By John Hodgart
ONCE again, a fever of panic has erupted over the latest OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) test results, as critics of the Scottish Government have striven to outdo each other in their hysterical pronouncements over what these tests appear to show, tests that are regarded by many leading educationalists as unreliable, worthless and even dangerous.
Unfortunately, Pisa tests really don’t tell us very much at all about the state of our educational system, or much that is worth fretting over. This is simply because there are so many variables across so many countries, languages and cultures and so many other powerful factors affecting performance, that they remain deeply flawed and unreliable. They do not compare like with like and only measure a very narrow range of skills indeed.
In fact Pisa tests, like old IQ tests, only really show how children perform in such tests, or to be more accurate, how thoroughly they are primed to perform, but actually tell us very little about how well our children are being educated in more important aspects of learning, or what they will eventually achieve, which is what matters at the end of the day.
However, if we look at the actual scores, it seems that Scotland is performing around the average for developed countries, as is the UK as a whole. Although reading scores appear slightly better this time, but science and maths slightly lower, the scores are more or less within a fairly narrow range or margin of error, while there are not huge differences between most developed countries.
Yet, as Professor Donald Gillies of West of Scotland University pointed out in The Herald last week, other ways of reading the scores can produce quite different ratings, especially in reading where “the raw score has risen from 493 to 504 and the relative position in the table from 26th out of 72 to 15th out of 79, a significant and unheralded rise”.
Another crucial factor we have to keep in mind is that some European countries, including the UK, have slipped down the rankings over the years with the emergence of Asian economies which are now zealously focused on preparing selected students to perform well in these tests as a matter of national status, but in ways that are severely detrimental to the health and wellbeing of their students.
Thus it is hardly surprising that educational experts across the globe have been fiercely critical of such tests and come to the conclusion that they are virtually worthless: “a thoroughly discredited testing and ranking system”, according to Michael Lloyd, a renowned international educational researcher. No wonder more than 100 educational experts across the world sent a letter in 2015, calling for an end to such tests, to Dr Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment.
If the wailing voices are unaware of how limited and how discredited such tests are, they really need to do some homework on them instead of spouting hysterical and misleading sound bites, while some, who should perhaps know better, have also been guilty of using these “results” to claim that Scottish education is failing and that the Curriculum for Excellence should be scrapped, something that only servers to highlight their own lack of balance and perspective. Once the Pisa panic has subsided I would recommend that many of our politicians sneak quietly back to school to raise their own standards.
John Hodgart is a retired secondary teacher.
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