Irish secondary level students ‘mediocre’ in problem solving

Irish students have produced mediocre results in problem solving as gauged by an ongoing international study known as Pisa. Irish 15-year-olds sitting the tests were ranked 17th out of 28 OECD countries and 22nd out of 44 participating countries involved in Pisa.

Asian countries swept the top 6 positions in the rankings with countries such as the US, Norway, Denmark and Sweden performing on a par with Ireland.

There was “considerable room for improvement” said the Minister for Education and Skills Ruairí Quinn when responding to the Pisa results released this morning.

Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) is an OECD initiative that seeks to measure the performance of 15-year-old students across the OECD and other countries.

As a participant country, students here sit a range of tests in maths, English and science and more recently computer based problem solving has been added to the list. It involves the students using laptops to undertake a number of problem solving tasks. The test is also an indication of the proficiency of a student using technology in an examination context and this can have a bearing on the results.

Testing for problem solving was added as an option in 2012. The 40 minute computer-based assessment was sat here by 1,303 students in 183 schools.

Ireland’s performance was only average whether compared to the OECD or the wider group of participant countries.

Singapore was ranked first with Korean, Japan, Macao Hong Kong and Shanghai following. Canada, Australia, Finland and the UK performed better than Ireland.

No significant gender difference arose between male and female students in Ireland, and the lowest and highest scorers here were comparable to those in other OECD countries.

Immigrant students performed better than the OECD average but still performed less well than native students here, according to the Pisa statistics.

Ireland’s relatively strong performance in maths science and English as seen in Pisa results released last year left expectations of a better but unachieved result for problem solving.

Mr Quinn’s comment on the results was a classic teacher’s response, “good, but there is considerable room for improvement”.

He believes however that our students will do better once they have progressed through the new mathematics curriculum, Project Maths.

"Project Maths and the emphasis on skills development in the new Junior Cycle Student Awards (JCSA) offer students and teachers new ways of thinking and learning that should improve our 15-year-olds' problem solving capabilities," he said. "There is also evidence which suggests that the student centred approaches and ICT (information and computer technology) activity of Transition Year result in better problem solving skills."

In any case short-comings seen in this and previous Pisa reports are being used to inform changes being brought forward through Project Maths and the JCSA, the Minister said.

Minister of State for research and innovation Seán Sherlock also pointed to gains that should be made by students once they progress through Project Maths. The new curriculum should “help to raise all students’ achievements”, he said.

1 Summary results for Ireland on problem solving 2 ECD’s reports on PISA 2012 results, including Volume 5, the report on problem solving