“This year we have made a very concerted effort to participate in the competition on better terms,” the National Program Coordinator tells PISA, Professor of School Education at the University of Peloponnese, Kostas Dimopoulos on the occasion of the launch of the competition at the national level on Monday 17 March.

Regarding the recent visit to our country of the head of the tender at the OECD, Andreas Schleicher, with whom they came into contact, the national coordinator said that “through a process of exchange of data and expertise, we expect to reach conclusions. At the moment, however, there are no formulated proposals from the OECD“.

“This year we have made a very consolidated effort to participate in the competition on better terms than we have generally done in the past,” Kostas Dimopoulos, National Coordinator of the PISA program, Professor of School Education at the University of Peloponnese, tells protothema.gr. Specifically, he mentions the compensation provided for teachers involved in the process, the strengthening of the technological equipment of participating schools and the preparation of students through the new platform Skills4Life, with content topics in line with the philosophy of PISA.

“We have provided for a fee for teachers who will assist in conducting the research, amounting to 10 euros for each student in the participating schools, provided that the research process is successfully completed. In large schools, which is about 57 pupils per sample, this corresponds to a amount of 570 euros, which will be divided according to how many coordinators are in the schools – usually 2 or 3. In addition, we have equipped schools with 4,500 laptops and 2,500 headsets for the English assessment this year, which have been added as a field in the survey – there will be more than 20 computers left per school. This is a very significant boost to the infrastructure of schools. We also made an intervention in some schools that were having connectivity issues – we worked with the National School Network and providers and upgraded their connectivity. Most importantly, we enriched the education community with the new platform, Skills4Life, which contains topics in the PISA test philosophy as well as older test topics. For this reason, it is an important tool to familiarize our students with this material.”

Contacting the head of the international PISA

Last week, the head of the PISA diagnostic test, Andreas Schleicher, visited our country. As part of his meetings, he also had contact with the national coordinator of Greece.

He also met with the national coordinator of the European Commission.

According to Mr Dimopoulos, “we presented to Mr Schleicher all the planning we have done for PISA in Greece – we have frequent communication anyway, we meet in the PISA management boards. Now, we discussed good practices that other countries have implemented regarding their preparation for the survey. We also discussed at length how we could use the data, gathered from PISA over time, to draw conclusions for our own education system. It should be noted that the competition produces data that highlights the weaknesses of each education system. How these are subsequently transformed into educational policy is a matter for the political leadership in question.”

Have the OECD made suggestions for improvement, as expected?

“We are in a process of exchanging data and expertise, which will probably result in proposals. But at the moment, there are no formulated proposals from the OECD, as far as I know.”

How optimistic can we be about the low performance of Greek students in the international PISA test?

“We are working on changing the situation. Many countries have managed to change their position in the survey, like Portugal, which was in the same place as we are today. And within a decade, it has surpassed the OECD average. A long-term and systematic effort is required. Countries are changing, as long as we take the right actions,” he said.

What changes does he consider necessary in our education system based on the data of the PISA competition?

“In my opinion, we must turn to cultivation of knowledge, which is framed with elements of everyday life. This, presupposes an adaptation in the curricula, which has started through the Skills Workshops, but needs to be strengthened. Secondly, it is important to look at the role of new technologies and how they are applied in the education system. PISA research has paid particular attention in recent years to how new digital technologies – AI, mobile phones, computers – are used in the education system and how they are changing it, positively or negatively. A third important point to dwell on is the issues of social and other differences as reflected in student performance. On the basis of the rich data we can draw from PISA, we will need to formulate compensatory policies to reduce these gaps in the performance of children from different social groups, such as between the center and the periphery or between native pupils and migrants. The Greek PISA, which starts on March 17 and will run until April 11, involves the mandatory participation of 245 schools from all over Greece, both public and private. The process is under the supervision and guidance of the Institute for Educational Policy (IEP), while the exams are being conducted under the auspices of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This year, two new subjects are introduced in the competition: “Learning for a Digital World” and “Assessment in Foreign Language – English (FLA)“.

In particular, the competition, which is addressed to 15-year-old students, will involve high schools, general high schools and vocational high schools from all over Greece, while it is noted that the selection of school units was made by random sampling in order to ensure their representativeness in terms of students and schools across the country.

The subjects tested

Science, Reading Comprehension, Mathematics and the additional field: Learning for a Digital World, are the subjects in which the subjects will be explored. Especially for Greece, this year we are participating in the new PISA survey “Assessment in Foreign Language – English (FLA)”.

The process

The survey, consists of a Cognitive Test and a Questionnaire. It is to be administered electronically in the School Laboratory of Information Technology and Computer Applications of each school unit. For this purpose, participating schools have been equipped with 4,500 laptops and 2,500 wired headsets.

The PISA framework

According to the information provided by the Institute of Education Policy (IEP), the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an educational research, conducted every three years, starting in 2000 and implemented by international research institutions (PISA Consortium) under the organization of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Directorate for Education and the cooperation of the participating countries.

The main objective of the PISA Program is to assess the range of knowledge and skills of students at the end of their compulsory education, on the basis of which, to a significant extent, their effective and equal participation in modern societies is shaped. In particular, it is noted that the survey is carried out in some 90 countries, all OECD members, and investigates whether the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old pupils in each country enable them to cope effectively with the demands of everyday life in modern societies.

Starting from a commonly defined and internationally accepted working framework, the PISA Program therefore collects information on the performance of 15-year-old participating students and, at the same time, traces the potential effectiveness of the educational systems of the countries taking part in the assessment. Each participating country is therefore able to obtain useful information about its educational system, understand the positive and weak points of its educational design and, ultimately, receive feedback on the degree of effectiveness of its educational work while discovering the Education and Training practices of other participating countries.