Student performance improves in science

The triennial Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) project always delivers a wealth of data and statistics that can be somewhat difficult to digest.

The consensus in the Department of Education on the release of the figures this morning however boils down to the following: shows improvement but could do better.

The primary concern related to the 2012 data was whether the sharp fall in performance seen in the 2009 figures would be repeated.Happily it was not. The 5,000 plus Irish students taking part did the country proud, doing well in reading literacy but also registering a sharp rise in our performance in science literacy.

Most of the categories offer a “flatline” performance over the years with little change from one Pisa result to the next. In 2012 however the results for the science tests were very strongly up.

How well we do helps inform Department of Education and Skills policy on education and allocation of resources. But the Government is also mindful of how valuable it is to register high marks in the Pisa rankings.

Minister for Education and Skills Ruairí Quinn commented on how foreign direct investment could be attracted by “brain power” and a strong performance in the Pisa results would be a demonstration of this.

There are always gender differences that emerge, with males here significantly outperforming females in areas such as print mathematics but females well ahead on print reading.

There are oddities too. Irish students perform better than the OECD average for four of the five maths subject areas in the print exams, but for some reason fall well below the OECD average in the area of “space and shape”. These tend to involve algebra and geometry in a real world written question.

Our abilities in this kind of question are expected to rise in future Pisas however as a result of Project Maths which focuses in on this type of problem.

It is encouraging that Ireland manages to be ranked in the above average category in the main, although we do not manage to reach the performance heights hit by the mainly Asian countries that cluster at the very top of the league table. These tend to include Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea.

So consistent is their performance however that we should examine what it is about their education systems that can deliver this kind of result.