Key education policy decisions in the early 2000s have not produced the desired results. But broad bipartisan agreement is now needed to give children and teachers the greatest chance of success.
PISA tests are taken every four years.
Keith Morris/Alamy
Australia has a wide gap in educational outcomes between children in poverty and their better-off peers. A new study indicates why reducing child poverty is the best way to lift our educational game.
Motivation plays a large part in educational success. Of students who sat the PISA test in 2018, 73% indicated they would have put in more effort had the scores counted towards their school marks.
Lockdowns and learning from home have further embedded digital technology in young people’s lives. Educational theory and practice need to catch up fast.
Improving initial teacher education is a long-term strategy. It won’t achieve the education minister’s goal of getting Australia to the top-performing nations in maths and literacy by 2030.
China is fast becoming a middle-class nation.
Ewan Yap/Unsplash
Parents in Shanghai are aiming for their children to adopt Western style values – like self-discovery.
While no test is perfect but the Programme for International Student Assessment rankings are pretty useful for understanding the skills young people are being equipped with.
www.shutterstock.com
The skills children learn at school have dramatic implications for their own future and the nation’s productivity, living standards and income inequality.
The latest OECD PISA results show Australia is doing worse than last time in science and maths.
from shutterstock.com
Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research
Australian education is still going backwards from where we started in 2000 – new PISA results show.
More testing won’t improve math achievement. Here, Alberta premier Jason Kenney with Adriana LaGrange, Minister of Education, after being sworn into office in Edmonton on April 30, 2019.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jason Franson
The main problem plaguing Alberta students’ math performance isn’t the current math curriculum or teacher accountability, but inequality and ballooning class sizes.
Focusing on narrow PISA measures may increase skill levels but cause students to miss out on the kinds of learning that generates higher-order thinking.
(Shutterstock)
There are many reasons to be skeptical about PISA rankings, and their use to compare student achievement or to identify best practices or solutions for educational problems.
The big spending provinces in Canada did not necessarily get the best Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) standardized test results.
(Shutterstock)
Research shows that the provinces vary widely in their ability to produce academic results for money they spend, and PEI shows the most efficient results.
Policy-makers must remember that the social consequences of a test are just as important as the test’s content.
(Shutterstock)
The stakes could be highest for students around the world as education systems decide how to respond to the changing shape of global standardized testing.
The Shanghai maths method is considered to be one the best in the world for teaching students mathematics, but it doesn’t necessarily translate well into English schools.
Canadians seem not to want to talk about race and racism, deferring instead to ‘income’ and immigration status when it comes to measuring education success.
LeonardoBurgos /Unsplash
News of Canada’s successful immigrant students glosses over important stories of racism, for example the ‘streaming’ of Black males. But without more data beyond Toronto, the story is hard to share.
Students’ sense of belonging at school is linked to how well they do at school.
Shutterstock
Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research
Australian students, on average, reported a poorer sense of belonging at school than the OECD average. But issues with sense of belonging aren’t distributed evenly across the population.
A still from a popular movie, Rainbow Troops, depicts teacher Muslimah, a character based on a real teacher, who inspires her students. Indonesia requires teachers to have passion.
Miles Films & Mizan Productions
Indonesia has allocated a huge percentage of education funding to improve the quality of teachers through various reforms. Yet their performance has not improved. What was missing?
Almost 10 per cent of Canadian 15-year-olds do not have the science proficiency level required to participate fully in society.
(Shutterstock)
Canada’s educational performance internationally has remained stagnant over the past decade. Students’ science and math proficiency is especially worrying.
Chemistry class at the Dong Tien Secondary School, Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam.
Asian Development Bank/flickr