Learn the lesson @ Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
HRD ministry’s return to PISA is welcome. Now, use the comparative data generated to reform school education.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development
must be congratulated for steering India back to the Programme for
International Student Assessment (PISA), which it had declined to participate
in after a disastrous performance in 2009. PISA is a global evaluation of
15-year-olds conducted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development to gauge mathematical, scientific and reading skills of school
students. Of the 74 nations participating, India was close to the bottom of the
barrel. The UPA government had quit the field in high dudgeon, complaining
about questions being set “out of context” in relation to the Indian
socio-cultural milieu. Indeed, an Indian student may find it more comfortable
to do sums using mangoes rather than avocados for units. But the argument can
be taken only thus far, for the context of math and science is the universe and
its contents. Besides, a test involving European motifs which Indian students
could not engage with should have been just as inscrutable to Mandarin readers.
The phenomenal success of Shanghai’s students suggests that the problem lies in
India.
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Anyway,
PISA is not a contest. It is a research exercise generating data which can be
compared across borders. Finishing last should not be read as losing face,
but rather as an opportunity to improve teaching methods and school systems
by intelligent comparison. If Singapore’s systems work better, what prevents
Indian school boards from emulating them? India lost out by boycotting PISA
in 2012 and 2015, when Asian countries like China, South Korea and Singapore
surged ahead. India need not have missed the bus, but the HRD ministry tried
to change the benchmark to fit the country, rather than trying to change the
country’s teaching system to fit the benchmark.
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While PISA is not a contest, it does have one
competitive aspect: It is a reliable indicator of the future intellectual
capital of participating countries. At one remove, it is a function of
projected GDP, a reflection of the future wealth of nations. A country hoping
to win the global GDP race should regard PISA as a target. And it should try to
correct the structural imbalance that this test for schoolchildren draws
attention to: India swears by universities and IITs, but it is happy to let
primary and secondary schools, which form the bedrock of the education system,
plod along with teaching methods that are decades old. The NDA government has
done well to seek to return to PISA’s global testing system. But the crucial
reform still lies ahead: PISA data must be used to improve the school system.
Source | Indian Express | 23 February 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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