PISA Response Paper

When thinking about international standards, there are always questions to be asked: who are we testing, how are we testing, and what do these test results mean? One way of testing these standards is to use PISA, a test given every three years to fifteen-year-olds in an attempt to compare students’ scores internationally. However, PISA can be problematic in the way that the tests ignore cultural contexts and force comparisons (Kamens, 2013). In our debate, there were two teams: the team in defense of PISA, and the team that wanted to get rid of PISA altogether. The team in defense of PISA claimed that international testing promoted quality, encouraged investment in education, and discourages complacency even in developed nations. They did agree

Of course, cultural context plays a big role in testing of any type. The background of the test taker will always influence their scores. The two teams wanted to address this problem in very different ways. The pro-PISA team wanted to adjust who wrote the questions to make the test culturally neutral. On the other hand, the no-PISA team wanted to create a new test with cultural background reports and different questions for each cultural region. However, would a test with different questions for every group truly be standardized? In my opinion, I do not think a test could simultaneously be standardized and personalized for each region. Looking at the bigger picture, I think it is admirable to make education culturally neutral, but incredibly difficult. For example, a school-in-a-box comes with what UNICEF claims to be the basic necessities to teach in a time of crisis. However, what UNICEF claims to be the most important may not be what is most important to every country that uses these boxes. These boxes may have different uses for each country dependent on their contexts; that does not make these boxes completely worthless (UNICEF, 2017). In the same way, PISA scores may be impacted by context, but the results are still not

The pro-PISA team claimed that international standards are part of the globalization that is taking place in our world, and that they promote growth and equality. The no-PISA team felt that these standards ignore differences of value and culture in other countries (such as how PISA does not test for creativity or entrepreneurial thinking). However, when thinking back to our previous discussions in class, many of them revolved around discontinuities in learning across borders. For example, one of our class speakers worked with refugees that come to America and cannot get a job in their field due to a lack of certification. This could more broadly apply to any type of immigrant into our country; education standards for the same position may be very different in different countries. This means that a person who was a doctor in their home country for decades could not practice medicine in the U.S. without going back to school for a degree (Lozeau, personal communication, February 8, 2018). However, I think that if education had more international standards, this issue could be resolved in many