Next Tuesday, September 8, the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will be known, the largest international evaluation on education in the world promoted by the OECD. 91 countries participate and Spain is among them. But what is PISA and what is it for?
Who do you evaluate?
It evaluates what 15-year-olds know and are able to do with what they know at the end of their Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO). If they have not repeated a year, they are between 3rd and 4th year of ESO because the OECD analyzes students born in 2009, regardless of their academic career. It does not measure rote content but competencies. How they apply what they have learned.
Not all students of that age take the exam, but rather a sample from each territory. The sample must be representative of the same and is established based on many variables (gender, socioeconomic composition, type of center...). In Spain, some 40,000 students from a thousand educational centers have applied.
All autonomous communities finance an expansion of the initial sample for Spain. This allows obtaining disaggregated results with statistical validity for each territory, equating them to independent countries in the analyses. The sample from Catalonia will not be representative in this edition due to a sample failure. In Spain, these tests are coordinated by the National Institute of Educational Evaluation (INEE) of the Ministry of Education and FP.
How are they evaluated?
The results are expressed on a scoring scale whose average is set at 500 points. Spain obtained in PISA 2022, just after the pandemic, a score of 472 in mathematics, 476 in language and 485 in science. Student performance levels range from 1 (lowest) to 6, and each country can know what proportion of its students reach the most advanced levels or remain at the lowest.
What does it evaluate?
Three competencies that are considered core in all systems in the world are evaluated: mathematics, reading and science. Each edition delves into one of the three. In PISA 2025 (so called because they were held in the first semester of that year) the subject that has been evaluated most intensively is science.
In addition to these three there are several collateral evaluations. In each cycle, an innovative competence is explored, such as collaborative problem solving, in 2015, global competence, in 2018, and creative thinking, in 2022. This edition has resulted in analyzing students' mastery of solving problems through the digital world.
The results of this competition, along with the foreign language (English) competition that has also been introduced for the first time, will be known next spring.
Why do they matter?
The results of Spain, which usually ranks below the OECD average, condition the political agenda, curricular reforms and the allocation of resources. The positions raised by each report are recurring. The Socialist Government highlights that the Spanish system is more resilient compared to others and that the school dropout rate improves. The Popular Party usually points to the results as proof of the need for greater academic demands. Sumar demands more investment in equity and other parties criticize the effects of the new education law in international comparison. Other agents in the educational community such as teachers and families point out that there are other evaluations that also evaluate competencies.
Who cares?
To families with children in ESO, to the teachers who prepare these students, to those responsible for educational policies and to any citizen interested in the quality of the educational system.
For administrations, these types of evaluations are essential for deciding educational policies. It provides a perspective on the educational performance of all citizens and a comparison with other countries. Identify strengths and weaknesses of the educational system.
In addition, PISA collects data on the socioeconomic environment of families, the school climate and the use of technology, which allows performance to be related to external factors. Factors such as equity and inclusion are essential to identify and correct inequalities in certain groups of students (immigrants, women, people with disabilities, etc.). For this reason, students are also asked specific questions about their situation and that of their family.
How does Spain fare?
Spain dropped in PISA 2022 due to the effect of the Covid pandemic that affected children's learning and their emotional well-being. The same thing happened in all countries. In Spain the drop was not as serious and that was related to the confinement period, which was shorter than in other OECD countries. However, the Spanish system has been losing scores since 2018 in the three subjects evaluated. In mathematics and language, Spain was at the level of Germany, France, Portugal or Norway.
Catalonia, however, collapsed. In seven years, he lost the equivalent of almost two grades in reading and 18 months in mathematics and science.
What has happened in Catalonia?
Catalonia has been left out of the international comparison. The educational centers excluded 23% of the students from the test because they believed that they were not qualified to take it. The reason given was that the students had learning difficulties or behavioral problems. Only a small part of those excluded were students of immigrant origin. The OECD recommends not exceeding a rate of 5%. Only five centers adjusted to this percentage while about ten centers exceeded the 40% exclusion.
As a result of the sample not being representative of the Catalan population, the organization decided to exclude Catalonia from the international comparison.
However, the ministry intends to publish the data for Catalonia with this exclusion, even if it is not valid. It will do so with an asterisk indicating that they are not useful for comparison with other autonomies.
The Catalan incidence put the tests in Spain as a whole at risk, but the validation and supervision commissions of the OECD determined that the Spanish sample was not affected.
