Expanding PISA’s circle of influence (part two)

by Barbara Ischinger, Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
Michael Ward, Senior Policy Analyst, PISA for Development
and Alejandro Gomez Palma, Policy Analyst, PISA for Development

In our previous blog about PISA for Development, we were pleased to announce Ecuador’s agreement to participate in this new pilot project. We’ve just returned from the Zambian capital of Lusaka and are delighted to report that Zambia has also agreed to participate – the first sub-Saharan African nation ever to take part in any PISA survey.

You might well ask: how can we compare the performance of students in highly developed countries – such as Japan and Germany – with that of students in low- and middle-income countries in Africa? And how do we assess the competencies of the tens of millions of 15-year-olds in developing countries who aren’t enrolled in school? These were precisely some of the challenges we put to ourselves when the idea of PISA for Development emerged from discussions with countries and OECD partners.

To make the assessments of 15-year-olds more relevant to a wider range of countries, including Zambia, we knew that we would have to adapt both the tests and the contextual information we collect through PISA’s student, school and parent questionnaires. For the assessment of reading, mathematics and science, we will tap into our large stock of questions that were already successfully used in previous PISA cycles and, in collaboration with our partners, select, review and adapt and then field trial those that we find are best suited to assess the level of skills we identify in the participating countries. The PISA for Development assessments will be better targeted to describe the performance at the middle and low end of the proficiency spectrum, while also measuring the higher levels and maintaining comparability with the international PISA scales. The range of questions included in the assessment will give us a fine-grained picture of performance at these lower levels that will, in turn, provide more valuable diagnostic information for countries. 

The questions we select will be field tested in Zambia and the other participating countries to see how well students respond to them, then reviewed and adapted, as necessary, with the assistance of local and regional experts, to ensure they are relevant across countries and cultures. This adaptation may involve making the questions more familiar to students by changing choices of words and references, for example, and, where necessary, translating the questions into the languages of the participating countries. The translation and verification process is well established in the main PISA assessment and it also allows for some adaptations to accommodate local contexts. There are, for example, different ways of asking the same question depending on whether the student taking the test lives in Australia or in the United Kingdom; and Scotland also adapts some of the terminology of some of the PISA test questions. But regardless of these contextual changes, the nature of the questions, and the knowledge and skills assessed, must remain true to the original intent of the question, so that the assessments still measure what they were originally designed to measure and results are comparable with those of other countries.

The context questionnaires, distributed to students, school directors and parents, will be similar to those we already use in the main PISA assessment, but will be developed to include questions that may be more relevant to countries like Zambia. So, for example, where the current PISA questionnaire to school directors asks about school facilities and resources, this would need to be adapted to include such questions as: Does the school have separate sanitation facilities for girls and boys? Does the student have electricity at home? Running water? A separate kitchen? And we will have to be prepared for very different answers to some basic questions – like: who is the head of your household? – as households in developing countries are sometimes headed by children or grandparents. An important point to remember is that we have to keep some questions common to all so that we can assess all countries on the same scale.

Field trials of the PISA for Development assessment will begin in the second half of 2015; we’re expecting that more than 25,000 students in 4 or 5 countries – including Ecuador and Zambia – will participate. The main assessment will be conducted during 2016 and early 2017. During this time, we’ll also continue working with our partners, including the World Bank, UNICEF and UNESCO, to try to identify 15-year-olds who are not enrolled in school and develop ways of reaching them, too. It’s an ambitious agenda, certainly. But we’re convinced that, as the world moves beyond the Millennium Development Goals towards a new post-2015 education agenda that is focused on improving learning outcomes worldwide, we must be sure that children in all countries not only have access to school, but are acquiring both fundamental and 21st century skills when they get there.

Links:
Expanding PISA’s circle of influence
PISA for Development
Millennium Development Goals
Photo Credit: Drawing of Zambia on Blackboard, drawn in chalk / @Shutterstock

Expanding PISA’s circle of influence

by Barbara Ischinger, Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
and Alejandro Gomez Palma, Analyst, PISA for Development

The enormous worldwide interest in the PISA 2012 results, which were released last December, showed that PISA is now widely accepted as the best measure of student performance we have – and one of the best sources of data that can be used to inform policy decisions about how to improve education systems. Sixty-five countries and economies participated in PISA 2012, but that leaves well over 100 others that either chose not to or believe that participation is out of their reach. We hope that that’s going to change soon.

We’ve just returned from Ecuador where the government agreed – with a sense of pride that was palpable – to participate in our pilot PISA for Development initiative. Eight Latin American countries participated in the latest round of PISA 2012 and we’re keen to add to that number. We’ve briefly mentioned the PISA for Development project in earlier blogs, but now that countries are signing on, we want to describe in more detail what it is and what it means, both for the OECD and for the countries involved.

The OECD has already done a lot of work on development issues (among other things, we helped to define the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, for example). We have often been asked to conduct reviews of education systems in developing countries and emerging economies; but because we haven’t always had a good evidence base for these countries, we didn’t feel we could provide the kind of analysis they were looking for.

In many of these countries, the main obstacle to conducting such reviews is the absence of good data. There is hardly any information at all on education outcomes, including results of student assessments or the level of quality and equity of the education provided. While some assessments and evaluations of education are conducted at the regional level in many areas, including Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, and we have been working with – and learning from – the organisers of these assessments as we shape PISA for Development, they cannot offer the kind of global benchmarking that PISA can.

The data PISA elicits is not just used to develop “league tables” comparing countries’ performance; it can – and should – be used as a public policy tool: governments can release the information to inform a public debate on how to improve the quality of their education systems.

A lot of what we will be doing in PISA for Development is building capacity in participating countries for managing large-scale student assessments. For the countries participating, our aim is to bring the level of capacity up to the minimum level needed to implement PISA.  In fact, many developing countries that have already participated in PISA have said that one of the biggest benefits has been the attendant capacity-building that is part of PISA.

The PISA for Development project fits in nicely with work on the post-2015 agenda, the successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals, which are likely to focus on ensuring access to education plus improving the quality of education, particularly the quality and equity of learning outcomes. How is the developing world going to measure quality in education? Well, the OECD and the over 70 countries that have participated in PISA since the first round in 2000 would respond that we already have a proven instrument: PISA. What we need to do now is to modify the assessment so that it can be used by a far larger set of countries that have a wider spectrum of student performance.

We’ll tell you how we’re adapting the PISA instruments, methods and analyses for PISA for Development – and targeting countries in sub-Saharan Africa, too, none of which has ever participated in PISA – in a subsequent blog.

Links:
PISA 2012 results
PISA for Development
United Nations Millennium Development Goals
Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education (LLECE)
CONFEMEN Programme for the Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC)
The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ)
Photo Credit: INEVAL/Ecuador

A Curriculum for the Next Billion

by Charles Leadbeater
Author of Learning from the Extremes and Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers Around the World, published by Bloomsbury with the support of the The Qatar Foundation’s WISE initiative.

Today, global companies are fascinated by the prospect of what the World Economic Forum calls ‘the next billion’ – the future consumers of the developing world whose income is rising from around $2 a day to between $5 and $7 a day. Most of these people are recently arrived in rapidly expanding cities, often living in the poorest areas: every month about 5 million people in the developing world move to cities.

If we were to look at these families as parents and learners, what kind of education will they be looking for? Or to put it another way, if we were to design a curriculum with ‘the next billion’ what would they want?

Having spent much of the last three years visiting a wide variety of education projects in cities across the developing world, it strikes me that the first thing that people want is facility with a global language, usually English, but also in some places Spanish and, in others, Mandarin. They want a language that will give them access to people and jobs linked to global networks and trade – a business hotel, a job in retail, manning a phone in a call centre – rather than confining them to ply their trade in purely local markets.

Next they want a mastery of basic mathematics, the ability to understand numbers and do fairly basic sums, like working out discounts or more complex applications like planning a production schedule. Maths is foundational to much else that people need, and want. to learn.

The third ingredient is digital literacy. People need to be able to work competently and capably with computers, and not just the basics of the Microsoft world of Word and Excel, but increasingly the world of the web and social media, apps and programming. They need to be comfortable with having to learn, and learn again, as technology changes.

None of that, however, is worth very much unless they are skilled at working together with other people. So the fourth thing their education needs to give them is a well-grounded experience in social skills so they know how to respond to customers and work well with their colleagues, to find collaborative solutions to problems. Some of those skills are social and relational, based on empathy and sympathy. But others are more about collaborative self-government, which is why it is so important that education provides children with ample, structured, challenging opportunities to work together, in groups, on projects which they can make their own. As social media spreads so it will open up ever more opportunities for people to find one another and come together to achieve common goals. Citizens will need to learn how to make the most of these technologies, for better government, richer culture and more successful businesses.

All of this needs to be married to entrepreneurial and creative capacity, by which I mean the ability to spot an opportunity, mobilise support to take it, learn how to take risks and recover from setbacks. Most of the ‘next billion’ will find themselves working in small entrepreneurial companies. Studies of the urban poor show that many have to hold down two or three jobs to survive. Their education needs to help them become micro-entrepreneurs, adaptive and resilient, fleet of foot. Learning to juggle work if, not balls, is a key skill.

The slim core skills set out above might provide the starting point for thinking about the kinds of skills all young people might need in the years ahead, in the developed and the developing world.

Yet that is only at best half the story. Setting out what people should learn is just the starting point. How they learn is almost as important. Effective learning needs to be a structured, well-designed, highly engaging activity which challenges and stretches young people as well as supporting them and building their confidence. It needs to pull people to it, by the laws of attraction. Too much of the time at school it is the other way around: people are pushed into learning they do not really understand and cannot make meaningful.

To be motivating learning needs to be intrinsically satisfying and to offer at least the distant prospect of a pay-off: a better job; a practical skill; a useful way of thinking.

Achieving that will mean that learning will have to become more connected to, if not located in, the real world of work and production. The most impressive and attractive places to learn in future, in the developed and developing world, will give young people ample opportunities to design and make, produce and sell things, with their hands and their heads. They should go to school to learn by working and having fun. They should study by making and building rather than sitting and listening.

Too often education is seen as a pristine preparation for a later career. Work is held at bay for as long as possible. I doubt we can afford that distinction in the future in which education increasingly seems to be losing touch with the real world that young people live in – and the real world seems increasingly unwilling to give them the jobs they crave. We need learning to give young people a real sense of what creative, satisfying, productive work can be, so they can take those standards and expectations into their later working life.

All innovators succeed by challenging ingrained conventional wisdom. Breaking down the barriers between work and learning will be one of the chief opportunities for educational innovators in the decades to come, especially if they want to meet the needs of the next billion parents and children entering formal education.


Links:
Innovation in Education: Lessons from Pioneers around the World
See also: OECD Skills Strategy

Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding

Photo credit: Population of our World in Colour / Shutterstock