When I learned that the latest PISA (Program on International Student Assessment had been released, I attended a webinar, where I learned once again that the scores of U.S. 15-year-old students were somewhat below the international average. The PISA tests in math, reading, and science have been offered since 2000, sponsored by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
My takeaway from the webinar was that we should try to be more like Singapore and Macau.
I have studied the results of international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS for years. Eventually, I began to wonder what the connection was—if any—between the test scores of 15-year-old students and the economic productivity of their nation 10, 15, 20 years later. We’ve been bemoaning our scores since the first international tests were given in the 1960s, even as our economy soars way beyond the nations with higher scores on the tests.
I invited Yong Zhao to share his reaction to the latest PISA scores. His response was as brilliant as I anticipated.
Yong Zhao is one our most accomplished scholars of education. Born in China to an impoverished family, he pursued his dreams, migrated to the United States, and has made his mark as a creative and innovative thinker. He is currently a Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas and holds an appointment as Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne. His list of honors and publications is too long for me to recite here. But you can find it online.
Yong Zhao wrote:
It doesn’t make sense: Why Is the US Still Taking the PISA?
I have always wondered what America has got from participating the PISA every three years. Since 2000, the U.S. has been taking part in this nonsensical global academic horse race. Every time it took the test, American students stood at about the middle of the global league table. Every time the results were released, American media would point out how American students are not the best, but East Asian education systems such as China, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are the best. And then U.S. authorities would invite PISA and other pundits to tell us how to improve American education.
The same story has been going on for more than two decades, but American education has not improved, at least according to the PISA scores. According to the most recent results (NCES, 2023), American students did much worse in math in 2022 than in 2003, with an 18-point decline from 483 to 465. Their reading and science scores, however, remained about the same without significant change over the past two decades. Although PISA experts largely blame the COVID pandemic as the reason for the decline in math, it does not make much sense because there is no decline in reading and science. Did COVID-19 only affect math, not science and reading? Of course, one can try to argue that reading and science are much less sensitive to COVID, but why?
Basically, the international standing of the US and the test scores of its students have not changed much. Whatever the PISA data revealed and/or the lessons from other countries such as China, Japan, Singapore, or Finland have not helped improve America’s PISA scores. By the way, Finland, the country Americans view with the best education system because of its early stunning PISA performance, has seen a much more dramatic decline in its PISA scores: from 544 to 484—a 60-point decline in math, from 546 to 490—a 56-point decline in reading, and from 563 to 511—a 52-point decline over the past two decades. Not sure if America still views Finland as the best education country, but its scores have dropped to almost the same point as American students.
In fact, other than Finland, the PISA league tables have not changed much either. East Asian education systems have consistently remained the top performers and the OECD countries’ average scores have been dropping. If PISA had any impact on the world’s education quality and equity, education should not be the same as 20 years ago.
PISA does not really have much to offer to anyone, except those who benefit from the test itself—the consultants, the test makers, the data processors, and possibly some education politicians.
In a review article (Zhao, 2020), I summarized the research about PISA and found: 1) PISA markets itself as an assessment of abilities needed in the 21st Century, but it is the same as other international tests such as TIMSS, 2) PISA ignores the overall educational purposes of different countries by primarily assessing math, reading, and science, 3) PISA’s tests are not of high quality with numerous theoretical and technical problems, and 4) PISA’s sampling has been manipulated in different countries. My conclusion is that instead of bringing positive changes to the world, PISA wreaked havoc.
America has never excelled in international tests since the beginning of such assessment in the 1960s, but the low scores have not seemed to affect it much. In fact, a correlational analysis done in 2007 showed a negative correlation between international test scores and economic development (Baker, 2007). That is, countries with higher scores in the first international study did worse than countries with lower scores. If PISA or any other international tests truly measure what matters in education, America should no longer be a developed country. On the contrary, East Asian countries have always scored well in international assessments, but their economic development has been more related to economic, political, and international orders than their test scores.
What matters to economic development and prosperity is perhaps the non-cognitive factors that PISA does not typically emphasize. For example, in an analysis, I found that PISA scores are negatively correlated with entrepreneurship confidence across countries (Zhao, 2012b). American students, despite their lower scores, have always had more confidence than their peers in other countries. In fact, confidence has been found to have negative correlations with test scores (Zhao, 2012b, 2014, 2018b). High score education systems, except Finland, have always had a negative impact on students’ social and emotional wellbeing (Zhao, 2012a). Even PISA’s own data show that PISA scores are negatively correlated with life satisfaction of students (OECD, 2019).
Many education systems participate in PISA because they are fooled by its claim to measure global competitiveness. Somehow these educational systems are convinced that their PISA scores and rankings mean how competitive they are globally. But this is not true and cannot be true. In 2022, over 80 education systems took part in the PISA but these systems are hugely different. For example, the U.S. has three hundred million people and does not really have an education system (it has over 50 education systems based on the number of states and over 12,000 systems if we treat each school district as a system). How can it be compared with Macao, China, a tiny place with about 688,000 people and one education system? Likewise, how can the U.S., with a per capita GDP of over $70,000 be compared with Albania, whose per capita GDP is about $6,000.
Moreover, PISA has been operational for over 20 years. The first cohort of 15-year-old students took the test in 2000. If PISA truly has predictive power, it should have produced a longitudinal study to show how these students do in society. They are about 39 years old today. But we haven’t seen any such report except the wild guesses made by some scholars (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2010).
If PISA offers nothing, why does the U.S. spend the money and effort to join the game? For monitoring of basic education conditions, it already has the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) or the national report card, which has been in existence since 1969. Why continue to participate in PISA?
Frankly, it’s inexplicable, for there is truly no reason the U.S. should continue to participate in PISA, let alone to pretend to learn from high performing countries. The lessons PISA offered have not been productive. For example, the lesson that high performing systems (e.g., Singapore, South Korea, and Finland) recruit high performing high school graduates to be teachers (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) is not based on real evidence and does not really produce better education outcomes (Gronqvist & Vlachos, 2008). The lesson that high performing systems have clear definitions of learning expectations, a good structure of different stages, and tough measures to ensure that students have met the expectations (Tucker, 2011) is intended largely to copy East Asian education systems; but, ironically, the East Asian countries have been working very hard to change these practices (Zhao, 2014). International learning may make sense sometimes, but there are great limitations (Zhao, 2018a). American education should focus on developing its own way to improve education instead of trying to catch up with others (Zhao, 2009).
This is not to say that American education is perfect. Rather, it is to say the way forward is not to look at what others have been doing. The U.S. needs to solve its own problems and work on creating a better future. With the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, the world has changed again. If ChatGPT had taken the 2022 PISA, it is highly likely that it would outscore all the students in the world. It would be the best education system accordingly. Today, many students use AI tools to do their schoolwork, and teachers use AI in their teaching. PISA has become even more irrelevant.
Since 2000, our scores on PISA have barely changed. While there’s much chatter about learning from other systems, it has not happened. There is no reason that the U.S. should continue its participation in PISA.
References:
Baker, K. (2007). Are International Tests Worth Anything? Phi Delta Kappan, 89(2), 101-104.
Barber, M., & Mourshed, M. (2007). How the World’s Best-Performing School Systems Come out on Top. Retrieved from New York: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/how-the-worlds-best-performing-school-systems-come-out-on-top
Gronqvist, E., & Vlachos, J. (2008). One size fits all? The effects of teacher cognitive and non-cognitive abilities on student achievement. Retrieved from Stockholm, Sweden: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1311222
Hanushek, E. A., & Woessmann, L. (2010). The High Cost of Low Educational Performance: The Long-run Economic Impact of Improving PISA Outcomes. Retrieved from Paris: http://books.google.com/books?id=k7AGPo0NvfYC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=hanushek+pisa+gdp&source=bl&ots=2gCfzF-f1_&sig=wwe0XLL5EblVWK9e7RJfb5MyhIU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MLPCUqaOD8-JogS6v4C4Bw&ved=0CGcQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=hanushek%20pisa%20gdp&f=false
NCES. (2023). Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/index.asp
OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 Results (Volume III): What School Life Means for Students’ Lives. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/acd78851-en.
Tucker, M. (Ed.) (2011). Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems. Boston: Harvard Education Press.
Zhao, Y. (2009). Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Zhao, Y. (2012a, December 11). Numbers Can Lie: What TIMSS and PISA Truly Tell Us, if Anything? Retrieved from http://zhaolearning.com/2012/12/11/numbers-can-lie-what-timss-and-pisa-truly-tell-us-if-anything/
Zhao, Y. (2012b). World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Zhao, Y. (2014). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Zhao, Y. (2018a). Shifting the Education Paradigm: Why International Borrowing Is No Longer Sufficient for Improving Education in China. ECNU Review of Education, 1(1), 76-106.
Zhao, Y. (2018b). What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Zhao, Y. (2020). Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA. Journal of Educational Change, 1-22. doi:10.1007/s10833-019-09367-x
I suspect that American students, knowing that the test does not affect them in the slightest, don’t much bother with it. At the same time, I suspect that a lot of students from East Asian countries feel compelled to apply themselves because they have grown up in cultures that are more rule-following.
I agree, Bob. Students in East Asia learn from an early age that their future depends on their test scores. American students ask, “Does it count?” When they find out that it doesn’t count, they don’t care.
While developing an IB elementary school, I interacted a great deal with Chinese Educators while we introduced Mandarin as our second language. Those educators kept asking why we were trying to use Chinese test heavy practices while they understood that their key to improvement was to follow our entrepreneurial approach. Our cultural advantage of providing opportunity for individuals has been lost to a focus on compliance and conformity.
I suspect that the reason the U.S. participates in and amplifies the results of the sinking, leaning tower of PISA babel is that the powers that be want the complacent compliance of East Asian students, rising workers, in the U.S. Billionaires don’t want innovation; they already have their monopolies and want cheap labor without unions.
2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing Opening Ceremonies: Remember the drums? The take here was that China is more powerful and better than the U.S. Uh, not really.
2010: D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee fires 241 educators and repeatedly shouts to high heaven that her daughters “suck” at soccer, then calls herself a Tiger Mom. Arne Duncan calls “white, suburban moms” stupid. President Obama fails in grand fashion to close HB-1 visa loopholes. Teaching Mandarin becomes a fad that hasn’t yet ended. The zeitgeist: China is totally awesome! The U.S. totally stinks!
Seems to me the triennial PISA always becomes a race to the bottom against East Asian countries. Never Finland.
yes
Then this should be refuted at higher levels of STEM training – however it is not. At present America is totally indebted to foreign talent. Apparently that talent is soon heading home home:https://www.openculture.com/2016/08/michio-kaku-on-why-immigrants-are-americas-secret-weapon.html
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20221/figure/5
I do agree, however, that immigrants are our secret weapon.
You have a good point, Allison. Part of this is attributable, I suspect, to the fact that K-12 schools have been focusing to an enormous extent on the Reading and Math standards because of the federal testing mandate. So, History and Science are getting short shrift.
I agree with Yong Zhao: Yin Zhen Zhi Ke: Drinking Poison to Quench Thirst
Yong Zhao in Conversation: Education Should Liberate, Not Indoctrinate
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-yong-zhao-in-conversation-education-should-liberate-not-indoctrinate/2012/05
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a version of insanity, and our current education policies reflect many wrong turns in education. Has dissatisfaction with PISA scores resulted in increased funding in public schools? No! Instead, the current trend is to divert more funds from underfunded schools and privatize them despite the fact that there is zero evidence this shift will improve education. Even more insane is the current voucher madness that further harms the public schools most students attend while wasting funds underwriting the education of affluent young people.
Covid is not causing our destructive education policies. The influence of Big Money from billionaires and corporations dictates our education madness with policies that undermine instead of improve public schools, particularly in red states. Standardized testing does not improve education. Programs that directly serve the needs of students do.
Three decades of the “standards movement” has not resulted in any evidence of meaningful improvement in student progress. We have all the data that tells us this was a mistake and we need to move on.
Interesting, isn’t it, Paul, that the data-mongers ignore this data.
It’s all about confirming that bias that some want to prove they are better than others and deserve the spoils.
Paul,
You reminded me of the new introduction to the book “Rise of the Meritocracy,” where the author warns that standardized tests are meant to give the privileged the belief that their success is due to their superiority, not to their luck in being born into good circumstances
When I visited China, I went to the museum in Nanjing about the east that was given for over a thousand years to identify the brightest citizen based on Confucian definitions of intelligence. That test did nothing for the nation or its people while the various dynasties brutally ruled over the people. It’s obvious that the justification for our tests is to show educations frailties so that it is abandoned along with our citizenry.
Captain! Captain! There’s a hole in the hull. We’re taking on water fast. Maybe some of the guys should stop polishing the bright work and go down and fix it.
Listen, when I told you I was going to maintain order RIGOROUSLY, I meant it. Tell the men to carry on as commanded.
But the hole, Captain!
My data show that the brass fixtures have only 70 percent of their possible shine. This is a 2 percent decline from last month. Probably Covid related. Tell the men that I insist on accountability.
But Sir!
But me no buts.
As so many superintendents turn…
pabonner– a depressing truth. Reflects ed policy driven by deep-pocket donors/ lobbyists, as opposed to govtl institutions dedicated to public goods such as public education.
My answer has always been: we must publicize bigly what it costs the taxpayer to support our wrong-headed, corrupt ed policies! The little guy– John Q Public– regardless of the megaphoned MAGAs– WILL respond if he is shown what these asinine policies take out of his pocket every year in property & state taxes.
On the failure of so-called reform, “We should call it a day and move on.” If logic was on our side, this would be true. Test and punish feed privatization as do the manufactured crises. Privatization is not driven by logic, it is driven by politics, special interests and money.
retired teacher– I rarely read posts through WordPress, where it is easy to “like” a post. This means I rarely respond to your posts because I always agree with them! Please consider your posts “Liked” by this reader henceforth!
SAME
“If PISA or any other international tests truly measure what matters in education. . . .”
No educational measures anything. Yes, it’s that simple.
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
Supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
C’mon test supporters, have at the analysis, poke holes in it, tell me where I’m wrong! I’m expecting that I’ll still be hearing the crickets and cicadas of tinnitus instead of reading any rebuttal or refutation.
Some intellectual attainments are easy to measure. Others are difficult. But it is false that measurement IN GENERAL cannot be done. That’s just silly.
I agree with Duane. The reason why grades are more accurate predictors of “success” than any test scores is that grades take into account sustained effort. You and I have agreed many times, Bob, that test scores do not measure content knowledge, especially in English classes. So, they are skills tests, essentially IQ tests. They only measure ability. Any study of the history of intelligence tests will reach the conclusion that they are bunk. Measuring intelligence is like measuring love. Some things cannot be measured.
Along those lines, I deeply fear efforts to destroy the Carnegie Unit. It will be the end of education.
Wrong again on this Bob, just dead wrong.
Explain to me how it is impossible to measure whether a child has learned his or her times table from 0 x 0 to 12 x 12.
Even though people do REPEATEDLY (that is, reliably) and ACCURATELY (that is validly) do that ALL THE FREAKING TIME. ROFL.
That is an assessment, judgement, evaluation but is not a true measurement. You confuse the terms “taking measure of something” which means to assess, evaluate and/or judge whether someone has learned something with actual measurement which involves using a standardized measuring device calibrated against an agreed upon standard. . . of which standardized tests, any test of what a student learns, lacks. There is no measuring device.
You manage to see through a lot of the educational jargon but have not in the case of measuring. The longer you believe the con the harder it is to break away (paraphrasing Sagan). You believe in the psychometric con and cannot give it up. Sad, but true.
Duane, what you and Mr. Wilson have claimed goes FAR BEYOND simply saying that people should be using the term assessment instead of the term measurement. Wilson makes the bizarre claim that we cannot ascertain intellectual accomplishment on the part of other people. That’s just hooey.
And I agree with Wilson that “we cannot ascertain intellectual accomplishment on the par of other people. Only fools believe that we can. What is hoody is believing that one can know what is in someone else’s mind.
What does “on the par of other people” mean?
Good ol typo. Par should be part
Ah. Thanks. I should have caught that.
Name one standardized test that merely attempts to measure whether a child has learned his or her times table from 0 x 0 to 12 x 12.
Wilson’s claim goes far, far beyond standardized tests, lct. The claim is that no measurement of any intellectual attainment is ever possible. That’s ludicrous.
Yong Zhao said, “Since 2000, our (United States) scores on PISA have barely changed.”
Something else hasn’t changed. I scanned the post but didn’t see this factor mentioned. Still, I may have missed it.
“When ranking child income poverty rates across 34 OECD nations from lowest to highest, the United States, with one of the highest rates of child poverty, ranks 31st .”
Standardized test scores are a great way to determine how many children live in poverty in those countries and the United States is near the bottom there.
In addition, a 2013 study out of Stanford discovered this about the US and PISA test. And I think that hasn’t changed.
“Socioeconomic inequality among U.S. students skews international comparisons of test scores, finds a new report released today by the Stanford Graduate School of Education and the Economic Policy Institute. When differences in countries’ social class compositions are adequately taken into account, the performance of U.S. students in relation to students in other countries improves markedly.” …
“There is an achievement gap between more and less disadvantaged students in every country; surprisingly, that gap is smaller in the United States than in similar post-industrial countries, and not much larger than in the very highest scoring countries.” …
https://ed.stanford.edu/news/poor-ranking-international-tests-misleading-about-us-performance-new-report-finds
If the US cares so much about test scores, it should propose raising wages as scores tend to improve when families have more money to provide healthcare and good nutrition for children. Blaming public schools is not the answer, and certainly defunding them is counterproductive.
Gee, thanks for this report, Lloyd, added it to my faves. It struck a couple of chords with me:
Somebody did a study of 2009 US PISA scores: they divided the enrollment of PISA-taking schools into <10% child poverty, 10%-25% child poverty, 25%-50%, & over 50%– then lined them up opposite countries scoring similarly to the school groups, along with those countries’ % child poverty. This appeared in the Wikipedia PISA article under “PISA scores by poverty” for some years (then disappeared).
Predictably, the <10% child poverty group of schools scored among the top-5-ranked countries, the >50% down with Chile & various African countries, and the betweens proportionally distributed. The most interesting thing about results: US consistently scored about 3% higher than their opposite # [e.g., Japan at 14% child poverty with US school group at 17% child poverty]– even tho the parallel country often did not even test SpEd students, & we included ESL students (not a factor for many parallel countries).
A large meta-study was released summer ’22 by the publishing arm of the [very conservative] Hoover Institute. [Google “Education Next A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide”]. They examine the period 1971-2017 based on millions of all kinds of test scores. Many positive findings. Improvement in math scores indicate kids are graduating these days with about 4 more yrs of math content than 50 yrs ago. Advances in reading scores are more pronounced for blacks & hispanics than for white kids. Students from low-SES backgrounds are advancing more swiftly than higher-SES in elem & middle schools.
This is one of those important posts for which I wish I had time during the workday on the three hours behind Left Coast to participate in the active discussion while it happened instead of waiting until I got home to throw together some thoughts while making dinner for the evening and lunch for the following day. This is an important subject.
LCT, your response is always timely
Yes, there are problems with standardized tests, especially when misused as they often are in our dispersed educational enterprise [it surely is not a “system”]. The achievement gap has persisted for decades and clearly data is an ineffective lever to result in significant change in the average public school system, sadly. Why? Because preserving the status quo is much easier than leading and sustaining change. The non-profit I founded and led for decades [back when Diane was on Checker’s side of the issues] found hundreds of teachers across the country more than willing to take new knowledge onboard and learn new skills. IF, there was adequate leadership and support. The study I led,one of the few that included empirical data, identified the federal strategy that actually worked – the National Diffusion Network. We helped keep it alive for twenty years until Newt Gingrich came into leadership with his machete on many ed programs. Never reborn to date. Still could work. As can high quality charter schools, as in the book we published that introduced the concept into the ecosystem. NOT profit-makers, NOT virtual schools, etc. NOT charters with no standards or accountability. Like so many things we “learned” from good educational research, tranlating it into sustained practice is really really tough. I wish we [including this excellent outfit] would quit directing energy to blaming charters and tests for the problems and start focusing on what could incentivize districts to take the risks to innovate, shift resources to their less able populations and persuade their majority populations, where white and “lucky” as noted in a prior comment, that their larger community will benefit when more/all kids and their families are supported so they can flourish. It takes years, not months though. Wishful thinking I fear.
Educational enterprise? Achievement gap? High quality charters? Orwellian word soup. Gobbledygook. Nonsense.
OK, going on a tangent. Here is a typical—though better than most—article on 2022 PISA results. Google “Future ed What the new PISA results really say about US schools.”
On the whole, a good, helpful article. Just a couple of bones to pick.
Article seems to imply US math score is in the “bottom half” of the 38 wealthier OECD nations. They take that from linked charts showing nations above, same or below OECD average. Unexplained here: “OECD average” is neither an averaging of richest 38 OECD, nor of the 80 nations whose scores are shown on the chart. The “OECD average” is actually a data scaling method [see Wikipedia article on PISA, heading Method of Testing, subheading Data Scaling for technical details]. Summary: 1st round PISA in 2000 was scaled so that “OECD average” in each domain [math, science, reading] = 500, and std deviation = 100. Subsequent cycles are linked to previous cycles as described.
Why is it, in this & every article I see, Math gets top billing? Why is it never noted that US scores, e.g., in Science, same as Germany and Netherlands, i.e., in top 20 ranked nations? Or in Reading even higher, in top dozen nations? Why is our Science score given short shrift [3pts less than in 2018], while Reading [1 pt less] is “the one bright spot”? A point or two decline is not significant when scores are in the hundreds of points.
3.But the para on whether or not US needs different way of teaching math was interesting in this regard: Japan’s method for teaching math prior to high school is in fact the way China & Singapore (perhaps most Asian/ S Asian nations?) teach math to their younger students. From the research I’ve read on this over the years, that makes all the difference. It figures that by high school, those students have the foundation needed to learn just as well from “direct instruction.” My conclusion would not be ‘this is a mixed approach,’ nor do I get why OECD would provide ‘no clear recommendations’ based on most successful math students.
Just to bore you with something I’m probably saying for the 5th time over the years: in the ‘80s there was a K12/college teacher exchange between US & China, studying math pedagogy. The Chinese math teachers’ critique: in US, we teach algorithms by rote, and have students spend nearly all their time practicing the memorized equation on different set of data. Chinese teachers’ concern: only most gifted US math students will gain from this method, via induction; average students will be left behind.
In China, students learn from an early age– via manipulables, teams, games etc– how to develop their own algorithms. Then they compare and contrast, decide which is most user-friendly etc. This is numeracy! And one learns there are different ways to get the same answer. Not to mention use of abacus from toddlerhood. I often hear, oh no, that’s fallen by the wayside. Doesn’t explain such things as the “air abacus” craze.
My point if you’re still reading: the one big takeaway from 20 yrs of occasional PISA testing is, US could do a helluva lot better in math instruction. Our 1st & 2nd-gen Asian-Americans’ accomplishments in STEM magnet schools (& regular public schools) tell us this. Our H-1B imports tell us this. US ed has an unfortunate leaning toward antique direct-instruction methods, particularly in math.
No worries! McKinsey has it all figured out, singling out Mississippi and Washington DC for showing how it’s done – all as measured by PISA scores and the like.
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/education/our-insights/spark-and-sustain-how-school-systems-can-improve-learning-at-scale#/
Oh, no!
This is what consulting firms do. They jump into areas of which they have no knowledge and produce extremely vague and general reports with the purpose of generating potential revenue streams for themselves. The whole idea is to get themselves hired to send in hordes of people with clipboards to gather information and hike up those billed hours in preparation for the next round of reports emphasizing the necessity of their services.
Yes.
Meant as a reply to Bob.
I know from teaching high-school kids that if the test does not count for or against them, they don’t bother, in general, to be careful about answering the questions. To be more specific, only the most neurotic and compliant of them do. Furthermore, Richard Nisbett, a psychologist who studies these matters, presents significant evidence that students from Asia and students whose parents are Asian immigrants tend to be a lot more rule-following than are American students generally. This alone could account for mediocre PISA scores.
See also this, about such tests generally: