PISA testing is something of a political football. It is used as justification or provocation by various invested interest groups. I always find it curious how easy it is for politicians to make *changes* in education - we are a pretty easy football to be kicked. I prefer to look at PISA as a means of improvement of our practice as teachers and the culture of learning as leaders. It acts as a snapshot of a cohort of students (PISA aims exclusively at 15 year olds). PISA looks at only at the 34 OECD countries.
The nice thing about PISA is that it's not solely interested in content (although the test against curriculum). The assessment is also about how students use that knowledge.
The key areas that are looked at in the PISA testing is Maths, Reading, Science, Problem Solving and recently they've added Financial Literacy. An area that is often over looked in the PISA testing is that each individual student (slightly over half a million students world wide are tested) over the two hours of testing the first part is a survey on their attitude towards school. Fairly similar idea done in our NZ asTTle testing. The PISA report makes note of the correlation to the student attitude and their overall success. Here is my summary of the correlations...
- Having parents that encourage and push is important. How do we at Waihi College engender this? What things can we do to improve this?
- students that enjoy being at school do much better. How do we create or add to this environment? What ways do we identify those students not enjoying Waihi College? FYI in the PISA report 91% of kiwi students reported as being happy at school - what would that be like here at Waihi College?
- Belonging was a key - PISA measure this by asking if they're late to school or have missed classes [the results were 1/3 are late and 1/4 missed a class]. Do we follow up our lateness or missed lessons? Who should be doing this? Statistically late students score 27% less and those that miss lessons score 37% lower.
- The better the relationship with teacher the higher the scores.
- Boys are likely to associate difficulty in assessments on external factors and girls are more likely to associate difficulty intrinsically. Do we create self management/responsibility in our boys? Do we offer enough support for our girls?
Further information on this can be found at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdfYou can actual try some of the actual 2012 PISA tests online at http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/
This post relates to RTC #2. demonstrate commitment to promoting the well-being of all ākonga and RTC # 11. analyse and appropriately use assessment information, which has been gathered formally and informally
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