Knowledge and Skills for Life: Findings from PISA, Programme for International Student Assessment
A Forum — May 31, 2002
Background
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) developed an assessment tool to measure the knowledge and skills of students across different national and cultural contexts. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2000 measures the reading, mathematics, and scientific literacy skills of 250,000 students from 32 different countries. The PISA 2000 instrument places special emphasis on testing the ability of 15 year-old students to use their knowledge and skills in three different subject areas and to apply them to every day life situations, rather than examining how well students' mastered a specific school curriculum. PISA 2000 also gathered information on students' learning and study practices.
PISA results and findings
PISA results from all 32 countries showed that Finland ranked the highest in reading with the U.S. ranking 15th . Japan, Korea and New Zealand, respectively, ranked the highest in mathematics and the U.S. ranked 19th. In science, Japanese, Korean, and Finnish students had the highest scores in science and the U.S. ranked 14th .
In all countries, females outperformed males in reading. This may be due to the fact that student surveys revealed that females expressed a greater interest in reading and reported reading more novels than males who preferred to read comics, newspapers, and web pages. In mathematical and scientific literacy, there were significant differences for both male and female mathematical scores, where males scored 11 points higher, in half of the OECD countries. However, scientific literacy favored either males or females in only six countries. In general, females expressed greater interest in reading, and males in mathematics. PISA researchers suggest that there is a positive correlation between student engagement and performance and may have consequences for learning that education policy needs to address.
U.S. student performance
In comparison to other countries, the U.S. ranked in the middle on all three subject areas. This middle ranking was due to the fact that the U.S. has a large percentage of higher performers, (only six countries have a higher percentage of high performers than the U.S.), however, the U.S. also has a large percentage of poor performers, which lowers the performance mean levels overall for students in the three different subject matters.
Countries like Finland, Japan, and Korea, in particular, show that it is possible to achieve both a small spread of results and a high mean. That is, they show that quality and equity can be achieved together.
Countries like Finland, Japan, Korea, Italy, Sweden and Canada show that it is possible for the relationship between home background and educational performance to be relatively weak. That is, the well-known impact of socio-economic benefit can be ameliorated by education systems and schools. In countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the United States, the relationship is significantly stronger than for the OECD as a whole. In these countries, coming from a disadvantaged background matters more.
In essence, the PISA findings support the role that schools and school systems play through their policies and approaches in ensuring school success. Policymakers and practitioners no longer need to accept the assumption that socio-economic status is an overpowering factor in school success or failure and also have encouraging evidence that interventions can minimize the role that gender plays in student success in specific subject areas (especially the traditional low performance of boys in reading compared to the higher performance of girls).
This brief summarizes an American Youth Policy Forum that took place May 31, 2002 on Capitol Hill, reported by Ming Shi Trammel.
The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) is a non-profit, nonpartisan professional development organization that bridges youth policy, practice and research for professionals working on youth policy issues at the national, state and local levels.
AYPF's events and policy reports are made possible by the support of a consortium of philanthropic foundations: Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, General Electric Fund, William T. Grant Foundation, George Gund Foundation, Walter S. Johnson Foundation, W. K. Kellogg Foundation, McKnight Foundation, Charles S. Mott Foundation, NEC Foundation of America, Wallace Reader's Digest Funds, and others.