學生能力國際評估計劃在倫敦的發佈會 (英文版)
OECD - UNESCO
Launch of the joint study
Literacy Skills for the World of Tomorrow:
Further Results from PISA 2000
London
1 July 2003
EQUITY AND QUALITY GO TOGETHER
Remarks by
John Daniel
Assistant Director-General for Education, UNESCO
May I welcome you to this news conference and thank you for joining us? I am John Daniel, Assistant Director-General for Education at UNESCO, and it is a pleasure to introduce my colleague Andreas Schleicher, Head of OECD’s Educational Indicators and Analysis Division. Andreas has devoted much of his professional life to the PISA study over the last few years and will talk to you in a moment about some of the most important results of this study. My role is to set the context for you.
PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. Its core aim is to assess the reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy of 15-year old students. The first results of the study were presented in 2001 and covered 28 of the 30 OECD countries. Those results caused something of a stir in countries where the achievement of their youngsters, in comparison with those in other countries, did not accord with the national self-image.
But I stress that our purpose is not to produce international league tables of intellectual firepower. We have two main aims. The first is to shift the assessment of educational performance from inputs to outcomes. We are trying to measure what the kids can actually do and how well it will serve them in later life. This is in contrast to input measures of things like the per capita investment of public funds per secondary school student or pupil-teacher ratio, to give just two examples.
Our second aim is to help policy makers by trying to discover what really makes a difference to student performance. For example, some countries outperform others while spending much less. Why is this?
Two things have happened since the first major PISA study was published. First, some 35 non-OECD countries have requested to join the study and 15 are included in this report. Performance of their 15-year olds was measured in 2001-02 and analysed alongside the results obtained in the OECD countries in 2000.
Second, we have extended the analysis of the data beyond what we were able to do in 2001, in particular by taking advantage of having a more varied set of countries and systems to examine again the influence of different factors on performance.
These two developments explain why OECD invited UNESCO to make PISA a joint effort. UNESCO’s membership includes practically all countries. On the UNESCO side the major contribution has been made by our UNESCO Institute of Statistics in Montreal, represented here today by my colleague Yanhong Zhang. We are delighted to be part of this project because it helps to balance UNESCO’s previous interest in educational quality, which has been more focused on values and curriculum, with the study of outcomes.
That will suffice for the context, but we would happy to respond to questions about it. Before I hand over to Andreas Schleicher let me suggest some of the stories this report contains. Although I have not been closely associated with this work I have read the whole report in the last few days as I travelled to and from Afghanistan via Azerbaijan. Here is what struck me.
First, of course, you will want to look at the league tables and see how OECD and non-OECD countries compare. Youngsters in one non-OECD jurisdiction, Hong Kong-China, outperform most the of OECD countries in all three measures of literacy: reading, mathematical and scientific. The other non-OECD participants show lower performance than the OECD average. Why is this?
Second, the study strongly suggests that equity and quality are more than compatible. High average quality and equality of outcomes go together. Canada, Finland, Hong Kong-China, Iceland, Japan, Korea and Sweden all display above average levels of student performance in reading literacy and, at the same time, a below average impact of economic, cultural and social status on student performance. Conversely, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary and Luxembourg are significantly below the OECD average in performance but above average in the disparities between students from advantaged and disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.
Third, girls do better than boys in reading literacy across the piece, that is to say in every one of the OECD and non-OECD countries and jurisdictions studied. In mathematical literacy boys do better, although not that much better, in most countries, whereas in science the picture is mixed and the differences less marked.
Furthermore, girls now have higher expectations of their futures than boys. This all suggests that efforts to strengthen girls’ education are bearing fruit. Indeed, for many countries the major educational challenge now is a long tail of under performing boys at the low end of the distribution.
There is plenty more, particularly about the relative influence of factors related to the home and to the school, as well as about student motivation. However, the analysis there gets quite subtle and I’d like to hand you over to Andreas Schleicher, who has the data at his fingertips and has thought deeply about it.
I conclude by saying that as head of education at UNESCO my main challenge is the campaign for Education for All, whose main purpose is to get into school the 100+ million kids, mostly girls, who don’t go to school now. In that context I find this report encouraging, even though it deals with the richer part of the world. It tells us that you can achieve quality by pursuing equity. And it shows that if you give girls a chance, they will perform very well.
I hand you over to Andreas Schleicher.
