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EdSurge
Looking for Post-PISA Answers? Here’s What Our Obsession With Test Scores Overlooks
By Tony Wan
Dec 3, 2019
The latest PISA scores are out. And for those who have closely followed
the international test, which is delivered to 15-year-olds in developed
countries every three years, the top-line results won’t offer many
surprises.
East Asian countries led the pack when it comes to reading, math and
science, topped by China’s handpicked, wealthiest regions. Estonia and
Finland, whose education systems are often held in high esteem, also
placed high.
And the Americans? U.S. students placed in the middle of the pack,
scoring slightly above average on reading and science and a little
below in math. Compared to the previous test in 2015, the scores stayed
flat.
Stagnant scores breed plenty of hand-wringing and questions over the
value of efforts like Common Core and investments in education reform
and technology. There is just cause for concern: According to the
National Center for Education Statistics, which administered the PISA
test in the U.S., the bottom 10th percentile of students fell further
behind, and the gap between them and top performers widened.
In the latest edition, 600,000 students in 79 education systems across
the world took the two-hour PISA exam. In the U.S., that included 4,800
students from 215 schools. Detailed results are shared across six
volumes that are being published this year and next.
Where there are rankings, there is a natural tendency to compare,
contrast and compete. And to seek remedies. But Andreas Schelicher,
director of education and skills at the OECD—the Paris-based
organization behind PISA—cautions against knee jerk reactions. “The
temptation is always to look for a quick solution, to say, ‘Oh, that
seems to be working. Let’s just copy and paste it.’”
The latest results, he adds, offers an opportunity to “step back and
see how your local education system fares in a broader perspective—both
its strengths and weaknesses.” And it’s equally important to understand
how demographics and socioeconomic conditions unique to each country
make certain approaches more feasible to replicate than others.
To reinforce the importance of seeing the bigger picture, he adds:
“Often we understand our own language better by learning a foreign
language.” (Given how Americans are known to be monolingual, that’s
perhaps a telling, if unintended, metaphor for our stagnant
performance.)
Adopting the Right Mindset
While top-line performance results dominate headlines and headspace,
the report also provides additional insights into the nonacademic
factors that shape education and students’ wellbeing. And it’s these
findings that Schleicher says can be more helpful for policymakers and
reformers as they think about ways to improve.
For one, believing in a growth mindset, or the idea that intelligence
is not fixed, but rather malleable and can be improved with effort,
leads to improved outcomes, according to the 2018 results. In a summary
of the results, Schleicher wrote that “students who disagreed or
strongly disagreed with the statement ‘Your intelligence is something
about you that you can’t change very much’ scored 32 points higher in
reading than students who agreed or strongly agreed.”
Those results are similar to recent findings published by Carol Dweck,
a Stanford education professor who is often credited with making growth
mindset a mainstream concept. Ninth graders who took an online growth
mindset course reported higher grades that those who didn’t.
On the PISA 2018 exam, the countries where the most students disagreed
with that statement hail from Europe (led by Estonia, Denmark and
Germany), with the U.S. coming in 10th.
But on a country-level analysis, doing well at reading, math and
science doesn’t necessarily correlate with a belief in growth mindset.
The mainland Chinese regions, along with Hong Kong and Macau, fared in
the middle of the pack. “I don’t really have a good explanation for
that,” says Schleicher. “It’s something that we want to study further.”
In addition, he says there’s a “strong relationship between growth
mindset and resilience” and the data suggests it can boost motivation
and reduce fear of failure.
“Growth mindset is a very important thing that makes us active
learners, and makes us invest in our personal education,” Schleicher
states. “If learning isn’t based on effort and intelligence is
predetermined, why would anyone bother?”
The test also gauged students’ responses on other indicators that
reflect the quality of their school environment, including bullying,
sense of belonging and parental support. These subjective, often
intangible feelings also factor into academic wellbeing.
It’s “absolutely fascinating” to see the relationship between teachers’
enthusiasm, students’ social-emotional wellbeing and their learning
outcomes, Schleicher notes. As one example, he noted in his summary
report that “in most countries and economies, students scored higher in
reading when they perceived their teachers as more enthusiastic,
especially when they said their teachers were interested in the
subject.”
In other words, happy teachers lead to better results. That’s hardly a
surprising revelation, says Scheleicher. But professional development
support is one thing that can sometimes be overlooked by policymakers
when so much of the focus is on test scores.
“There is a tendency to reduce teaching to the delivery of instruction
and content,” he says. “We may have underestimated the bigger social
role that teachers play in creating the environments that also shape
learning outcomes.”
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