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On Standards and Diversity
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International Programs PISA The OECD Program for International Student Assessment gauges the achievement of students (age 15) before the end of their high school years from industrialized countries. The tests scrutinize how these young people use their knowledge, rather than just how much they learned in school. This includes assessing how they approach learning, beliefs in their own abilities, motivation, attitudes and the problem-solving skills. PISA has become an important measure for the countries involved and a point of measure to assess national education policies. An important aspect of PISA is measuring literacy. This not only tests knowledge, i.e., the skills of performing a certain task, but also understanding the relevance of knowledge in one's life. Why is it important to know calculus? Why is it important to know a foreign language? Why is it important to study the chemistry of genes? Using science literacy and example, PISA divides assessment thereof into three distinguishable categories:
It all reflects the general idea that a complete education is not just one of knowing certain facts and concepts, but to use this knowledge to evaluate new information and making decisions in personal matters but also matters of public interest and participation. Participation based on informed consent is an invaluable commodity in a free and democratic society. National Programs PISA is of course a form of standardized testing that compares a large group of students (265,000 in 2002) from 30+ countries. While it is important for countries of similar economic and political standing, standardized testing on national and regional levels are more relevant as a measure of educational achievements. Standardized testing has become fashionable because it is perceived as a tool to hold public institutions accountable for their performance. Accountability means to measure a performance against some yard stick. Two forms of comparisons are used; first, a relative measure using percentiles, usually the median, that puts each school (district) on a scale determining how many perform better and how many perform worse. This form of measurement indicates the distribution of quality of education. This relative measure, however, must be backed up by a second gauge, a gauge that gives us an idea of a how good the overall education is. Ideally, in a society that demands equality of education, all schools should perform close or at the median (in fact, if all schools score exactly the same there would be no distribution and the median would represent all schools and it would mean that all schools perform the same. This sameness could be at a low or high level of knowledge). Thus, the second measure tests an absolute level of performance. We need to reach a certain standard and most tests are addressing this measure, e.g., the scholastic aptitude test (SAT) at the individual level and the academic performance index (API) in California at the school district level. California
Standardized Testing and Reporting H
o m e Copyright © 2000-2011 Lukas K. Buehler |
