Response to PISA: Exploring the success of Singapore

Last week, when the PISA 2015 scores were released, Thomas Hatch shared a response and a scan of headlines from around the world. We reached out to an international group of scholars and asked them to share their own response to the PISA results as well. Today we share a comment from Dr. Saravanan Gopinathan of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

2016 has been a good year for Singapore Education. Results released in the TIMSS and PISA assessments shows a sustained trend towards high performance in Maths. Science and Literacy. Those who are critical of Singapore’s education model point to two features. One is that while Singapore students have admirable mastery of PISA content domains, they are incapable of problem solving, applying content to authentic situations, etc. This is attributed to teacher dominated teaching, memorisation and extra out-of-school coaching. The other is that while Singapore may have an excellent system, it is not sufficiently equitable, showing a long tail in performance. And yes, we have not produced any Nobel Prize winners.

What can be said in its defense? There has been a conscious, sustained effort since 1997 to promote knowledge building pedagogies via curriculum and assessment reform, teacher professional development and textbook redesign. It would be reasonable to assume that in a tight compact system like Singapore, reforms are beginning to change teaching and learning practices. With regard to the second, Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has pointed to the fact Singapore’s proportion of low performers in each of the three domains is at about 10% among the lowest of all participating systems and its proportion of top performers in each domain is the highest among all participating education systems.

Let us enjoy our status as a top education reference system, at least until the next PISA results!

For more from Dr. Gopinathan, read “Real Singaporean Lessons: Why do Singaporean students perform so well on PISA?” which was published as part of the Leading Futures series on IEN.

For more on the recent PISA results, explore the following recent articles:

Pisa results 2016: Singapore sweeps the board http://buff.ly/2hr1zYN (TES, 12/6)

Behind Singapore’s PISA rankings success http://buff.ly/2hsWfRB (ABC online, 12/7)

Asian countries dominate, science teaching criticised in PISA survey http://buff.ly/2hsS3RJ (Business World, 12/7)