Category Archives: About K-12 International Education News

Posted in About K-12 International Education News, View

Tagged curriculum reform, Finland, teacher selection, teacher turnover

IEN in Finland: First day at a new school

Posted on May 19, 2014 by internationalednews | 1 comment

Today, Stella (9) and Clara (13) spent their first day at a practice school in Helsinki. Practice schools are regular public schools, serving students who live in their neighborhood. The school our children are attending is a ‘comprehensive school’ for children in grades 1-9, with an associated kindergarten next door. Practice schools have been developed expressly for the purpose of preparing and supporting the learning of prospective teachers and are staffed with what might be called mentor teachers in the US (or “practice teachers” in Finland). Practice teachers teach regular classes for pupils in the school but then are also responsible for supervising, observing and co-planning with student-teachers. The principal estimated that at any one time, the school has between 30-36 student-teachers placed in various classrooms throughout the grades. Practice schools receive additional government funding to pay for the special work they do.

In some cases, practice schools have been designed specifically to accommodate and support the new teachers. In fact, our daughters’ school has a suite of rooms for student-teachers including a room with tables for their meetings; their own lockers and bookcases for materials and resources; and a coatroom and lunch space. The meeting room, equipped with the latest technology, underscores the importance that is placed not only upon learning to teach but upon analyzing (and learning from) teaching. In these rooms, student-teachers meet with their practice teachers to debrief plans and lessons and to talk about next steps. This attention to the cycle of planning, action, and reflection / evaluation is initially modeled in the student-teacher’s University classes, and they are expected to engage in similar kinds of analysis and inquiry when they have their own classrooms. These parallel activities underscore the notion that learning in practice does not happen “on its own” but rather requires concurrent opportunities for teachers to analyze their experiences and to make connections between research and practice.

Stella’s day today was led by a substitute as the regular teacher was out of the classroom because she was spending the day at the Finnish National Board of Education working on the national Curriculum (in the coming years, the national curriculum is due to revised and updated). Stella’s Finnish teacher is qualified to teach not only primary teacher education but also music education (having obtained an additional master’s degree) as well as 3^rd grade—she leads the choir and also music instruction courses. Clara’s teacher is currently working on his doctoral dissertation after having completed coursework at an institution in the United States; his studies have focused upon religious studies and music. (While the advanced educational experiences of Finnish teachers is particularly notable, Stella’s teacher back in her public school outside New York City is also at work on an additional Master’s degree, currently working on a second master’s degree in writing children’s literature).

Stella’s day began at 9 AM with a hug from the substitute teacher, and then introductions as the teacher asked each child to stop by Stella’s desk, shake her hand and introduce themselves. The classes included two sessions of math (as well as a math test), an English lesson, two recesses and lunch. We thought originally her day would end at 12:45, when students who are not taking religion headed home. However, she was invited to stay, and ended the day with another recess, and then the religion class when the teacher led the students in a series of games.

Clara’s day started with a meeting with her teacher, who had made plans for her to first tour the school with (and get to know) several English-speaking classmates, before joining the whole group. At 9.45 she joined the students in their homeroom class—her classmates had started their day at 8.00 with two hours of language instruction (either English, German, or Swedish). In addition to the language classes, the day included art class, preparation for the end-of-the-year ceremony (to be held at the end of next week), as well as a music class. Her homeroom teacher led the group to a well-equipped music room and introduced them to an animated computer program to help them all learn to play chords on acoustic guitars.

–Karen Hammerness & Tom Hatch

Tagged Finland, Practice Schools

A class schedule in Finland

Posted on May 18, 2014 by internationalednews | Leave a comment

While we are in Finland over the next two weeks, our children will be in a ”practice school” in Helsinki. The school is similar to other schools in Finland, but it is associated with the University of Helsinki’s teacher education program and student teachers are placed there.

Our 9 year-old’s teacher shared with us what her schedule will be this week (Mon-Fri):

19.5.-23.5.2014

kello	MA	TI	KE	TO	PE
8.00-8.45				gym
9.00-9.45	French	gym	class	crafts
9.45-10.30	class	French	music	crafts	class
	FOOD	FOOD	FOOD	FOOR	FOOD
11.15-12	Englishlesson	class	class	music	English
12.00-12.45	class	class	class	class	class
13.15-14.00			class
14-14.45

Most other times of the year, the students would have 23 hours a week of school, but the teacher told us that this week there will be 2 hours less because of “theatre, musical, and movie visits.” On Wednesday, they will also be going fishing!

–Thomas Hatch

Tagged Finland, school schedule

IEN in Finland

Posted on May 16, 2014 by internationalednews | 1 comment

I launched IEN in 2011 to respond to a need I recognized when I returned from a year living in Norway with my wife, Karen Hammerness, and three daughters. Once back in the United States, I found it very difficult to get timely information on policy developments and the latest research on educational improvement outside the United States. Since then, working with Deirdre Faughey and other colleagues, we have searched for and shared links to articles, reports, and other resources that we hope provide a glimpse into what’s new, what’s good, and what’s effective in education around the world. One of the most powerful aspects of my experience in Norway, however, was the combination of learning about the educational system through my work with educators, researchers, and policymakers (summarized in “Beneath the surface of accountability”) and through my children’s experiences in Norwegian schools (briefly described in “What Norway (not Finland) can tell us about schools”). Through that experience we found how much we could learn from the approach of what some call a “low-performer” (Norway’s PISA scores have been closer to those of the US than to Finland’s over the years) but a system that can also be seen as highly successful in other respects.

Now, through a grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program and the Fulbright Center in Finland, my family and I are fortunate to have a similar (though much shorter) opportunity to learn about education in Finland. Over the next few weeks, my wife and I will be Visiting Scholars at the University of Helsinki. While most people want to know why Finland scores so much higher than the U.S. (even with some decreases in Finland’s latest PISA scores), I’m still interested in figuring out why Finland’s scores are so much higher than Norway’s – two countries that are much more comparable in terms of their social-welfare systems, size, and demographics. Karen will be continuing her studies of teacher education in Finland and several other countries. At the same time, our 9, 13, and 15 year olds will have a chance to spend the last two weeks of the Finnish school year in a school in Helsinki. While there, Karen and I hope to post occasional reflections on what we’re learning from our Finnish colleagues and to share as well what our children are doing. (We’ve already learned that the end-of-the-year in schools in Finland, as in the United States, often involves field trips and special projects)

Of course, our experiences will provide only a small window into what the educational system and the schools are like in Finland, but we hope it will complement perspectives from Finnish experts like Pasi Sahlberg and Hannu Simola as well as Americans who have had a chance to get inside schools in Finland including Tim Walker (a U.S. teacher teaching this year in a Finnish school) and journalist Amanda Ripley (who followed an American teenager during a year in a Finnish high school). Ideally, in the future, we will have more opportunities at IEN to share these kinds of personal perspectives on educational policy and practice in different countries. Our point, however, is not to suggest that there is any “best” model to follow nor to promote particular practices. Rather, we hope to encourage further reflection on the social, cultural, political, geographic, economic and other factors that shape different educational systems and the efforts to improve them.

–Thomas Hatch

Tagged Finland

Education reform in Mexico

Posted on May 15, 2014 by internationalednews | 1 comment

Dr. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo

The following post is based on a conversation with Dr. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo. I reached out to Dr. Rincón-Gallardo to learn more about his work in Mexican schools and to better understand how the current political climate in Mexico has influenced the grassroots reform efforts of Redes de Tutoría, a small NGO that catalyzed a movement to transform conventional classrooms in public schools into learning communities where independent learning and tutorial relationships are practiced by students and teachers. An excerpt of our conversation appears below. Click here to read more of the interview.

As we have covered in earlier IEN posts, when President Enrique Peña Nieto was elected in 2012 he introduced education reforms that sought to address issues of educational quality and governability through what Andres Delich called a “mix of centralization and decentralization.” As covered in the Harvard Policy Review, lackluster Pisa scores have called attention to the fact while enrollment and basic skills have improved, repetition rates remain high and resources are distributed inequitably. The country’s system for hiring and paying teachers has been pinpointed as a problematic issue. In Mexico, all teachers join the union (SNTE), and the union assigns teachers to schools; teachers earn lifetime tenure after just six month of service. In an effort strengthen government control, President Peña Nieto bolstered the power of the national evaluation agency (INEE), and established higher professional standards and accountability measures for teachers. Peña Nieto also arrested union President, Esther Gordillo, on charges of embezzlement and money laundering, and teachers have been protesting the reforms everywhere from Mexico City to Guerrero.

In the context of all of this change, we wanted to learn more about how the new policies influence the practice of education and, as Dr. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo explains, the social and political aspects of pedagogical reform.

Deirdre Faughey:

Can you tell us about your work in Mexico, and the ways in which political changes in the country have been influential?

Dr. Santiago Rincón-Gallardo:

Let me tell you a little bit about the Learning Community Project (LCP), which provided the context for my research. In 2004, I was part of a small NGO called Convivencia Educativa, A.C. (now Redes de Tutoría, S.C.) that started working with a few teachers in a small number of schools, providing very intensive classroom-based support for teachers interested in turning their classrooms into Learning Communities. We started working on a very small scale, about eight schools total, working with voluntary teachers in middle schools that were built in marginalized communities with very small populations. We started working with some teachers there, providing coaching and training, but also spending a lot of time in classrooms working with them to turn their conventional classroom into a learning community. We would spend a whole week with each teacher every month in their classrooms, trying to understand what we needed to do and what we could do to turn the classrooms into Learning Communities.

Even though the scale was very small there was a strong impact on the engagement and excitement of the teachers and students who joined the project: students were learning better and they were gaining a lot of confidence to undertake individual study, to engage in research and learn on their own, but also to express their views and their learning in public, both in writing and in oral presentations. Maybe most importantly, they also started to work as tutors to other students who were interested in learning what the students had come to master.

The excitement that we started seeing in this small number of schools started to spread through the outreach of teachers themselves, and some local authorities who started to get excited to see what these young kids were capable of and how excited they were about learning. They started reaching out to other teachers in other schools, other local authorities in other regions, visiting other classrooms to showcase or display the practice, and then having other people come to their classrooms to see what was going on there. There was a lot of movement and excitement.

In four years we had moved from eight schools to about 400 schools that were engaged in this new practice of Learning Communities – we call it the Tutorial Relationships Practice. At that point the Deputy Minister of Education at that time visited one of our schools, and he was very impressed with what he saw there, in terms of the engagement and the skill of the students, so he decided to adopt the model and bring it to scale to 9,000 schools all over the country.

At the same time that the movement at the grassroots was taking place, one of the key leaders of the NGO, whose name is Dalila López, was invited to join the Department of Innovation at the Ministry of Education at the national level, and she was able to bring in people from our organization to the ministry. So we were able to create a team within the Ministry to support the kind of work that we felt was worth supporting, which was developing the conditions for teachers to learn the new practice of tutorial relationships and disseminate it to other places. What the leadership at the top did was create opportunities and mobilize infrastructure for teachers to be able to visit other schools in their regions or in other states so that there was the exchange of information and practice all over the country. We found really good results really quickly.

The large-scale project started in 2010. By 2012, the schools that had data available, but also the ones that had been engaged in this model for a long time, since 2010, increased the percentage of kids scoring with an excellent levels, at a faster pace than and surpassing the national average. This happened in 2012, everything was moving very smoothly and powerfully. There has not been any other program or initiative in Mexico that has shown a clear and significant impact on student learning, even as measured by standardized tests. We started getting a lot of international attention. We had Richard Elmore from the Harvard School of Education, come to visit our schools. He experienced being tutored by a girl from a rural community, Maricruz, a 13 year old girl who was just amazing at guiding him through his own thinking, and identifying some of the weaknesses in his own thinking about how to solve a geometry problem. She was very masterful in supporting him. Throughout that visit, Richard and I were able to write a paper for the Harvard Education Review that discusses this model, and he got very excited about it. He’s been talking about it in his classes, and in 2012 and 2013 we welcomed about 10 students from Harvard’s Educational Leadership Doctorate program to come and learn about the model and report back to their cohorts about what they have learned. We had that for two years, so in total we have had 21 visitors or so. The work has been attracting the attention of several other international experts.

What’s happened since that pinnacle of performance? We had a change in administration at the presidential level, and also a change in the Ministry of Education. They came with a very clear agenda of cutting down any relationship with union leadership, in particular Esther Gordillo and her people. And it so happened that the Deputy Minister who had been supporting this work at the national level, and the one who invited us into the Ministry, was the son-in-law of Gordillo, the leader of the teachers’ union. As soon as this new administration came, they decided to cut down any relationship with them which meant also kicking out the whole team that had been building and supporting this work from the top. So the the leaders who launched and disseminated the Learning Community Project are again grouped around a small NGO called Redes de Tutoría, and they’ve continued to support the work on a smaller scale, but at a deeper level. Right now they’re working with five states that have expressed very clear interest in continuing this work. So the idea is to still go to scale – not at the national level, but at the state level. The strategy is to create “Regions of Excellence,” where you would have several schools who are engaged in this practice and sites where people could come and see what’s possible but also having this as a professional development site for others interested in learning the practice. We’re not entirely sure how many schools are going to continue with this work. As we are putting the pieces together we are trying to find ways in which we can continue to support teachers who are committed to this work but not getting a lot of support from the state-level authorities. We are trying to find a strategy to help continue this work. We’re doing the lobbying that we can because we know that there is some vibrancy in this work that won’t disappear unless somebody wants to really shut it down. I don’t think that’s going to be the case, but we don’t have the political backing at the national level so that teachers can feel free to innovate. The practice has gone underground, it’s invisible but it’s still there.

Please continue reading.

Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Interviews

Tagged education reform, Education research, mexico

Interview with Louise Stoll

Posted on May 5, 2014 by internationalednews | Leave a comment

Dr. Louise Stoll

Louise Stoll is Professor of Education at the London Centre for Leadership in Learning at the Institute of Education, University of London, as well as a freelance researcher and an international consultant. Her research and development activity focuses on how schools, districts and national systems create capacity for learning and improvement, focusing especially on leadership, learning communities and learning networks. This interview, which is part of the Lead the Change Series of the American Educational Research Association Educational Change Special Interest Group, appears as part of a series that features experts from around the globe, highlights promising research and practice, and offers expert insight on small- and large-scale educational change. Recently, Lead the Change has also published interviews with Diane Ravitch, and the contributors to Leading Educational Change: Global Issues, Challenges, and Lessons on Whole-System Reform (Teachers College Press, 2013) edited by Helen Janc Malone, have participated in a series of blogs from Education Week.

Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Interviews

Tagged Educational change, OECD, Professional Learning Community, UK

How does one of the top-performing countries in the world think about technology?

Posted on April 28, 2014 by internationalednews | 1 comment

The following post was written by Sarah Butrymowicz and originally published on The Hechinger Report.

Going ‘at your own pace’ isn’t part of the equation in Singapore

SINGAPORE—Forty students in bright yellow shirts hunched over their computers in Singapore’s Crescent Girls School as they raced against their teacher’s digital stopwatch. They had just a few minutes to add their thoughts about a short film on discrimination into a shared Google Doc and browse the opinions of their classmates.

When the time was up, their teacher led a discussion about the meaning of discrimination and how to judge the credibility of an argument. The computers sat mostly forgotten.

“The technology just fades away, and that’s what we hope for it to do,” said principal Ng Chen Kee.

Students at Crescent Girls School in Singapore discuss conflict and discrimination in groups while working on a shared Google Doc. (Photo: Sarah Butrymowicz)

Crescent Girls has plenty of flashy gadgets, but balances those with these more subtle exercises in a way that’s emblematic of how Singapore tries to approach education technology. Glitzy tech that serves no purpose other than being cool is frowned upon. In classrooms in Singapore, digital devices are increasingly viewed as a means to bring students together in collaboration, rather than separate them further.

In contrast, American students who have tools like tablets and computers in the classroom often use them in isolation, powering through interactive worksheets and online quizzes. Indeed, technology’s main purpose often seems to be giving students personalized learning paths and a way to progress at their own pace.

In part, it’s because online learning in America grew out of a push to move away from rigid requirements of the number of hours a student should spend on a subject in favor of allowing them to move on once a concept is mastered. “That’s where the conversation started within the U.S.,” said Allison Powell, a vice president at the International Association for K-12 Online Learning (iNacol). “In a lot of other places, it wasn’t about taking an individual online course. It was ‘Let’s integrate it into the classroom.’”

Singapore has been one of the highest performing countries on international assessments for decades, while the United States remains stuck below the top performers. Investments in education technology have been a key part of Singapore’s national plan for two decades and have been cited by some experts as a reason that the country has so much academic success.

Singapore, South Korea and Uruguay were praised by Richard Culatta, director of the United States Department of Education office of educational technology, as global leaders in technology in the classroom. “These are impressive places and they didn’t get there because they randomly decided to do it. These are countries that have not taken their eye off the ball,” he said. “There’s a point where if we’re going to remain competitive globally, we need to make sure we’re keeping up.”

In the late 1990s, the Singapore Ministry of Education unveiled its master plan for technology. The first phase was spent building up infrastructure and getting computers into schools. In the 2000s, in phases two and three, the ministry focused on training teachers in how to use gadgets and identifying schools to experiment with new innovations.

The Ministry of Education would not provide information on how much money it had spent on these initiatives, but in a presentation for the World Bank, said phase one had cost $2 billion over five years and phase two $600 million over three years. In 2010, the Ministry of Education committed another $610 million over eight years for technology in schools, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Crescent Girls School was selected in 2008 to be one of these so-called FutureSchools. With extra money from the Ministry and support from the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore’s teacher training university, these eight schools must develop and trial new types of technology. If they work, the plan is to spread them to other schools.

History teachers at Hwa Chong Institution are working to create new social media platforms for students to share reflections. Students at Canberra Primary School visit a 4D immersive lab in groups to learn about different environments, like the rainforest. Crescent Girls has developed the “digital trails” platform, where students and teachers make interactive maps by adding text, photos and videos. The school also has a room full of touch-screen tables, loaded with games and applications to prompt discussion and teamwork. In one, four students, each with a different responsibility, must use geometry concepts to protect a submarine from enemies.

A student at Marsling Secondary School in Singapore navigates around a virtual environment for the first time. His teachers plan to make a digital gallery for the students to show case designs and comment on each other’s work. (Photo: Sarah Butrymowicz)

Beyond the FutureSchools, the Ministry is also bankrolling other tech endeavors for schools. Researcher Kenneth Lim has set up a lab at the NIE where he’ll design custom immersive virtual environments for any lesson teachers want, such as a lesson on perspective in an art class or one on water shortages in geography.

The worlds are designed to be incomplete and act as a virtual workbook, where students can try to fill in the blanks. They wander around with their avatars, talking to classmates in person and online. “Their whole threat level is lowered,” Lim said. “They make mistakes.”

Singapore is trying to move beyond the much-criticized culture of high-pressure testing and studying by memorization here and in many other Asian countries. That’s why officials are focusing on soft skills, like collaboration and confidence. Technology, like Lim’s work, is becoming a popular way to allow students to learn by exploring without worrying about the consequences of failure.

On a January morning, Lim and his team helped eighth graders in a Design and Technology class at Marsiling Secondary School enter their virtual world for the first time and practice drawing basic shapes. The end goal was create a gallery that would allow students to comment and help each other on their work.

It’s the first major technological project the school has undertaken, and as Principal Foong Lai Leong stood in the corner watching, she was trying to think of other courses that might benefit from some digital lessons. Science and art, definitely, she decided. Maybe even certain topics in math.

There’s no pressure from the Ministry of Education to use technology for any particular subject or in any way. It is encouraged, but always with a reminder to “be wise, be judicious,” said Ng Pak Tee, an associate dean at the NIE. “It should not be a teacher looking at a technology saying, ‘Wow.’”

This careful and deliberate introduction of digital devices into the classroom sets Singapore apart from many places in America. While some districts or schools have rolled out programs thoughtfully, they’re still the minority, Powell said. “I get calls from superintendents and principals on a daily basis [saying], ‘I went out and bought 500 iPads. Now what do I do?”

Reforma educacional: las claves del proceso que busca poner fin a la selección en los colegios

Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Newspaper Articles

Tagged education technology, instruction, Singapore

Education reform in Chile

Posted on April 24, 2014 by internationalednews | 2 comments

Is the government really putting an end to private education in Chile? A recent article in Xinhua.net (which was also picked up by Shanghai Daily) makes it seem so. On April 20th, Diane Ravitch noticed the article and posted it on her blog using the headline: BREAKING NEWS. However, later that same day, Ravitch posted two more posts: “More on Chile’s education reforms,” and “Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world.” In each of these posts, Ravitch calls upon Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation (a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008, which put forth reform proposals) for clarification.

Dr. Mario Waissbluth

I also wrote to Professor Waissbluth for more information and he made it clear that Chile was NOT actually ending private education, as Xinhua.net and Shanghai Daily made it seem. Waissbluth pointed me to his clarifying post, in which he explains that the educational system in Chile is far too complex for such a simple solution. He details the cultural hurdles that Chile must overcome to address what has become, in his words, “a true apartheid.” He also explains what will be changing in Chile:

Education Minister, Mr. Nicolás Eyzaguirre (with a powerful political and financial experience and profile) has announced the first wave of legislation, to be sent to Congress in May, whose details are now being drafted. They include, amongst other things, the radical ending of academic selection and skimming, the gradual elimination of cost-sharing (to reduce social skimming), the phasing out of 3,500 for-profit schools (to be converted into non-profits), the radical pruning of the standardized testing system, the strengthening and expansion of the public network of schools (so that they can compete in a better way with the charters) and a major reform to the teaching profession, from its training (completely unregulated so far), to improving salaries and working conditions.

While it is not an overall end to private education, these changes do seem – to use a word Waissbluth employs in the quote above – somewhat radical. What seems even more striking, to an outside observer, is the fact that these changes have come about after the student protests that came to be known as the “Chilean Winter” of 2011-2013.

Valentina Quiroga

It will be interesting to understand better the link between these protests and the reforms. For example, in February Valentina Quiroga (one of the student leaders involved with the protests) was appointed undersecretary of education.

It is also interesting to note that coverage of Chile’s education reforms has been somewhat limited, and information in English-language news sources is not easy to find. We will continue to pay close attention to the evolving situation in Chile and will follow-up with another post in the coming weeks.

—Deirdre Faughey

For more information:

Chile: Students set to win free higher education

Chile’s Bachelet to unveil $8bn tax hike to fund education boost

Chile: Bachelet elected, social reforms begin

2 Comments

Posted in About K-12 International Education News, Newspaper Articles

Tagged Chile, education reform, private education, school change, student protests

Global Learning Alliance Conference 2014

Posted on April 17, 2014 by internationalednews | Leave a comment

A recent meeting of the Global Learning Alliance (GLA) included a series of presentations from educators around the world responding to the question: “What in the world are schools doing to cultivate 21st century capacities, and why does this matter?” The GLA was established to to share ideas for moving schools and educational systems towards supporting the development of 21st century skills and brings together scholars, researchers, teachers and school leaders from China, Canada, Singapore, Finland, and the US among others.

Presentations at the conference included discussions of recent developments in countries like Singapore and Finland as well as considerations of broader issues of change and innovation. A symposium of educators from Singapore, for example, described innovative school level programs designed to support the development of engineering and design skills amongst high school students. At the same time, Dr. Suzanne Choo, of Singapore’s National Institute of Education, also cautioned that while students there are excelling in many areas like English language and mathematics, fewer and fewer students are taking traditional liberal arts subjects like English Literature. Dr. Jari Lavonen, of the University of Helsinki, suggested that many of the conditions for innovation in schools are in place in Finland. These include a long-term policy vision rather than “ad hoc” ideas from multiple policymakers; decentralized decision-making and assessment at a local level instead of standardization, inspections, and national testing; trust-based responsibility instead of test-based accountability; and collaboration, networks, and partnerships vs. competition and rankings.

Dennis Shirley, Professor of Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College and author of The Global Fourth Way, also focused on the possibilities for cross-cultural learning in education. Shirley, who began his career as an education historian, discussed how examples of cross-cultural learning through history, including the way kindergarten permeated the rest of the world, could be vehicles for innovation or for maintaining the status quo.

At issue throughout were fundamental questions, however, about what constitutes “innovation”: When is a program or a practice actually “new” and when and to what extent do “innovations” lead to better schools and educational systems?

B.C. students among best in world at problem solving but ‘work’ remains

Tagged Educational change, Finland, Global Learning Alliance, innovation, Sinagore

2012 Pisa Creative Problem Solving exam in headlines from around the world

Posted on April 5, 2014 by internationalednews | 2 comments

In a response similar to what we have seen with the release of other global rankings of testing results, the 2012 Pisa Creative Problem Solving rankings prompted a wide-ranging media response around the world. As you will see in the quick collection of headlines we have gathered here, the news is interpreted as good, bad, and for some, a call to action – particularly for those countries that interpret their low scores as being related to the fact that this Pisa exam was computer-based. In recognition of the fact that this collection is from mostly English-language publications, we invite you to share other articles on this topic in the comment section below.

Canada, The Vancouver Sun

“When it comes to problem solving, B.C. students are the best in the country and seventh in the world, the latest international assessment scores show. But Canada has fallen out of the top-10 math scores on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment — or PISA — from 2012.”

Finland, The Helsinki Times & yle.fi

Young Finns are persistent problem-solvers, Pisa assessment finds

“On an average, boys outperformed girls in the problem-solving tests in all but one of the participating countries – Finland, where girls beat boys emphatically.”

PISA: Finnish kids best problem-solvers in Europe

“Finnish children scored highly enough to finish joint fourth out of OECD countries with Australia in the ranking, which made Finland the highest-performing European country in problem-solving. Ahead of Finland were South Korea, Japan and Canada.”

Singapore, The Straits Times

Singapore students excel in problem-solving, a global study shows

“Singapore’s 15-year-olds don’t just excel in mathematics, science and reading, they are also world beaters when it comes to solving complex and unfamiliar problems, a global study shows.”

Japan, The Asahi Shimbun

Japanese students place 3rd in problem-solving skill testing

“Japanese students ranked third in problem-solving ability as part of testing of the academic competencies of 15-year-olds in 44 countries and regions in 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said on April 1.”

Malaysia, http://www.malaysia.msn.com

Malaysia ranks 39 out of 44 countries in problem-solving test for 15-year-olds, says report

“Malaysia once again fared poorly in a world student performance assessment test conducted in 2012, ending up in the bottom quarter among 44 countries – a result that reinforces the concern that the country’s education system is in tatters.”

South Korea, http://www.arirang.co.kr

Korean students best at problem solving: OECD

“Their score, just a point behind Singapore, was the second-highest when taking into account all the 44 participating countries, and the highest among OECD countries.”

Taiwan, The China Post

Taiwan places fourth in math: OECD assessment

“Mathematics remains one of the strengths of Taiwanese students, according to an assessment conducted under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”

Spain, http://www.thelocal.es

Spain’s schools are failing immigrants: OECD

First the bad news: Spanish school students with an immigrant background performed significantly worse than their ‘native’ peers in the recent PISA test. In fact, there was a 39-point difference in the OECD exam which assesses practical life skills like how to operate a remote control or buy train tickets.

US, http://www.pbs.org

Mixed messages on whether U.S. students will be well-prepared for the workforce

“According to the first report from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, American students performed just above average on a new, international test of problem-solving skills given to 15-year-olds. Students in Singapore and Korea had the highest average scores, while U.S. students scored similarly to those in Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, England and the Netherlands.”

UK, www.theguardian.com

Students in England perform highly in international problem-solving test

“Students in England have performed higher than average in a key international test to measure problem-solving skills vital to the job market. England came 11th overall, edged out of the top 10 by Singapore, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Shanghai, but outperformed most western rivals.”

Australia, http://www.theaustralian.com.au

Students better at problem-solving than maths, reading or science

“One in six Australian 15-year-olds scored at the highest levels in the tests, compared with the OECD average of one in five, but one in six students also scored at the lowest level and were only able to solve straightforward problems.”

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