PISA and TIMSS are like apples and oranges

While most employers and parents expect students in the real world to be able to spell correctly, the PISA approach is to accept answers like the following as correct and to give students full marks: “because before than it disapeared completly and at that time it reapeared (sic)”.

A second problem with PISA is the way the test adopts fuzzy maths in opposition to the more traditional approach. The PISA test ignores student ability to master mathematical operations and calculations, preferring to focus on problem solving and guesswork.

The results of fuzzy or real-world maths are clear to see. Not only do many of our universities now have remedial classes for first year science and maths students, but, as a visit to the local market demonstrates, most teenagers are incapable of mental arithmetic.

Unlike PISA, with its faddish approach, the TIMSS test focuses on what is taught in terms of essential mathematics and science content. TIMSS also identifies effective classrooms by analysing the characteristics of those systems that perform best. Effective classrooms are those where teachers actually teach, instead of “facilitating”, and where more time is spent on whole class work instead of students working individually or in groups.

Successful systems like Singapore and the Netherlands also have succinct syllabus documents that focus on essential learning, especially during the early years, and which give teachers a clear and easy to follow road map of what it to be taught. There is regular testing and the assumption is that students should only progress after they have mastered the set work. This approach is the opposite of what happens in most Australian classrooms.

NSW curriculum, for example, as noted by the Vinson Report, is cumbersome and bureaucratic and teachers complain that in attempting to cover so much ground students miss out on the basics. More traditional skills like mental arithmetic, rote learning times tables and mastering algorithms like long division are ignored in favour of calculators and problem solving and students are promoted from year to year without a clear sense of whether they have passed or failed.

In most English classrooms, phonics has given way to the whole language approach where, instead of learning the relationship between letters and sounds, students are taught to look and guess.

The result? According to the 1996 national literacy test, initiated by the Howard Government, approximately 30 per cent of primary students failed to meet the minimum standard considered essential if they were to cope with future learning.

Last year, a second survey carried out by the Australian Council for Educational Research, concluded that approximately one third of year 9 students lacked the literacy skills needed to cope with the demands of the senior school curriculum.

Significant for Australia is that countries like the USA and England that have improved their performance in TIMSS have dropped progressive fads in favour of a more academic approach. An approach based on teachers teaching, students knowing right and wrong answers and mastering the basics.