Developing PISA Related Tasks

Student selection of five-unit mathematics in high school has become more straightforward in recent years.  The motivation is practical, as it provides students with a ‘golden key’ to enter prestigious technology units in the army, competitive departments in universities, and high paying jobs in the labor market later on. Students receive individual matriculation grades, which they present when applying to the army and university. Initially it was difficult to persuade students that the effort of studying the five-unit track at the age of 16 would be worth it many years later. However, through a public campaign, enlisting parents, the media and the school system, they were eventually convinced.

In junior high school, the motivation for investing great efforts to excel is much less obvious. None of the large-scale assessments (Meitzav, TIMSS and PISA) provide individual grades that are transparent to students. Rather, they are aggregated according to class, school, district, stream or the system as a whole, providing it with feedback on its performance. PISA, for example, is administered in approximately 200 schools for 5,000 students who represent a sample of the 15-year-old cohort of Israel. The OECD conducts the test in the schools it selects independently, through local representatives, and the results are reported internationally only a year and a half later.

So, how could we convince students to study hard and to strive for excellence in junior high school? How could we persuade students, parents and teachers that proficiency skills in mathematics would serve them well later on? On the one hand, we might want to show the public that PISA has been found to be a good predictor for entering the five-unit mathematics track. However, we believe this argument would apply only to a small group of policy makers and very few parents. We intend to do that, but in addition, we assume that a possible driver for students to excel would be to encourage their intrinsic motivation. Namely, if students found the PISA learning assignments relevant to their lives and interests, and perceived them as challenging, inspiring and joyful, they would develop a more positive attitude towards them and desire to tackle them.

Our proposal therefore is to use the upcoming PISA test in March 2018, to aim to develop student motivation towards skills-based proficiency tasks in mathematics. We intend to do so by using competitions and challenge methodologies surrounding areas of interest for young people in Israel. The Center for Education Technology (CET), a leading expert in this realm, will prepare and customize the tasks (see the grant recommendation below), and Presentense will contract the necessary technology and operate the competitions.

We chose Presentense from three final candidates that submitted initial proposals, based on their passion and experience in nurturing creative social entrepreneurship. Presentense is a nonprofit organization, founded in Jerusalem a decade ago, encouraging grass root social initiatives across the country, with special emphasis on the Arab, Haredi and people with disabilities. It operates as an accelerator, offering entrepreneurs infrastructure, advice and support to help them to realize their initiative and bring it to scale.

Presentense is suggesting initially recruiting a project manager and conducting focus groups to identify the most appealing areas of interest for young people (such as high tech, youth movements, emergency medicine, animals, etc.). When these areas are determined, CET will be able to craft PISA-like assignments around these themes (for example, calculate the dosage of salts required for a patient suffering from head injuries, or calculate the correct angles allowing a wooden structure to stand stable for an outdoor camp) and customize them accordingly. Concurrently, Presentense will design a branding, marketing and communications plan for each content area and prepare plans for the competitions. They will contract technology companies to prepare a web-based database for the tasks, allowing uploading and editing visual, textual and numeric assignments, an analytics system to enable analyzing the usage and a gateway portal for each competition.

The first competition will launch in January 2018 as a pioneer pilot program, while collecting data for feedback and improvement. An additional four competitions will then be developed, and will run until the end of March. Each competition will hold events and ceremonies and may offer modest prizes for the winners. Due to this effort, it is expected that 85% of Israel’s 9^th-10^th grade students (200,000 students) will be actively exposed to at least one task and 100,000 will solve five tasks. As a result, it is hoped that Israel will advance to at least the 35^th position in the international ranking, and that more than 10% will reach high performance in the 2018 PISA mathematics test.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 266