all OECD countries, has mean 500 and standard deviation 100.
All PISA results are broken down by countries. Public attention concentrates on just one outcome: achievement mean values by countries. These data are regularly published in form of "league tables".
The following table gives the mean achievements of OECD member countries in the principal testing domain of each period:[6]
In the official reports, country rankings are communicated in a more elaborate form: not as lists, but as cross tables, indicating for each pair of countries whether or not mean score differences are statistically significant (unlikely to be due to random fluctuations in student sampling or in item functioning). In favorable cases, a difference of 9 points is sufficient to be considered significant.
In some popular media, test results from all three literacy domains have been consolidated in an overall country ranking. Such meta-analysis is not endorsed by the OECD. The official reports only contain domain-specific country scores. In part of the official reports, however, scores from a period's principal testing domain are used as proxy for overall student ability.[7]
Top results for the main areas of investigation of PISA, in 2000, 2003 and 2006.
| 2000[8] | 2003 | 2006 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reading literacy | Mathematics | Science | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
| Programme for International Student Assessment (2006) (OECD member countries in boldface) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maths | Sciences | Reading | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top 10 countries for Pisa 2006 results in Math, Sciences and Reading.
| Programme for International Student Assessment (2009)[1] (OECD members as of the time of the study in boldface) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maths | Sciences | Reading | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Top 30 countries for Pisa 2009 results in Maths, Sciences and Reading. For a complete list, see reference.
The correlation between PISA 2003 and TIMSS 2003 grade 8 country means is 0.84 in mathematics, 0.95 in science. The values go down to 0.66 and 0.79 if the two worst performing developing countries are excluded. Correlations between different scales and studies are around 0.80. The high correlations between different scales and studies indicate common causes of country differences (e.g. educational quality, culture, wealth or genes) or a homogenous underlying factor of cognitive competence. Western countries perform slightly better in PISA; Eastern European and Asian countries in TIMSS. Content balance and years of schooling explain most of the variation.[2]
An evaluation of the 2003 results showed that countries that spent more on education did not necessarily do better. Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand and the Netherlands spent less but did relatively well, whereas the United States spent much more but was below the OECD average. The Czech Republic, in the top ten, spent only one third as much per student as the United States did, for example, but the USA came 24th out of 29 countries compared.
Another point made in the evaluation was that students with higher-earning parents are better-educated and tend to achieve higher results. This was true in all the countries tested, although more obvious in certain countries, such as Germany.
It has been suggested that the Finnish language plays an important part in Finland's PISA success.[3]
International testing, including both PISA and TIMSS, has been a central part of many recent analyses of how cognitive skills relate to economic outcomes. These studies consider both individual earnings and aggregate growth differences of nations.[4]
In 2010, the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results revealed that Shanghai students scored the highest in the world in every category (Math, Reading and Science). The OECD described Shanghai as a pioneer of educational reform, noting that "there has been a sea change in pedagogy". OECD point out that they "abandoned their focus on educating a small elite, and instead worked to construct a more inclusive system. They also significantly increased teacher pay and training, reducing the emphasis on rote learning and focusing classroom activities on problem solving."[5]
For many countries, the first PISA results were surprising; in Germany and the United States, for example, the comparatively low scores brought on heated debate about how the school system should be changed. Some headlines in national newspapers, for example, were:
The results from PISA 2003 and PISA 2006 were featured in the 2010 documentary Waiting for "Superman".[6]
PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS, their organizers and researchers, are restrained in giving reasons for the large and stable country differences. Cautiously they leave this task to other researchers, especially from the economic sciences and psychology. Economic researchers studied single educational policy factors like central exams (John Bishop),[7] private schools or streaming between schools at later age (Hanushek/Woessman).[8] An extensive literature related to cross-countries difference in scores has developed since 2000.[9]
The stable, good results of Finland have attracted a lot of attention. According to Hannu Simola[10] the results are not due to attributes of the educational system, but are due to disciplined students, the respected status of teachers (attracting good students to the teaching profession), high quality of teachers due to professional teacher education, conservative direct instruction ("teaching ex cathedra", "pedagogical conservatism"), low rates of immigration, fast diagnosis of learning problems and treatment of them including special schools, and the culture of a small border country (as in Singapore and Taiwan) feeling that the people could survive only with effort. Others have suggested that Finland's low poverty rate is a reason for its success.[11][12]
Systematic analyses across different paradigms (culture, genes, wealth, educational policies) for 78 countries were presented by Heiner Rindermann and Stephen Ceci[13]: They report positive relationships between student ability and educational levels of adults, amount and rate of preschool education, discipline, quantity of institutionalized education, attendance at additional schools, early tracking and the use of central exams and tests. Rather negative relationships were found with high repetition rates, late school enrollment and large class sizes. In their opinion the results suggest that international differences in cognitive competence could be narrowed by reforms in educational policy.
Critics, such as Mel Riddile say that low performance in the United States is closely related to American poverty, but the same reasoning applies to other countries.[11][12] Riddile also shown that when adjusted for poverty, the richest areas in the US, especially areas with less than 10% poverty can perform an average PISA score of 551 (higher than any other country).[12] In essence, the criticism isn't so much directly against the Programme for International Student Assessment itself, but against people who use PISA data uncritically to justify measures such as Charter schools.[14]
The table below summarizes the scores of American schools by their poverty rates and compares them to countries with similar poverty rates.[12]
| Country | Poverty Rate | PISA score |
|---|---|---|
| United States | < 10% | 551 |
| Finland | 3.4% | 536 |
| Netherlands | 9.0% | 508 |
| Belgium | 6.7% | 506 |
| Switzerland | 6.8% | 501 |
| United States | 10%–24.9% | 527 |
| Canada | 13.6% | 524 |
| New Zealand | 16.3% | 521 |
| Japan | 14.3% | 520 |
| Australia | 11.6% | 515 |
| United States | 25–49.9% | 502 |
| Estonia | 501 | |
| Poland | 14.5% | 500 |
| United States | 50–74.9% | 471 |
| Austria | 13.3% | 471 |
| Turkey | 464 | |
| Chile | 449 | |
| United States | > 75% | 446 |
| Mexico | 425 | |
| NASSP |
Given the wide variation in performance of students in different states within the United States, several comparisons have been made by calibrating international assessments to assessments in the United States. The U.S. has regularly tested students in mathematics and reading for individual states since the early 1990s in its National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Two studies have linked the performance in individual states to national scores on PISA. In the first, comparisons were made between those scoring at the advanced level in mathematics and reading according to NAEP with the corresponding performance on PISA for the "High School Class of 2009."[15] Overall, 30 nations did better than the U.S. in producing students at the advanced level of mathematics. Six percent of U.S. students were advanced in mathematics compared to 28 percent in Taiwan. Perhaps more significantly, the highest ranked state in the U.S. (Massachusetts) was just seventeenth in the world rankings. In the second, U.S. students in the "Class of 2011" who were proficient on the NAEP in mathematics (32 percent) ranked thirty-second among the nations participating in PISA.[16] Massachusetts was again the best U.S. state, but it ranked just ninth in the world.
Comparisons with results for the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) appear to give different results -- suggesting that the U.S. states actually do better in world rankings.[17] The difference in apparent rankings is, however, almost entirely accounted for by the sampling of countries. PISA includes all of the OECD countries, while TIMSS is much more weighted in its sampling toward developing countries.
Education professor Yong Zhao has said the high scores in China are due to an excessive workload and testing, and added that it's "no news that the Chinese education system is excellent in preparing outstanding test takers, just like other education systems within the Confucian cultural circle—Singapore, Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong."[18] Zhao also noted that most major Chinese media outlets did not pay much attention to this story.[18] Others have criticized Shanghai as an outlier among China, while most of the country has a lower quality of education.[12] According to Chinese state-media, Xinhua News Agency's report, there are 18.9 million students enrolled in four-year higher education institutions (non-vocational, etc.) in 2007, making the figure roughly 2% of the total Chinese population.[19]
Some educators in Mexico have taken issue with the methods in which the PISA was performed in Mexico. Municipalities in Mexico with the highest educational performance rankings, Monterrey, Queretaro, Guadalajara, Merida, Puebla and Mexico City were excluded from partaking in the PISA test as local PISA officials concluded that the quality of education in these municipalities were substantially higher than the national average or that of rural municipalities throughout the country and that it would skew the overall test results. Critics of this decision have repeatedly raised the point that these 6 municipalities should be included into the PISA testing circuit as they combined make up a full 30% of the Mexican population and these few municipalities are the driving educational, economic and social forces of Mexico.
Criticism has ensued in Luxembourg, which scored quite low, over the method used in its PISA test. Although being a trilingual country (Luxembourgish, French and German), in 2000 the test was not allowed to be done in Luxembourgish, the mother tongue of the majority of students (77%).
According to OECD's PISA, the average Portuguese 15-years old student was for many years underrated and underachieving in terms of reading literacy, mathematics and science knowledge in the OECD, nearly tied with the Italian and just above those from countries like Greece, Turkey and Mexico. However, since 2010, PISA results for Portuguese students improved dramatically. The Portuguese Ministry of Education announced a 2010 report published by its office for educational evaluation GAVE (Gabinete de Avaliação do Ministério da Educação) which criticized the results of PISA 2009 report and claimed that the average Portuguese teenage student had profund handicaps in terms of expression, communication and logic, as well as a low performance when asked to solve problems. They also claimed that those fallacies are not exclusive of Portugal but indeed occur in other countries due to the way PISA was designed.[20]
|
||||||||||||||||||||