International Educational Findings, USA is Failing
Topic: COMMUNITY INTEREST
Key findings from PISA 2015 for the United States
The performance of 15-year-olds in the United States in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compares it to that in four countries/economies: Canada, Estonia, Germany and Hong Kong (China).
The recently released report examines policies from these four education systems, which were all selected for their high performance and high or improving levels of equity. It concludes with a discussion of science instruction in the United States.
Key Findings from PISA
The United States remains in the middle of the rankings. Among the 35 countries in the OECD, the United States performed around average in science, the major domain of this assessment cycle. Its performance was also around average in reading, but below average in mathematics. There has
been no significant change in science and reading performance since the last time they were the major domains (science in 2006 and reading in 2009).
One in five (20%) of 15-year-old students in the United States are low performers, not reaching the PISA baseline Level 2 of science proficiency. This proportion is similar to the OECD average of 21%, but more than twice as high as the proportion of low performers in Estonia, Hong Kong (China), Japan, Macao (China), Singapore and Vietnam.
At the other end of the performance scale, 9% of students in the United States are top performers, achieving Level 5 or 6, comparable to the average of 8% across the OECD. By contrast, over 15% of 15-year-old students in Japan, Singapore and Chinese Taipei achieve this level of performance.
Attitudes towards science are positive overall students in the United States display high levels of epistemic beliefs, or those beliefs that correspond with currently accepted representations of the goal of scientific enquiry and the nature of scientific claims. Over nine in ten 15-year olds in the United States agree that ideas in science sometimes change, that good answers are based on evidence from many different experiments and that it is good to try experiments more than once to be sure of one’s findings.
Some 38% of 15-year-olds in the United States expect to work in a science-related career at age 30. Only 24% of students across the OECD, by contrast, expect to do so. The majority of these students in the United States (22%) expect to become health professionals; 13% science and engineering professionals; 2% ICT professionals; and 1% science-related technicians
and associates.
Girls are more likely than boys to expect to become health professionals (35% vs. 9%), but boys are more likely than girls to expect to become science and engineering professionals (20% vs. 6%) and ICT professionals (4% vs. 0.5%). The influence of socio-economic status on student performance is about average,but equity has improved since 2006.
In the United States, 11% of the variation in student performance in science could be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, similar to the average variation in performance observed across the OECD.
PISA index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) in the United States is associated with an increase of 33 score points in the science assessment, which is below the average of 38 score points across the OECD.
Disadvantaged students in the United States were 2.5 times more likely to be low performers than advantaged students. However, disadvantage does not consign students to low performance: 32% of disadvantaged students in the United States were resilient, performing above expectations and among the top quarter of students with the same socio-economic status across all countries and economies in PISA. This proportion has increased by 12 percentage points since 2006.
Equity has improved in the United States since 2006, when socio-economic status accounted for 17% of the variation in student performance in science, and a one-unit increase in the ESCS index was associated with an increase of 46 score points. However, mean performance did not increase over the same period. The increase in equity can be attributed to gains in performance among disadvantaged students, but these were not large enough to significantly increase the country’s mean performance. There has been little change in science performance among advantaged students. Students’ science performance is also associated to the socio-economic composition of their schools.
In the United States, a 91-point gap in science performance exists between students attending advantaged schools and those attending disadvantaged schools. This is larger than the gaps of less than 70 points observed in Canada and Estonia.
The level of between-school variation in science performance in the United States is below the OECD average, whereas within-school variation is higher than the OECD average. The bulk of variation in performance in the United States is observed among students attending the same schools rather than different schools. This is partly due to the fact that schools sort and track students to a lesser extent in the United States than in other OECD countries.
Time and resources devoted to science differ between schools Principals in disadvantaged schools in the United States are more likely to report a shortage of human resources than principals in advantaged schools. This may exacerbate disparities in performance related to socio-economic status. There are no significant differences in access to material resources across schools.
Advantaged students receive approximately 50 minutes more of science instruction per week in school than their disadvantaged peers. This is equivalent to 30 hours per year for a school year of 36 weeks, compared to 22 hours on average across OECD countries.Policies to promote equity in education.
Education systems should ensure that all students are able to access high-quality education and reach their full potential,regardless of their social or economic status. Equity does not come at the expense of high performance: Canada, Estonia,Germany and Hong Kong (China) have all attained high levels of performance with high or improving levels of equity.
Five policy pillars that aim to continuously improve teaching and learning in schools and to promote equity in education have been identified, drawing on the experience of these countries:
1. A clear education strategy to improve performance and equity should be implemented.
2. Rigorous and consistent standards should be applied across all classrooms.
3. Teacher and school leader capacity should be improved.
4. Resources should be distributed equitably across schools – preferentially to those schools and students that need
them most.
5. At-risk students and schools should be proactively targeted.
Approaches to science educat ion in the United Stat es
Science instruction in the United States has changed over the past few decades. In addition to acquisition of knowledge specific to each field of science, emerging science education underscores the concepts spanning many fields of science and the practices used by scientists and engineers. This is in line with what the PISA science assessment examines: the ability to explain scientific phenomena, to evaluate and design scientific inquiry, and to interpret the data collected by
the inquiry. Different instructional approaches need to be considered and introduced to enhance students’ learning and their use of scientific knowledge in the real world.
The main purpose of formative assessment is the feedback it provides to both learners and instructors about gaps in students’ learning, so that further instruction and support may be provided to bridge those gaps. It is critical that assessments be
aligned to instruction to make them informative to both teachers and students. Teachers who regularly implement formative assessments – both formalised assessment tasks and less formal check-ins – are in a better position to adjust instruction to address student challenges and provide opportunities for deeper learning when appropriate. Students who regularly receive feedback can begin to gauge their own progress and recognise the need for additional help from teachers and peers.
PISA 2015 asked students who attend at least one science course how often certain activities happen in their science lessons. The teaching strategies used by teachers are grouped into four approaches: teacher-directed instruction, perceived feedback, adaptive instruction and enquiry-based instruction. According to students’ reports, these teaching approaches are not mutually exclusive, even if some teaching approaches, such as adaptive teaching and providing feedback, are more frequently combined than others.
When students in OECD countries were asked about what happens in all or most lessons, almost seven in ten reported that they are given opportunities to explain their ideas, about six in ten reported that their science
teachers explain how a science idea can be applied to different phenomena, and half reported that their teachers explain the relevance of science concepts to their lives. Only one in four students or fewer reported that they are allowed to design their own experiments, spend time in the laboratory doing practical experiments, or are asked by their science teacher to do an investigation to test their ideas.
In all OECD countries except Korea, using teacher-directed instruction more frequently is associated with higher science achievement, after accounting for the socio-economic status of students and schools; and students in all countries also hold stronger epistemic beliefs, such as believing that scientific ideas change in light of new evidence, when their teachers used these strategies more frequently. A positive association is also observed between these teaching practices and students’ expectations of pursuing science-related careers. In no education system are these
instructional practices associated with students being less likely to expect to work in science-related occupations.
In 27 of the countries and economies that participated in PISA, students in socio-economically disadvantaged
schools are more frequently exposed to enquiry-based teaching than those in advantaged schools, while the
reverse is true in 10 other education systems. After accounting for the socio-economic profile of both students and schools, greater exposure to enquiry-based instruction is negatively associated with science performance in 56 countries and economies. Perhaps surprisingly, in no education system do students who reported that they are frequently exposed to enquiry-based instruction score higher in science. However, across OECD countries, more
frequent enquiry-based teaching is positively related to students holding stronger epistemic beliefs and being more likely to expect to work in a science-related occupation when they are 30, even if these relationships are weaker than is the case with teacher-directed and adaptive instruction.
The main purpose of formative assessment is the feedback it provides to both learners and instructors about gaps in students’ learning, so that further instruction and support may be provided to bridge those gaps. It is critical that assessments be
aligned to instruction to make them informative to both teachers and students. Teachers who regularly implement formative assessments – both formalised assessment tasks and less formal check-ins – are in a better position to adjust instruction to
address student challenges and provide opportunities for deeper learning when appropriate. Students who regularly receive feedback can begin to gauge their own progress and recognise the need for additional help from teachers and peers.
Posted by tammyduffy
at 2:25 PM EST
Updated: Sunday, 11 December 2016 2:46 PM EST
