Addressing inequities in the Slovak Republic through evaluation and assessment

by Claire Shewbridge
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

It is taken for granted in OECD countries nowadays that the vast majority of children and young people have access to education, regardless of their wealth or background. However, despite this great achievement, in many countries, the socio-economic background of children will still have a large impact on how well they succeed at school.

In the Slovak Republic, there are considerable equity challenges, and a very clear link between students’ socio-economic background and their educational achievement. The educational differences between rural areas and cities are significant, regional disparities are more pronounced than in other OECD countries, and the educational outcomes of the Roma minority are particularly poor. This has a lasting impact on a child’s life, as the reduced risk of unemployment for Slovak men and women with upper secondary education is particularly strong when compared internationally. These regional challenges and the important role that education plays in promoting a more inclusive growth are also underlined in the OECD Economic Survey launched today by OECD's Secretary-General in Bratislava.

An essential tool to help the Slovak Republic address this inequity is an effective evaluation and assessment system that will help them to monitor teaching and learning, set educational goals, and improve practice and outcomes. This has been the focus of the OECD’s Review of Evaluation and Assessment in Education, of which the Slovak Republic Review is the final publication.

To improve the evaluation and assessment system in the Slovak Republic, a strategic approach is needed, with the clarification of long-term goals for schooling, and capacity building at the national level so that results from evaluation and assessment feed into policies for school system improvement.

The Slovak Republic has made a positive move by strengthening the objectivity of examinations at the end of upper secondary schooling (Maturita) and developing national assessments in Year 9 that help embed the competency-based national curriculum. Next week, also, children in selected primary schools will sit a new assessment in Year 5.

To keep moving forward, the entire school community needs to be empowered to get involved, from parents associations, to students associations, to teachers associations. An important part of this is ensuring that teachers and school leaders have access to adequate professional development. With strategic national leadership, and meaningful community feedback, positive changes can be driven forward so that all students, regardless of their background, will have the opportunity to succeed.

Links:
OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Slovak Republic
OECD Press Release: Economic activity is accelerating in the Slovak Republic, OECD says 
OECD Review on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes
Synergies for Better Learning: An International Perspective on Evaluation and Assessment
Photo credit: © iQoncept - Fotolia.com 

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

Where diversity doesn’t mean disadvantage

by Marilyn Achiron 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

OECD publications and international media regularly discuss the impact of immigrants on host-country societies. This month’s PISA in Focus looks at the issue from a different perspective: how effectively do the education systems of host countries integrate their immigrant students?

Between 2000 and 2009, across OECD countries the proportion of 15-year-olds with an immigrant background increased from 8% to 10%. In Ireland, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Russian Federation, Spain and the United States, the proportion of immigrant students increased by five percentage points or more during that time, and these students now represent from 8% to 30% of these countries’ student population. Education systems play a critical role in the process of integration: they give immigrants and their children opportunities to acquire the skills needed for them to join the labour market.

Results from PISA 2009 show that immigrant students of similar socio-economic status who come from the same country perform very differently, depending on their destination country. For example, immigrant students from the Russian Federation living in Finland, Germany and Israel perform around the OECD average in reading while those in the Czech Republic score about 30 points below the OECD average – the equivalent of a full year of school. Similarly, immigrant students from the Former Yugoslavia living in Denmark score about 40 points below the OECD average while those in Luxembourg score more than 80 points below average. 

The same pattern is observed among students from OECD countries who have immigrated to other countries. For example, on average, German students in Austria and Luxembourg perform at least 10 score points below the OECD average in reading, while those in the Netherlands and Switzerland score more than 30 points above average. On average, French students going to school in Belgium, Israel and Luxembourg perform around the OECD average, while those in Switzerland score 35 points above average.

While immigration policies, similarities between the immigrants’ and the host cultures, and other social policies also explain some of these differences in performance, some education systems appear to be able to facilitate the integration of immigrant students better than others. Immigrant students tend to perform better in school systems that have relatively large populations of immigrant students and where immigrant students are as diverse in their socio-economic status as other students. For example, between one in four and one in five students in Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States have an immigrant background. In these four countries, all students with similar socio-economic status perform equally well, regardless of whether or not they are immigrants. By contrast, in countries where immigrant students represent only a small proportion of the overall student population, and this group is more socio-economically diverse than the overall student population, performance differences between immigrant and non-immigrant students are relatively large, even after taking socio-economic status into account.

PISA results show that immigrant students tend to do better in countries and economies that rise to the challenge of diversity and whose school system is flexible enough to adapt to students with different strengths and needs. Countries that are just beginning to receive increasing numbers of immigrant students from diverse backgrounds can learn from the experience of those systems that have been confronted with this challenge for longer and have succeeded in integrating these students into their school systems.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No.33: What do immigrant students tell us about the quality of education systems?
Related PISA in Focus issues:
How are school systems adapting to increasing numbers of immigrants students?
How do immigrant students fare in disadvantaged schools?
Do immigrant students' reading skills depend on how long they've been in their new country?
Photo credit: road made with flags from around the world/@ Shutterstock

What you get out of schooling is often what you put in

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education 

Does having a positive attitude towards school make it more likely that a student will get good marks? Or does getting good marks make it more likely that a student will have a positive attitude towards school? The latest edition of PISA in Focus reports that the answer to both of those questions is yes: positive feelings about school are often linked in a virtuous circle with high performance. According to results from PISA 2009, across OECD countries, nearly nine out of ten students think that school has taught them things that could be useful in a job, and around three-quarters of students think that school has prepared them for adult life and has helped to give them confidence to make decisions. In most countries, students who think school is useful are more likely to have high PISA test scores in reading; and students who have high scores in reading tend to report that they think school is useful. In 48 countries and economies, those students who performed well in reading tended to report more positive attitudes towards school than those who had lower scores.

In all participating countries and economies, students’ positive attitudes towards schooling are related to positive attitudes towards their teachers and to their perceptions that the classroom environment is conducive to learning. In fact, these associations are mutually reinforcing: Students who have good relations with their teachers and who study in classes that are conducive to learning tend to think that school is useful – and their positive attitudes make the climate for learning at school even better.

Perhaps surprisingly, PISA also found that a student’s background or the type of school he or she attends is only weakly related to his or her attitudes towards schooling. In 21 participating countries and economies, socio-economically advantaged students tended to report more positive attitudes towards school, but the opposite was noted in nine countries and economies. And students attending private schools don’t necessarily have better attitudes towards school than public-school students: students in private schools tended to report more positive attitudes towards school than students in public schools in only nine of 49 countries and economies with comparable data.

In many countries, the one student characteristic that is associated with positive attitudes towards school is gender. In 28 of 65 participating countries and economies, girls tended to report more favourable attitudes towards school than boys (when the questions involved classroom atmosphere and various student and school characteristics were considered together). Only in Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom did boys tend to report more positive attitudes towards school than girls.

While it’s a little difficult to pin down exactly what influences students’ attitudes towards school, results from PISA clearly show a link between positive attitudes towards school and good performance in reading, and between positive attitudes and an atmosphere in the classroom that is conducive to learning. This implies that, to a greater or lesser extent, students’ own attitudes towards school can shape the quality of their learning experiences.

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:  Student showing thumbs up / Shutterstock

Looking for equity in education? Follow the (public) money

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

Talk of school vouchers inevitably triggers heated debate: do they give all students equal access to quality education? Or do they transfer resources away from precisely those schools that need them the most and inadvertently create a two-tier system of education?

This month’s PISA in Focus highlights results from PISA 2009 show that while privately managed schools do tend to attract advantaged students, the scale of the difference between the socio-economic profiles of publicly and privately managed schools is associated with the level of public funding allocated to privately managed schools – and with how that funding is provided.

In Finland, the Netherlands, the Slovak Republic, Sweden and the partner economy Hong Kong-China, principals in privately managed schools reported that over 90% of school funding comes from the government, while in Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg and Slovenia, between 80% and 90% does. In contrast, less than 10% of funding for privately managed schools in Greece, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, the partner countries Albania, Brazil, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Qatar, Panama, Peru, Tunisia, Uruguay and the partner economies Dubai (UAE), Chinese Taipei and Shanghai-China comes from the government. PISA data reveal that in those countries where privately managed schools receive higher proportions of public funding, there is less of a difference between the socio-economic profiles of publicly and privately managed schools.

To refine these results further, PISA considered two systems through which public funding to privately managed schools is offered directly to parents: universal voucher systems, in which vouchers are available to all students, and targeted voucher systems, in which vouchers are provided only to disadvantaged students. Vouchers that are available for all students can help to expand the choice of schools available to parents and promote competition among schools; vouchers that target only disadvantaged students can help improve equity in access to schools. An analysis of PISA data shows that the difference between the socio-economic profiles of publicly managed schools and privately managed schools is twice as large in education systems that use universal vouchers as in systems that use targeted vouchers.

But PISA results also show that providing more public funding to privately managed schools will not necessarily eliminate that difference: other factors that are unrelated to funding, such as a school’s admittance criteria, academic performance, and learning environment, are also partly related to differences between schools’ socio-economic profiles.

What is crucial to take away from this analysis is that countries that manage to have small differences between the socio-economic profiles of publicly and privately managed schools also tend to achieve better overall performance. That means that policy makers – and ultimately parents and students – do not have to choose between equity and strong performance in their school systems: the two are not mutually exclusive.

Links:

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

PISA in Focus No. 19: Is there really such a thing as a second chance in education? 

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Hooked to be connected!

by Lynda Hawe
Communications Officer, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Directorate for Education OECD

Concerned parents are becoming more and more anxious as they watch their bright children getting completely absorbed by and attached to new mobile devices.  Young people’s attachment to digital media and connectivity will shortly reach a level of almost universal saturation. In some OECD countries, more than 95% of 15-year-olds use an internet connected computer daily while at home. How many of us have experienced frustration while trying to get kids to actually listen, as their eyes remain glossily glued to their favourite pet gadget?  So just how worried should we really be? Well, it still remains difficult to clearly identify the risks or rewards of such behaviour, especially in relation to long-term learning and brain functions.  But first, let’s be reassured - it’s not all bad news!

The OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has just released an inspiring new publication called Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners, authored by Francesc Pedró. This book has wisely researched technology in relation to emerging issues for education.  Particularly, given that digital media and connectedness are an essential part of the lives of today’s learners, schools and teachers must now cope with the new responsibilities in relation to these skills.  This explorative book tackles the issue and helps to contribute to filling the knowledge gap.

Frankly, it’s not about the technology, but it’s all about connectedness. Connectedness, which is the capacity to benefit from connectivity for personal, social, work or economic purposes, is having an impact on all areas of human activity. Consequently, devices and gadgets are less important than the ability to be connected and seizing the opportunities that connectedness offers. Education is expected to play an important role in this transformation as it can equip individuals with the required skills for harnessing the opportunities that the knowledge economy and society offers.

In particular, teachers need to be well prepared in terms of the potential pedagogical benefits of new technologies. Challenges for schools and teachers are to better integrate the new digital media and the resulting innovative social practices into the daily experience of schooling.  With the objective to help learners to make the most out of connectedness, while enabling teachers to improve their skills. In addition, teachers should simultaneously pay attention to the different needs of learners and provide increased support to those who come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.

It is very reassuring to discover that Mobile Learning is emerging as one of the solutions to the challenges faced by education. As described in UNESCO’s Mobile Learning project, it offers unique characteristics in comparison to conventional e-learning: personal, portable, collaborative, interactive, contextual and situated.  As well as the fact that it highlights "just-in-time-learning", since instruction can be delivered anywhere and at anytime.

Nobody can predict what new technologies may bring, or how the teaching and learning experience in education will evolve over the next decade.  So in the meantime, let’s just stay aware of the learning opportunities, while keeping a caring eye on the gadget screens as well as a little clock beside the video-games, see Setting Computer Limits Tips.   Of course, not with the intention to deprive youngsters of all the fun, but just to ensure that the final rewards will fully outweigh any eventual risks.

Links:
OECD work on New Millenium Learners
Activities: Centre for Eduational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Photo Credit: © Eric Audras/Onoky/Corbis

The “extra” in extracurricular activities

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

It may be tempting for school systems that are trying to reduce expenses to trim the “extras” from their budgets, including school-sponsored extracurricular activities. But are these activities just a luxury that schools can no longer afford? The latest issue of PISA in Focus makes the case that the availability of extracurricular activities at school is positively related both to student performance and to students’ attitudes towards learning.

As part of the PISA 2006 survey, which focused on student performance in science, school principals were asked about the kinds of extracurricular activities they offered their students. On average across OECD countries, 89% of students attend schools whose principals reported that science-related field trips were commonly offered, 56% of students attend schools that hold science competitions, 48% of students are in schools that encourage involvement in extracurricular science projects, 42% are in schools that organise science fairs, and 41% are in schools that have science clubs.

While the types of science-related extracurricular activities vary across countries, their relationship with better student performance is consistent throughout. In 22 of 31 OECD countries and 14 of 17 partner countries and economies, students in schools that offer more science-related extracurricular activities tend to perform better in science than do students in schools that offer fewer such activities. And in 21 OECD countries and 12 partner countries and economies, this positive relationship holds even after accounting for students’ socio-economic background. However, in two countries, the relationship is very different:  in the United States, students in schools that offer fewer of these kinds of science-related activities tend to perform better in science, after accounting for students’ socio-economic backgrounds; while in Montenegro, the relationship is negative both before and after accounting for students’ backgrounds.

And there’s more at play than test scores: PISA also found a link between the availability of school-sponsored extracurricular activities and students’ belief in their ability to handle science-related tasks, known as self-efficacy, and their enjoyment of learning science. In 22 OECD countries, 7 partner countries and 1 partner economy, students in schools that offer more of these kinds of activities tend to have higher levels of self-efficacy in science; and in 20 OECD countries, 2 partner countries and 1 partner economy, they also enjoy learning science more. In no country or economy is there a negative relationship between science-related extracurricular activities and positive attitudes towards learning science.

These findings from PISA can’t determine conclusively whether being exposed to science-related extracurricular activities enhances students’ attitudes towards science or whether students with more positive attitudes towards science are attracted to schools that offer more of such activities; both could be true. But what these results do show is that these kinds of activities are positively related not only to student performance, but also to students’ attitudes towards learning and their belief in their own abilities. With that in mind, school leaders should carefully weigh the benefits of these “extras” against their cost when making tough budgetary decisions.

Links:
For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
PISA in Focus: Link latest issue "Are students more engaged when schools offer extracurricular activities?"
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