ASSESSMENT IN SUPPORT OF INSTRUCTION AND LEARNING: Bridging the Gap Between Large-Scale and Classroom Assessment by National Research Council of the National Academies

Author:National Research Council of the National Academies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education : Policy, Reviews and Evaluations
Publisher: NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS
Published: 2003-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

PROGRAMME FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ASSESSMENT (PISA)

The OECD, which was formed as part of the Marshall Plan after World War II, is composed of thirty nations, all of which are democratic market economies. As Barry McGaw, director for education at OECD, explained at the workshop, a primary function of the OECD is to collect data in a number of policy areas, and in the late 1980s the organization began a process of upgrading its statistical work in education, with the particular goal of ensuring that the data used to represent national systems become more comparable. While the OECD had been using data regarding educational outcomes supplied by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement for a number of years, it began to gather data of its own in the mid-1990s through PISA. The focus is on summative data that can be used be make useful comparisons among the member nations.

The primary initial goal for PISA was, as McGaw explained, “to estimate the yield of national education systems,” and he acknowledged that this is a grand ambition. Yield is an economic concept not generally used in the study of education, but it led the developers of PISA to focus on what students can do with what they have learned, and thus avoid the difficulty of identifying the material that had been covered in common across many countries. Thus PISA assesses the “literacy” of fifteen-year-olds in reading, mathematics, and science. They use a variety of measurement approaches—multiple-choice questions as well as open-ended short questions and written pieces, but the assessments are not intended to be used for formative, classroom purposes.

McGaw provided some examples of the kinds of questions that can be considered using PISA data, using tables and graphs, for example, to show how the member countries vary in terms of the balance they achieve between equity and quality. He also showed graphically that countries vary considerably in terms both of how much spread they have between their lowest and highest performing students, and also in terms of how much of that spread occurs within schools and how much occurs across schools. Probing that question even deeper, he presented a table that broke down the variation that occurs across schools according to whether it was intended—that is, the result of deliberate tracking of students into academic or vocational programs, for instance—or unintended. Data such as these, McGaw explained, are very useful for helping countries see that there are alternatives to the way they are structuring their education systems. South Korea, for example, has been remarkably successful at achieving both high quality and high equity; it has the lowest degree of spread among high- and low-performing students, while overall performance is high.

Although PISA does not fit particularly well with the criteria laid out by the committee, McGaw noted that it does offer formative possibilities in a system context. Denmark, he noted, has found that though it spends among the largest amounts per students, its average student performance figures are quite low. As

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