[Phys-L] int'l student assessment -- OECD PISA 2003

[jsd at AV8N.COM (John Denker)]

Hi --

> "Learning for Tomorrow's World: First results from PISA 2003"
> presents initial results from the PISA 2003 assessment. The report
> goes well beyond an examination of the relative standing of countries
> in mathematics, science and reading. It also looks at a wider range
> of educational outcomes that include students’ motivation to learn,
> their beliefs about themselves and their learning strategies.

That's a quote from
http://www.pisa.oecd.org/document/55/0,2340,en_32252351_32236173_33917303_1_1_1_1,00.html

OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

PISA is OECD's "Programme for International Student Assessment".

The first report from their 2003 survey was released last week.
You can download the full report (6 megabytes) from:
   http://www.pisa.oecd.org/dataoecd/1/60/34002216.pdf

I've looked through some of it (not yet all 471 pages).  It
looks like a tremendous amount of skill and effort went into
collecting the data, and into analyzing it.  No axe-grinding
that I could detect.

So far the report has received little notice in the press;  I
get only 83 hits from
   http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&q=oecd+pisa+2003
and many of those reports are IMHO superficial, focusing only
on the "horse race" i.e. which countries scored "the best"
overall ... even though the report analyzes the data from
many different angles, as it should;  there's lots of stuff
other than the overall ranking.

For instance, I found figure 2.20 to be quite thought-
provoking.  It showed that Finland, the Netherlands, and
Korea did remarkably well using no more than ordinary
levels of spending per student, while the US and Italy
took the booby prize for having a high level of spending
with little to show for it.  Also:  Slovakia turned in a
respectable performance using minimal money, while Mexico's
performance was absolutely appalling using the same amount
of money.  Hmmmmm.

The report emphasizes math, but also covers reading and
science (Chapter 6).