The PISA Effect on Global Educational Governance by Louis Volante

Author:Louis Volante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

A New Research Basis for Teacher Education

Large-scale assessments like PISA triggered research on teachers, and in Germany the opportunity was taken to combine these studies systematically with the assessment of teachers’ competences or with video studies of mathematics or science lessons. Consequently, a number of coordinated research and priority programmes (supported by the German Research Foundation or the Ministry of Education and Research) were launched and successfully completed (Hartig, Klieme, & Leutner, 2008; Prenzel, 2007).

Comprehensive research studies on teachers’ professional competence (e.g., COACTIV; see Baumert et al., 2010; Krauss, Baumert, & Blum, 2008) were conducted to investigate, among other items, the role of subject matter content knowledge but also pedagogical content knowledge for teaching and students’ competence development in mathematics and other outcomes. Findings indicated for instance a substantial positive effect of pedagogical content knowledge on students’ learning gains which was mediated by the provision of cognitive activation and individual learning support during lessons (Baumert et al., 2010). Furthermore, results support efforts to improve teacher education by placing a stronger emphasis on subject-based pedagogical content knowledge (Krauss, Neubrand, Blum, & Baumert, 2008). One of the most striking findings of COACTIV was the extent of pedagogical knowledge found in Gymnasium teachers. While the curriculum for teachers qualifying for the Gymnasium focuses more on content knowledge in subject matters, the programmes for teachers for other school types set more emphasis on pedagogy and knowledge. And yet, the group of Gymnasium teachers was significantly higher not only in content knowledge, but also in pedagogical knowledge (Krauss, Neubrand, Blum, Baumert, Brunner, et al., 2008). Hence, the programme of the teacher training and the level of knowledge were shown to be highly correlated. Such knowledge affects not only the way teaching is carried out but in fact also the students’ competence development.

The strategy of extending large-scale assessments (e.g., by oversampling complete classrooms for comparisons between the federal states or students from specific backgrounds or with special needs, by adding a second or third day of assessment, or by implementing follow-up studies) turned out to be very productive and helpful because limitations of PISA’s descriptive cross-sectional approach could be overcome—towards explanative evidence from longitudinal multilevel analyses. Linking video studies of science (e.g., Seidel et al., 2007) or mathematics (Rakoczy et al., 2007) lessons to PISA also proved to be an effective approach. In-depth analytical studies identified specifically problematic challenges in Germany and helped to understand how teaching could be choreographed and organized in order to stimulate sustainable, active, and explorative learning in students. It was even possible to make insights from video studies fruitful for theory-driven improvements of the PISA questionnaires (e.g., Müller, Prenzel, Seidel, Schiepe-Tiska, & Kjaernsli, 2016) or for further analysis of classroom-related data from PISA cycles (e.g., Kobarg et al., 2011).

All in all, the COACTIV study and other complex research designs linked to large-scale assessments in Germany demonstrated that empirical research is able not only to identify problems but also to differentiate scripts of teaching or competence profiles of teachers that are more or less effective for successful learning in the classroom.

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