Pakistan’s education system & PISA

By Rizwan Ghani

In education, Pakistan needs to fix three things: addressing language issue, standardization of education and its assessment framework and bringing national education and evaluation standards at par with international standards. It can help improve local education standards, bring local education at par with international standards, help Pakistani students compete at international level, save billions being spent by the individuals and government on overseas education, increase share in international job market and improve local economy.

It will lay the foundation for stronger, prosperous and united Pakistan. In my view, Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is one model that can help Pakistan reinforce its strengths and address its education challenges.

OECD started the program in 1997 to help countries improve education without changing local curriculums and monitor the outcomes of education systems in terms of student achievements within a common internationally agreed framework. Without changing local education system, it provides a basis for member countries for international collaboration in defining and implementing education policies. It evaluates quality, equity and efficiency of national education systems. It allows governments and policy makers to measure scientifically what students can do (than what they know), show features common to high performing students, schools and education systems draw policy lessons. Seventy countries including 34 OECD states are PISA members. Together, they constitute 90 percent of world’s economy.

Under PISA, every four years students are evaluated in reading, mathematics and science. Every three years, surveys are conducted. In PISA 2009, 470,000 students of members were tested in the three subjects. In PISA tests, a difference of 39 score points in student performance is equivalent to one year of school education. PISA tests 15-year- old students who have completed their school education and are about to join higher education. The tests and surveys include students from grade 7 to 13. PISA 2009 report comprises of seven books. They are “assessment framework”, “overcoming social background equity”, “learning to learn”, “successful schools”, “learning trends”, “what students know” and “take the tests”. The report is available on www.pisa.oecd.org. PISA uses term “reading literacy” instead of “reading” or “literacy” to evaluate students’ ability to apply knowledge and skills in real life. Reading exam scale is divided in five levels. Level 2 is taken as base level of reading proficiency and level 3 is the expert level. To keep pace with use of technology in real life, PISA reading literacy evaluation includes reading of electronic texts, computerized test of reading and understanding electronic text. Accordingly, PISA has developed a reading assessment framework, which includes print reading and electronic text assessment (ETA).

The reading results of PISA 2009 show that students’ “reading habits” play an important role in their results. Reading habits in PISA include enjoyment of reading, time spent reading for enjoyment, diversity of reading material, diversity of online reading activities and reading for school. Furthermore, the students who were aware of “approaches to learning” (memorization strategies, control strategies, elaboration strategies, summarizing and understanding and remembering) performed better than students who are unaware of these strategies. Results showed that students used mix of memorization, elaboration and control strategies in reading. The students who approached reading with definite objectives scored better. The difference of 90 score points (equal to 18 months of school education) in student results from the same class show that reading habits have cardinal role in reading results. The 2009 reading survey disclosed that students who enjoy leisure reading are better readers. Students who spent 2 hours daily on reading for enjoyment and were aware of learning strategies scored 90 points more on average as compared to those who spent the same amount of time on reading but failed to pass (reading level 2) because they were unaware of learning strategies. The survey also established relation between type of materials students read and their performance in reading examinations. The score points of students reading fiction, comic books, non-fiction, magazines and newspapers were 53, -2, 22, 15 and 16 respectively. Out of these students 31 percent read fiction, 23 percent comic books, 18 percent non-fiction, 58 percent magazines, and 61 percent newspapers. The results also revealed that proficient readers already scored 81 percent through self-reading and leaving 19 percent for the classrooms.

PISA divides readers into six groups based on their reading performance, reading habits and awareness of approaches to learning. Seventeen percent students fall in group-1 (deep and wide), 25 percent in group-2 (deep and narrow), 29 percent in group-3 (deep and highly restricted), 5 percent in group-4 (surface and wide), 10 percent in group-5 (surface and narrow) and 13 percent in group-6 (surface and highly restricted). It allows improvement of weak and strong readers and help address the complex issue of student performance versus teaching standards. The results of Argentinean students in regular education system and out of regular education system offer illuminating insight. The regular students scored 439, 421 and 439 in reading, mathematics and science and the stay-at-home students scored 335, 337 and 341 in the three subjects respectively. Pakistan can use the survey to divide ten-year-old readers into six groups for improving strong and weak readers and making students aware of reading habits and approaches to learning at an early age. PISA 2009 results showed that despite increase of 35 to 70 percent increase in education budgets, the reading standards have dropped by one percent between 2000 and 2009. Similarly, the girls continue to score 20 score points more than boys for the last ten years. Results show that girls score more because they are more aware of reading strategies and boys tend to associate reading as “girl thing”. This underperformance of boys on average results in 20 percent loss to national economies. Pakistan needs to improve reading habits of boys to reduce losses to the national economy. The students coming from poor socio-economic backgrounds tend to perform poorly as compared to their rich counterparts mostly due to non-availability of reading material and leisure time. Results show that awareness of reading strategies and reading habits helped improve their results. The results also show that homework “crowd-out” the time for leisure reading resulting in poor reading scores. However, what the OECD report failed to highlight were the adverse impacts on education standards in welfare economies, which adopted capitalism. Increased poverty and lack of leisure reading time have resulted in poor reading scores and weaker economies.

For scoring, PISA uses a scoring guide of no credit, partial credit or full credit for each answer. In addition to the performance of the students, results also allow to analyze other factors such as gender, socio-economic background and differences between schools. In this way, PISA has established a unique comparative knowledge base of education systems and their outcomes, which can be monitored over time. PISA sample question are available in “take the test sample questions” http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/23/41943106.pdf. Brief comments are given on each question showing percentage of students who answered correctly across OECD countries, the difficulty of question in score point and which competency is being assessed.

Finally, 70 OECD member states are successfully using PISA since 1997 to keep pace with international standards of education, participate in international assessments, review and update national educational. The assessment frameworks allows to measure ability of students taking the examination and the question difficulty on a single continuum. It helps to learn about the strengths and innovations of education systems of other countries. Pakistan can use PISA model to overcome problems of national and provincial education standards, assessment frameworks including examination papers.