ON Dec 6, the Education Ministry announced that students had shown improvement under the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015. We had achieved higher scores in Mathematics, Science and reading literacy. It was a reason to rejoice.
However, the excitement didn’t last long.
The next day, we came to realise that the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the body that conducted the tests, said: “The weighted response rate among the initially sampled Malaysian schools (51 per cent) fell short of the standard PISA response rate of 85 per cent. Therefore, the results may not be comparable to those of other countries or to results for Malaysia from previous years.”
In other words, for this round, our scores fell short of full recognition.
There have not been updates or comments on PISA from either the Education Ministry or other stakeholders. It is prudent at this stage to leave it to the ministry to discuss the results with the PISA organising body.
Hopefully, our participation in future PISAs will not be jeopardised, else we may lose a yardstick for measuring our successes in academic pursuits as defined in the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025.
Meanwhile, there are lessons to be learnt from the “scores” that the ministry had put forth.
First, we have improved in three scores. This is good.
However, each score is below its global average. Moreover, if the 51 per cent of students who took the tests represented the better students from the earlier selected and designated population, we are in dire straits.
The numbers show that even our best performed below the global average standard.
Second, we have always attributed our poor performance in PISA to the lack of higher order thinking skills (HOTS) in students. So, teachers are sent for HOTS courses so that they could train their students in HOTS.
However, without content knowledge, no amount of thinking skills will help students to tackle a question in Mathematics and Science.
Perhaps it is time we re-focus and re-emphasise on pedagogical content knowledge.
Teachers must know their subjects. They must acquaint themselves with the latest teaching methods and technologies to deliver better lessons.
They must impart full understanding of the topics taught to their students.
If students do not understand a topic, no thinking skills can help them solve a Mathematics or Science problem that demands basic knowledge and understanding of the components involved.
Third, we need to encourage speed reading among students.
This skill will help them confront tests that demand much intellectual agility, such as PISA.
Time saved in reading and comprehending questions will give them more time to tackle problems and figure out solutions.
Fourth, many of the top-performing countries in PISA are East Asian nations, our neighbours.
We can better identify with these nations in terms of culture, tradition, language and history.
We can study and even adapt and adopt their systems more easily as compared with that of Western countries.
LIONG KAM CHONG, Seremban, Negri Sembilan