Trouble with homework

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

It’s sometimes hard to tell who has more trouble with homework: students or their parents. PISA results show that homework, itself, may inadvertently perpetuate a problem that goes far beyond spoiling a student’s evening or a parent’s self-esteem. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, homework may widen the performance gap between students from different socio-economic backgrounds.

Students everywhere are assigned homework by their teachers, and across OECD countries in 2012, 15-year-old students reported that they spend almost five hours per week doing homework. (If you think that’s a lot, it’s actually one hour less per week than the average reported in 2003 – and 9 hours less per week than students in Shanghai-China reported in 2012.)

The problem lies not so much in the amount of time spent doing homework, but in differences in the amount of time spent doing homework that are related to students’ socio-economic status. In every country and economy that participated in PISA 2012, advantaged students spend more time doing homework than disadvantaged students. In OECD countries, for example, advantaged students spend 5.7 hours per week doing homework, on average, while disadvantaged students spend an average of 4.1 hours per week. PISA also finds that students who attend schools whose student body is predominantly composed of advantaged students, and students who attend schools located in urban areas, reported spending more time doing homework than students who attend schools with a more disadvantaged student body and schools located in rural areas.

What accounts for these differences? PISA cannot establish cause-and-effect links, but results from previous PISA studies suggest that advantaged students are more likely than their disadvantaged peers to have a quiet place to study at home and parents who convey positive messages about schooling. The connection between the socio-economic profile of a school’s student population and the amount of time students spend on homework might reflect differences in teachers’ expectations for their students and teachers’ perceptions of their students’ capacity to study independently.

All of this has an impact on student performance. Students who spend more time doing homework tend to score higher in the PISA mathematics test. And if you compare students from similar socio-economic backgrounds who attend similarly resourced schools, those who attend schools where students, in general, spend more time doing homework perform better in mathematics than those who attend schools whose students devote less time to homework. In fact, PISA results show that the net payoff in mathematics performance from attending a school where more homework is assigned, in general, is particularly large – 17 score points (the equivalent of nearly 6 months of schooling) or more per extra hour of homework – in Hong Kong-China, Japan, Macao-China and Singapore.

One good way to make sure that homework does not perpetuate differences in performance that are related to students’ socio-economic status is for schools and teachers to encourage struggling and disadvantaged students to complete their homework. This could involve providing facilities at school so that disadvantaged students have a quiet, comfortable place to work, and/or offering to help parents motivate their children to finish their homework before going out with friends or surfing the web. The homework still has to get done; but maybe students and their parents will find it a little less troublesome.

Links: 
PISA 2012 Findings
Does homework perpetuate inequities in education?
PISA in Focus No.46 (French version)
Photo credit: Student connection / @Shutterstock

Spread the wealth, reap the benefits

by Marilyn Achiron, 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Quick: Who has more up-to-date textbooks: students in wealthier schools or students in poorer schools? Actually, it depends where you live. As this month’s PISA in Focus explains, not only are some countries better than others in allocating their educational resources more equitably across schools, but students in these countries generally perform better in mathematics.

PISA 2012 asked school principals to report whether teacher shortages, or shortages or inadequacy of physical infrastructure or instructional materials, like textbooks, hindered their school’s ability to provide instruction. PISA found that while disadvantaged schools benefit from investments in smaller classes, they are also more likely to suffer from teacher shortages and inadequate instructional materials than advantaged schools. In general, schools with more socio-economically disadvantaged students tend to have less adequate resources than schools with more advantaged students.

It may come as a surprise, but according to PISA data, the United States is the second least-equitable OECD country, after Mexico, in the allocation of educational resources. One in four disadvantaged students in the United States attends a school whose principal reported that a shortage or inadequacy of science laboratory equipment hindered – to some extent or a lot – the school’s capacity to provide instruction. Meanwhile, only around one in seven advantaged students in the United States attends such a school. The differences between advantaged and disadvantaged schools are even starker among Latin American countries, including the OECD countries Chile and Mexico. For example, fewer than one in two disadvantaged students, but more than three in four advantaged students, in Mexico attend schools that have adequate instructional materials.

Apart from making a huge difference to individual students, inequity in resource allocation has an impact on a country’s overall performance in PISA. After taking into account countries’ relative wealth, 19% of the variation in mathematics performance across all the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2012 can be explained by differences in principals’ responses to questions about the adequacy of science laboratory equipment, instructional materials, computers for instruction, Internet connectivity, computer software for instruction, and library materials. At least 30% of the variation in mathematics performance across OECD countries can be explained by how equitably resources are allocated across all schools.

PISA has consistently found that, when it comes to education, money isn’t everything, and that beyond a certain minimum level of expenditure per student, how the money is spent is more important than how much money is spent. When money is translated into such tangibles as up-to-date textbooks, reliable Internet access, and a school library full of books, spreading the wealth evenly across all schools, regardless of their socio-economic profile, gives all students, not just those in the wealthiest schools, the nourishment they need to succeed.

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 44: How is equity in resource allocation related to student performance?
PISA in Focus No. 44 (French version)
Photo credit: Teenager students outside protecting their heads from a rain of books / @Shutterstock

Who is most likely to be left back at school?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

It was the kind of thing you whispered about with your classmates, while for the kid himself – and it usually was a “he” – it was an embarrassment that some tried, unsuccessfully, to dress up as a badge of honour. Being left back at school was no joke; and the practice continues to take a toll on millions of students every year – even though it does little to benefit the individual student who is required to repeat a grade.

The latest PISA in Focus highlights how successive rounds of PISA have found that grade repetition shows no clear benefit, either for individual students or for school systems as a whole. It is also an expensive way of handling underachievement, since the students who are left back are more likely to drop out of school entirely, or stay longer in the school system and so spend less time in the labour force.

Some countries have begun to realise that grade repetition is neither cheap nor particularly effective in assisting struggling students. They are rejecting the practice in favour of identifying and providing support earlier to these students. Among the 13 countries and economies that had grade repetition rates of more than 20% in 2003, for example, these rates dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points by 2012. Rates fell particularly sharply in France, Luxembourg, Macao-China, Mexico and Tunisia.

Results from PISA 2012 suggest another good reason to end the practice of grade repetition: because disadvantaged students are more likely than advantaged students to repeat a grade, grade repetition tends to reinforce inequities in the school system. Across OECD countries, one in five socio-economically disadvantaged students reported that they had repeated a grade at least once since they entered primary school, while fewer than one in ten advantaged students reported so. In Belgium, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia and Uruguay, more than one in two disadvantaged students reported that they had repeated a grade at least once since they entered primary school.

More troubling is that even among students with similar performance in mathematics, reading and science, the likelihood of having repeated a grade is often linked to socio-economic background. In 33 of the 61 countries and economies analysed, the odds of repeating grades are significantly higher among disadvantaged students than among advantaged students, after accounting for differences in mathematics, reading and science performance across students. On average across OECD countries, disadvantaged students are 1.5 times more likely to repeat grades than advantaged students who perform at the same level.

What this shows is that poor academic performance is not the only reason students are left back; other factors related to socio-economic disadvantage come into play as well. For example, grade repetition may be used not to help students who are lagging behind, but as a form of punishment to sanction misbehaviour. PISA data show that disadvantaged students are significantly more likely than their advantaged peers to arrive late for school or to skip classes. But it is unclear – at best – how repeating a grade improves behaviour in class and engagement at school. What is clear is that students who arrive late for school or skip classes miss out on learning opportunities, which, in turn, reinforces inequities related to socio-economic background.

Being required to repeat a grade adds shame and embarrassment to students who may already be discouraged and disaffected at school – and to no apparent benefit. Instead of making struggling students the focus of class gossip, isn’t it better to make them the focus of the support, extra help and encouragement they need – as soon as they need it?

Links:

PISA 2012 Findings

PISA in Focus No. 43: Are disadvantaged students more likely to repeat grades?

Photo credit:  Broken pencil  / @Shutterstock

The socio-economic divide in pre-primary education

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

The metaphor “levelling the playing field” crops up a lot in discussions about pre-primary education.

As well it should: attendance in those programmes has been shown to improve education outcomes later on. But as this month’s PISA in Focus shows, not even a steamroller can level the playing field of formal education if disadvantaged students are sidelined from the beginning.

PISA consistently finds that 15-year-old students who had attended pre-primary education tend to perform better than those who had not attended pre-primary education, even after accounting for the students’ socio-economic status. 51 points – the equivalent of substantially more than a year of formal schooling.

In 2012, the vast majority of 15-year-old students in most PISA-participating countries and economies reported that they had attended pre-primary education; and PISA data confirm that enrolment in those programmes has grown over the past decade. In 2003, 69% of 15-year-olds across the OECD countries that have comparable data between 2003 and 2012 reported that they had attended pre-primary school for more than one year; in 2012, 75% of students reported so.

But PISA also finds that while 15-year-old students in 2012 were more likely than 15-year-olds in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education, pre-primary enrolment is higher among advantaged students than disadvantaged students, and higher among students attending advantaged schools than those attending disadvantaged schools. In 2012, an average of 67% of disadvantaged students had attended pre-primary education for more than one year, while 82% of students in advantaged schools had done so.

This difference in enrolment between advantaged and disadvantaged students is seen in almost all PISA-participating countries and economies. It is largest – 48 percentage points – in Poland, and between 25 and 30 percentage points in Portugal, the Slovak Republic and Uruguay. This means that the students who could benefit the most from these programmes – those from disadvantaged backgrounds – are less likely to participate in them. This socio-economic divide widened in the Slovak Republic between 2003 and 2012 as it did, to a lesser extent, in Finland, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Poland and the Russian Federation; it narrowed, however, in Germany, Korea, Macao-China, Portugal and Uruguay. 

That pre-primary enrolment rates are growing faster among advantaged students than among disadvantaged students signals that countries have to work harder to ensure that all families, particularly disadvantaged families, have access to high-quality pre-primary education, and to information about such programmes, near where they live. An investment in early education, both for parents and for governments, pays dividends later on in life. Which brings to mind another apt expression: “You can’t win if you don’t play.”

Links:
PISA 2012 Findings
PISA in Focus No. 40 : Does pre-primary education reach those who need it most?
Photo credit: Kids Hands / @Shutterstock

Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

Mr. Huang became principal of Qiao Tou Lian He school at the age of 25, not because he was specifically trained for the post, but because he had been the only educated person in his village. He’s a dynamic leader who is squarely focused on supporting, developing and evaluating his teachers, of whom only a handful have a high school degree and more than basic teacher training.

The teaching conditions in the rural Qiao Tou Lian He school, 3,000 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, are tough and teachers are struggling. In Shanghai, teachers not only have smaller classes, but they can also rely on much better initial preparation and more extensive training opportunities at the school, district and municipal levels. They spend 70% of their time teaching and 30% of their time learning, often in collaboration with teachers from other schools. In many countries, we see learning outcomes severely impeded if a quarter or more of the students come from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. Here every child does. The Qiao Tou Lian He school is mainly on its own; but the teachers I met there showed an amazing commitment, and I was struck by the positive learning atmosphere – rigorous, highly disciplined, yet joyful – in every classroom I visited.

Over lunch in his office, Mr. Huang explained how he works with individual teachers to become aware of any weaknesses in their practices – and that often means not just creating awareness of what they do but also changing their underlying mindset. He helps them understand best practices by seeing how they are applied by other teachers in other classrooms. And he motivates his teachers with his high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and with the belief that they can all make a difference to every child. He keeps close track of teacher performance, looking at both student achievement and classroom management in order to help teachers strengthen their practice. Over time, he also hopes to bring parents along, offering workshops for them not just on how to support their children’s education, but also simply on how to be good parents.

This is a country where everyone is willing to learn: students are learning for a better life; teachers are learning to improve their teaching; schools compare themselves eagerly with other schools; and, perhaps most important, the system as a whole is willing and able to learn. Whether China is interested in designing a better sewer system, retirement system or school system, it sends key people from the relevant sector to visit the world’s best performers in those areas with instructions to find out how it’s done and to put together a design for China that is superior to anything seen anywhere else.

Seven years ago, Andrea Pasinetti came to the area as a college student to brush up his Chinese. He saw both the enormous challenges facing the country’s schools, and also the opportunities afforded by China’s openness to learning. He dropped his studies and founded Teach for China. His organisation is now supporting over 80 schools; it doesn’t provide a high volume of resources, but it offers what is most critically missing in this area: teaching capacity to build teaching capacity. He is enlisting promising future leaders from across academic disciplines and careers to teach at least two years in those rural schools and become lifelong promoters of educational quality and equity.

I met two of these teachers, Xianming Xu and Madeline Christensen and was inspired by their enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism. Critics of organisations like Teach for China maintain that there is no alternative to the traditional route of undergraduate studies, teacher training and then a career in the classroom. But they underestimate the potential that this combination of talent, passion and entrepreneurship represents. In fact, the administration in China understands this better than many other countries and is embracing their work. Zhenhua Mi, another enthusiastic leader of this organisation explains to me that Teach for China is now so attractive that it can recruit the most promising candidates, even where the general status of the teaching profession is in decline. The programme also provides intensive initial training, ongoing support, and a work environment in which teachers work together to create good practice. What impressed me most is the vision of social transformation behind all this work – extending from teacher leadership through school leadership, policy and political leadership, up to community organisation.

By strengthening teaching capacity, these people are making a difference towards helping rural China build an education system that shifts from reproducing educational content for school towards strengthening competencies for life; from education to serve the state towards education for citizenship in the local and global community; from education for competition in exam hell towards strengthening relevant skills; and from education for situational values (I will do anything the situation allows me to do) to sustainable values. That will help the next generation to better reconcile resilience – managing in an imbalanced world – with greater sustainability – putting the world back into balance – that China needs so badly too.

Links:
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher
Learning in rural China: The challenges for students
China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?
Implementing educational reform in China
Chinese lessons

Photo credit: @ Schleicher OECD

What’s your strategy for learning?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Here’s a little test for you: Write a one-paragraph summary of a newspaper or web article you just read. After you’ve done that, try to explain how you did it. Did you read the text over and over to try to commit it to memory? Did you make sure the most important facts in the article were represented in your summary, in your own words? You might ask: what does it matter?

Knowing the best way to summarise information you read is key to being a proficient reader. In fact, this month’s PISA in Focus suggests that if disadvantaged students – who consistently score lower on PISA assessments than advantaged students -- used the most effective learning strategies to the same extent as students from more advantaged backgrounds do, the performance gap between the two groups would shrink considerably.

PISA 2009 asked students to describe how they summarise texts they read. Based on their responses, and on experts’ judgements of the relative effectiveness of different strategies, PISA was able to determine the extent to which students were aware of the most effective strategies for learning. 

Results show that countries with a strong average reading performance are those whose students generally know how to summarise information. Across OECD countries, the difference in reading performance between those students who know which strategies are best for summarising information and those who know the least is 107 PISA score points – the equivalent of more than two years of schooling. The findings also indicated that, within OECD countries, students from socio-economically advantaged backgrounds know more about the relative effectiveness of different learning strategies than students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Could these differences contribute to performance differences between advantaged and disadvantaged students?

The answer is “yes”: students from disadvantaged backgrounds could attain scores much closer to those of their advantaged peers if they had a greater knowledge of how best to approach learning. In as many as 31 countries and economies, if the most disadvantaged students had the same levels of awareness about summarising strategies as the most advantaged students in their countries and economies, their reading performance would be at least 15 points higher. In Austria, Belgium, Dubai (UAE), France, Hungary, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland and Uruguay, the score-point difference between what disadvantaged students could achieve if they had the same levels of knowledge about effective summarising strategies as advantaged students is more than 20 points, or the equivalent of half a year of formal schooling. Across OECD countries, if disadvantaged students used effective learning strategies to the same extent as students from more advantaged backgrounds do, the performance gap between the two groups would be almost 20% narrower. In Belgium, Finland, Korea and Liechtenstein, the gap would be 25% narrower.

While PISA cannot firmly establish cause and effect, these results suggest that one of the ways socio-economic advantage translates into better proficiency in reading is by providing more opportunities for students to develop an understanding of which learning strategies are the most effective. But there is no reason why these opportunities should be available mostly to advantaged students. By reading to their young children or talking with adolescent children about cultural or political events, all parents can give their children opportunities to experiment with and practice various learning strategies. Teachers, particularly those who work in schools with large proportions of disadvantaged students, can focus some of their reading lessons on the best strategies for summarising information. After all, knowing how to learn from the earliest age equips a student for a lifetime of learning.

Now: can you summarise, in two sentences, what you just read?

Links:   
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No.30 :Could learning strategies reduce the performance gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students?
Photo credit: Definition of the word summary/ Shutterstock

Making education more equitable

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Most of us think of education as the great leveller; but are our education systems really doing all they can to ensure that boys and girls from all backgrounds have an equal shot at a high-quality education? As this month’s PISA in Focus reports, some countries have been more successful than others in levelling the playing field for their students.

PISA results consistently show that socio-economic disadvantage is linked to poor student performance. On average, an advantaged student scores 88 points higher – the equivalent of more than two years of schooling – on the PISA reading test than a disadvantaged student. But results from the assessment also show that countries and economies vary in the degree to which performance is linked to socio-economic status. That fact demonstrates that the link can be weakened, usually by putting the right policies and practices in place.

Even more encouraging, education systems don’t have to choose between equity in opportunity and high performance. In the PISA 2009 survey, many of the countries and economies with the greatest equity are also top performers. Students in Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Iceland, Korea, Liechtenstein and Norway score above the OECD average in reading while, at the same time, the difference in scores between advantaged and disadvantaged students is less than 70 points.

Many countries and economies have made notable progress in reducing the difference in performance between advantaged and disadvantaged students while simultaneously improving overall performance. For example, comparing results from the PISA 2000 and 2009 surveys reveals that, in Albania, Chile, Germany and Latvia the relationship between students’ socio-economic status and their reading performance weakened and students’ overall reading performance improved. In Germany, the performance gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students narrowed by more than 25 score points over the period while the average reading performance improved by 13 points. Canada, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong-China, Mexico and the United States also narrowed the performance gap between these two groups of students, but there was no concurrent improvement in overall performance between the two assessments.

Education policies than can foster improvements in equity and performance include giving more and better support to disadvantaged students who start school with deficits in their education; ensuring that all schools provide high-quality instruction; and offering additional educational opportunities to disadvantaged students, as their parents might not be able to provide them. Broader social policies that limit the differences in the life experiences between advantaged and disadvantaged students either at home – crucially, before students enter formal education – or in school can also promote both equity and high performance.

That some countries and economies have weakened the link between socio-economic status and performance in school proves that it is far from inevitable that students from disadvantaged families perform poorly in school. If disadvantage deprives a student of access to the educational opportunities advantaged students enjoy, then these opportunities should be provided by the school system. In other words, all students – regardless of their background – should have the same opportunities to succeed in school.

Links:

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 25: Are countries moving towards more equitable education systems?

Photo credit:   Mark Herreid / Shutterstock.com

Breaking down the barriers to immigrant students’ success at school

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education 

Education is one of the best ways of integrating immigrant children and their families into their new home countries. But most immigrant students have to overcome multiple barriers in order to succeed at school. The latest edition of PISA in Focus shows that of all the obstacles to success these students must surmount, the concentration of socio-economic disadvantage at school is among the most strongly related to poor performance.

Disadvantage and immigrant status are closely linked. Most immigrants leave their home countries in search of better economic prospects. Once immigrants arrive in a host country, they often settle in communities where there are other immigrants who share their culture, their language and often their socio-economic status. Their children often attend the same schools – and those schools frequently have large proportions of immigrant students. As a result, immigrant students tend to be concentrated in certain schools. In most cases, these schools are generally more socio-economically deprived than other schools.

PISA finds that countries vary markedly in how immigrant students are accommodated in schools. In New Zealand, for example, 50% of immigrant students – well below the OECD average of 68% – attend a school that has a large proportion of immigrant students. In addition, the concentration of immigrant students in socio-economically disadvantaged schools is also relatively low in New Zealand: only one in four immigrant students – compared with the OECD average of 36% – attends a school that has a large proportion of students whose mothers have low levels of education. (Having a low-educated mother, that is, a mother who has not attained an upper secondary education, is a measure of socio-economic disadvantage among immigrant populations.) In Germany, the concentration of immigrant students in schools is around the OECD average, while the concentration of immigrant students in disadvantaged schools is higher than the OECD average. In the United Kingdom, high concentrations of immigrant students in schools are coupled with high concentrations of immigrant students in the most disadvantaged schools.

When analysing student performance through this prism, poor student performance, particularly among immigrant students, is most strongly related to the proportion of students in a school whose mothers have low levels of education. This finding indicates that immigrant students – indeed all students – face a major obstacle to success at school when they are concentrated in schools attended by students who face similar socio-economic disadvantage.

In contrast, the results suggest that it is not the proportion of immigrant students or the proportion of those who speak a different language that is most strongly associated with poor performance. In other words, being in a school with students from different countries or who speak multiple languages does not hinder learning as much as being in a school that has a high concentration of disadvantaged students does. In fact, there are many high-achieving schools that have large proportions of immigrant students. Many schools in the Canadian province of Alberta, for example, have just this kind of profile. Often, that high performance is the result of specific national or regional education policies designed to accommodate – and make the most of – heterogeneous student populations.

What these results tell us is that reducing the concentration of disadvantage in individual schools is a good first step towards helping immigrant students integrate successfully into school and, ultimately, society.

Links:

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 22:How do immigrant students fare in disadvantaged schools? 

Photo credit:  Colour figures / Shutterstock