Grade expectations

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

They’re a source of both anxiety and pride, but school marks can also have long-term consequences for students. Most teachers reward student achievement, but also the skills, attitudes, habits and behaviours that are necessary for lifelong learning. However, as this month’s PISA in Focus  points out, the tendency of teachers to award higher marks to girls and socio-economically advantaged students than to boys and disadvantaged students – even if they perform equally well in school and have similar positive attitudes towards learning – is cause for some concern.

Marks help to promote student learning by informing students about their progress, alerting teachers about their students’ needs, and certifying the degree to which students have mastered the tasks and competencies valued by teachers and schools. Schools and teachers recognise this: more than 95% of students in the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2009 – except Korea – attend a school that measures student achievement through teacher-prepared tests, student portfolios or student projects. In most cases, students receive feedback on these assessments in the form of school marks.

As PISA results show, few countries and economies share the same marking schemes; in fact, even schools within a country may have different ways of marking. In addition, different education systems establish their own ways of informing students that they have failed a class or an assessment. In some countries, the marking scheme allows for only one possible value for failing. This means that students who fail do not know how far they are from meeting the passing criteria. This is the case in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and the Slovak Republic. Other countries establish the passing mark somewhere in the middle of the marking scale, which gives students some idea of how far they are from passing. In Ireland, for example, the grading scale ranges from 0 to 100, but only scores below 40 are considered unsatisfactory or failing. In some countries, such as Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic, the remaining values on the marking scale reflect the quality of the passing mark in clear and distinct labels, such as “sufficient”, “good”, “very good” and “excellent”; meanwhile Belgium (Flemish Community), Italy and Ireland use a wider array of numeric values (e.g. 50 to 100, 10 to 20 or 6 to 10).  Analyses suggest that countries and economies that have a grading system with a limited number of values and use labels that refer to clear categories of achievement (e.g. “sufficient”, “good”, “very good”, “excellent”) can better differentiate students’ performance.

Students often base their expectations of further education and careers on the marks they receive in school; and school systems use marks to guide their selection of students for academically oriented programmes and, later, for entry into university. So whenever teachers reward – or punish – certain student characteristics that are unrelated to learning they may inadvertently shape a student’s future according to factors that have nothing to do with the student’s abilities, talents and personal goals.

That’s why it’s a good idea for school systems to promote marking practices that reward the behaviours and attitudes that help students to learn – so that more students can make the grade.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 26: Grade Expectations
Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions 
Photo credit: Test score sheet / Shutterstock

“We do things differently here”: evaluation and assessment in New Zealand schools

by Deborah Nusche
Policy Analyst,  Early Childhood and Schools Division, Directorate for Education

New Zealand’s consistent high performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has sparked international curiosity about the ingredients of its success.

New Zealand’s education system is unique in many ways. It has probably gone furthest among OECD countries in allowing schools to run themselves. In turn, it’s not surprising that evaluation and assessment is very much in the hands of schools and their Boards, and the main policy focus has been to build their capacity to do this. Notably, student assessment relies strongly on the professionalism of teachers to assess and report on student learning. A new OECD report on evaluation and assessment in New Zealand schools provides in-depth information about the country’s unique approach to evaluating student, school and system progress.

What struck the review team most about New Zealand’s approach was the great amount of trust in the ability of students, teachers and schools to evaluate their own performance and engage in self-improvement. While international developments are closely followed, the global trend towards high-stakes accountability is not seen as a good option for New Zealand. Especially in primary education, there is a general consensus against national testing and the use of test results for school rankings.

To gather information on how the education system is doing overall, New Zealand relies on sample-based surveys that do not carry high stakes for individual students, teachers or schools. Instead of going further down the road of national assessments, New Zealand is investing in teacher capacity and guidance materials to help teachers make and report professional judgments about the learning of each student. The national agencies provide clear performance expectations and a set of nationally validated assessment tools to guide assessment practice. Teacher professionalism is also supported by well-established approaches to teacher appraisal and school self review. Both promote evidence-based inquiry and the use of assessment results by schools for accountability and improvement.

The New Zealand model has successfully avoided some of the potential negative effects of high-stakes testing such as curriculum narrowing, teaching to the test and assessment anxiety. It has helped communicate the message that assessment is an integral part of everyday teaching and learning rather than a one-off event at the end of the school year. Effective assessment is described by the Ministry of Education as a circle of inquiry, decision-making and transformation – in short, “a process of learning, for learning”.

While New Zealand has a lot to be proud of, the OECD report also identifies a range of challenges and provides recommendations for improvement. Policy priorities are to:

• Further develop and embed the National Standards within the evaluation and assessment framework
• Consolidate teaching standards and strengthen teacher appraisal 
• Strengthen school collaboration and regionally-based support for schools
• Reinforce professional learning opportunities for teachers, school leaders and trustees
• Ensure that evaluation and assessment respond to diverse learner needs
• Enhance consistency of the overall evaluation and assessment framework

Links

OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: New Zealand:

• Country Review  
• Main Conclusions 
• Policy Pointers

For more on OECD Reviews on Evaluation and Assessment Frameworks for Improving School Outcomes: www.oecd.org/edu/evaluationpolicy

Related blog posts:

When the school inspectors call less often, will Flemish schools take up the self-evaluation challenge?

Snowed under or crystal clear? Evaluating and assessing education outcomes in Norway

 The report was authored by Deborah Nusche, Dany Laveault, John MacBeath and Paulo Santiago


Photo credit: New Zealand Ministry of Education 

All that money can’t buy

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education 
                                                    

We can now add something else to the growing list of things money alone can’t buy: love, happiness–and strong performance in PISA. Results from PISA 2009 show that there is a threshold beyond which a country’s wealth is unrelated to its overall score in PISA.

Among moderately wealthy economies whose per capita GDP is up to around USD 20 000 (Estonia, Hungary, the Slovak Republic and the partner country Croatia, for example), the greater the country’s wealth, the higher its mean score on the PISA reading test. But PISA results indicate that above this threshold of USD 20 000 in per capita GDP, national wealth is no longer a good predictor of a country’s mean performance in PISA. And the amount these high-income countries devote to education also appears to have little relation to their overall performance in PISA. PISA looked at cumulative expenditure on education–the total dollar amount spent on educating a student from the age of 6 to the age of 15–and found that, after a threshold of about USD 35 000 per student, expenditure is unrelated to performance. For example, countries that spend more than USD 100 000 per student from the age of 6 to 15, such as Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland and the United States, show similar levels of performance as countries that spend less than half that amount per student, such as Estonia, Hungary and Poland. Meanwhile, New Zealand, a top performer in PISA, spends a lower-than-average amount per student from the age of 6 to 15.

So what is it that makes a country a strong performer in PISA? Its decisions on how it spends the money that it does invest in education. PISA results show that the strongest performers among high-income countries and economies tend to invest more in teachers. For example, lower secondary teachers in Korea and the partner economy of Hong Kong-China, two high-performing systems in the PISA reading tests, earn more than twice the per capita GDP in their respective countries. The countries that perform well in PISA tend to attract the best students into the teaching profession by offering them higher salaries and greater professional status. They also tend to prioritise investment in teachers over smaller classes.

Successful PISA countries also invest something else in their education systems: high expectations for all of their students. Schools and teachers in these systems do not allow struggling students to fail; they do not make them repeat a grade, they do not transfer them to other schools, nor do they group students into different classes based on ability. Regardless of a country’s or economy’s wealth, school systems that commit themselves, both in resources and in policies, to ensuring that all students succeed perform better in PISA than systems that tend to separate out poor performers or students with behavioural problems or special needs.

So when it comes to money and education, the question isn’t how much? but rather for what?

For more information:
on PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
PISA in Focus N°13: Does money buy strong performance in PISA?
Full set of PISA in Focus: www.oecd.org/pisa/infocus
Video Series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education

Video: Singapore: Building a strong and effective teaching force
From the series of videos on Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, produced jointly by the OECD and the Pearson Foundation