The outcomes of the PISA 2015 Report warn about the need of strengthening our youth with more and better skills.  

The results of the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) 2015  were recently released and, as it usually happens, the outcomes arise heated debates around the quality of the education in the region.

The test is taken every three years to 15 years old students from over 60 participant economies from all over the world. The goal is to measure the performance of young people in three key areas: science, mathematics and reading.

In the 2015 edition, the focus was set on science, given their growing relevance in the economy and society. A sample of 540,000 students were assessed, representing the near 29 million 15 years old kids there are in the world.

The PISA Reports aim to generate data on the three following indicators:

• Basic indicators that provide a profile of the students’ knowledge and skills.
• Indicators of how these skills are linked to economic, social, demographic and educational variables.
• Indicators of trends that show changes in results and distributions, and in the relationship among the variables of the students’ level, school’s level, and education system’s level.

In order to understand the report, the following key points should be considered:

• As regards sciences, those students who achieve top levels of performance are capable of using abstract scientific concepts or ideas to explain rather complex phenomenon they are unfamiliar with.
• As regards mathematics, students with top level performance demonstrate having advanced mathematical thinking and reasoning.
• High levels of performance in reading show that students can retain information that requires them to localize and organize pieces of information in a complex text of graphic.

Meanwhile, when low levels of performance are achieved,

• In the case of science, it shows that students cannot use basic scientific knowledge to interpret data and reach valid scientific conclusions.
• In the case of mathematics, low levels of performance mean that students are incapable of computing the price of an object in another currency or of comparing the total distance between two alternative routes.
• Finally, when students show low performance levels in reading, it indicates they have great difficulties recognizing the core idea of a text.

Furthermore, PISA analyses gender and social equity gaps. In the case of social equity gaps, it analyses up to what extent education outcomes are linked to the social status of the students’ parents, as well as the performance gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students.

What were the outcomes?

On a global level the 10 economies with best performance in science were Singapore (556 pts.), Japan (538), Estonia (534), China Taipei (532), Finland (531), China Macao (529), Canada (528), Vietnam (525), Hong Kong (523), and BSJG China (518).

The 3 countries with the worst performance in science were Kosovo (378), Algeria (376) and the Dominican Republic (332). The average of OECD economies was 493 points.

When analyzing the results in mathematics, we observe that, once again, Singapore leads the ranking with 564 points. It is followed by Hong Kong (548), Macao China (544), China Taipei (542), Japan (532), BSJG China (531), South Korea (524), Switzerland (521), Estonia (520), and Canada (516).

The three countries with worst performance were, once again, Kosovo (362), Algeria (360) and the Dominican Republic (328). The average of OECD economies was 490 points.

Finally, the analysis on reading show that the top 10 economies were: Singapore (535), Hong Kong (527), Canada (527), Finland (526), Ireland (521), Estonia (519), South Korea (517), Japan (516), Norway (513), and New Zealand (509).

The three economies with poorest performance in this area were Algeria (350), Kosovo (347), and Lebanon (347). The OECD average in Reading was 493 points.

What were the outcomes of the region?

Similarly to previous editions, the Latin American and Caribbean economies were amongst the worst in the world.

In Science, the top performing Latin American country was Chile, with 447 points. The ranking is completed with Uruguay (435), Trinidad and Tobago (425), Costa Rica (420), Colombia (416), Mexico (416), Brazil (401), Peru (397) and the Dominican Republic (358).

It is important to mention that there were improvements in certain countries in the region when comparing the 2006 and the 2015 results.  For example, Chile went from scoring 438 points in 2006 to 447 in 2015. The most outstanding cases were those of Colombia, which went from scoring 388 points in 2006 to 416 in 2015, and Uruguay, which scored 428 points in 2006 and 435 points in 2015.

Nevertheless, every Latin American economy surveyed reached scores that are way below the OECD average.

As regards Mathematics, once again Chile is the regional leader with 423 points, followed by Uruguay (418), Trinidad and Tobago (417), and Mexico (408). The countries with the worst performance in this area are Peru (387), Brazil (377) and the Dominican Republic (328).

When we analyze the results in Reading, we observe that Chile on the top of the regional ranking with 459 points, followed by Uruguay (437), and Costa Rica (427). The economies that scored at the bottom of the regional ranking were Brazil (407), Peru (398) and the Dominican Republic (358).

The number of countries in the region that took part of PISA has grown, and, in every country, the percentage of young people who are in the education system and took the test also grew. However, participation in the test is not universal yet, and it varies in every country. Chile has the highest participation rate, reaching 80% of the 15 years old students. In Mexico, Brazil, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic the participation rate is below 70%.

In the case of Argentina, for 2015 the test was taken only to 55% of the sample of 15 year old students. Therefore, results were not reported.

What do these outcomes mean?

Despite certain improvements in Science and Mathematics in Peru and Colombia, Latin American countries still perform way below leading nations.

In order to understand the meaning of the results that the region got in the assessment, it is important to consider that PISA tests do not only measure whether a student can recreate knowledge, but whether he/she can extrapolate from what he/she has learnt and apply that knowledge in unfamiliar situations. In other words, the test provides questions that make students think.

As Melina Furman, PhD in Education of the University Columbia, claims, education systems in Latin America keep on “prioritizing shallow and encyclopedic content learning, which students assimilate without truly understanding them, instead of focusing, like other regions in the world do, on learning thinking capacities and complex problem solving skills, which are core pieces of knowledge for life.”

Andreas Schleicher, Director of Education at the OECD , said that Latin America faces a major challenge, which basically consists on  moving away from a system focused on contents’ learning, and prioritizing that students learn how to “… think as a scientist, as a mathematician, as a philosopher, or as a historian.”

In addition, Schleicher claimed that one of the main problems of the region is inequality. Those students who are lucky enough to be born in wealthy families, have more favored education, and labor, paths that students who have fewer initial advantages.

The expert said that teachers’ careers must be professionalized and prioritized, which does not exclusively mean paying better salaries, but also turning teaching into an intellectually challenging profession.

Finally, the Schleicher referred to the problem of school drop outs, and encouraged countries in Latin America to reflect on the causes of this phenomenon. “Plenty of young people do not think that what they are learning will be of use in their lives. This problem must be faced, students cannot be kept inside schools are if these were prisons”, he said.

 “I directly link the importance of PISA to the demographic bonus. The region is going through a period in which the working age population outnumbers the non-working population. If we fail to strengthen our youth in relevant skills, the possibility of development might become a utopia”, warned Martin Padulla, Founder and Managing Director of staffingamericalatina.