The “PISA international education fever” has spread out to Vietnam when. In the dispatch issued on March 10, the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) requested heads of local departments to release decisions on establishing steering committees for the PISA program.
In the dispatch, MOET requested local education departments to send officials to attend all the conferences, workshop and training courses to be organized by the ministry to prepare for the PISA program. The events will be organized to help local education managers, teachers and students well understand the basic requirements and the main activities of the program.
Vietnam has registered to join PISA program in 2012 initiated by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide evaluation of the scholastic performance of 15-year-old school pupils', performed first in 2000 and repeated every three years.
Undertaken since 1997, PISA aims at testing literacy in three competence fields: reading, mathematics, science, and the ability to handle situations.
The PISA mathematics literacy test asks students to apply their mathematical knowledge to solve problems set in various contexts. In the reading test, students should be able to construct, extend and reflect on the meaning of what they have read.
It is estimated that about 4500-10,000 students participate in the project in every country.
Deputy Minister of MOET Nguyen Vinh Hien said that joining PISA will give Vietnam the opportunity to have the right outlook about Vietnam’s education and point out the strengths and weaknesses of the education system. This will allow Vietnam to learn lessons and realize what it should do to settle problems.
Do Tien Dat, a member of PISA taskforce from the Vietnam Education Science Institute, said that the knowledge required by PISA in multiple-choice tests is not unfamiliar to Vietnamese students. However, there are differences between the testing and assessment of PISA and the traditional way of testing and assessment applied in Vietnam. Therefore, Dat thinks that it will not be easy for Vietnamese students to attain high results.
To date, 63 countries, mostly developed countries, have joined PISA 2009.
After four tests, Finland has been found as the country whose students gained the highest testing results in the world, if considering general results in all the three fields of mathematics, science and reading.
The New Republic newspaper published an article which shows interesting comparisons and analyses about American and Finnish educations. The article said that there are many things that the US reformers need to learn.
In Asia, Japan, Republic of Korea and Hong Kong have joined the program. In China, only Shanghai joined for a trial test and it usurped the throne which had held kept by Finland for many years.
The latest report (PISA 2009) shows that US students rank the 31st among 65 economic territories in mathematics, the 13th in science and 17th in reading.
Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, said in the interview given to Washington Post that as for him, the result has opened US people to the quality of US education. Last week, Foreign Policy published an article where it raised a question if US students are lagging behind.
Meanwhile, LiLiu Jinghai, Headmaster of the High School No 8 Zhabei in the north of Shanghai told The New Republic that developed countries like the US should not be too surprised abut the result. This is just a test which measures the good points of the education of Shanghai and China, while the result cannot conceal the weak points of the education.
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