Here’s an interesting tidbit: PISA‘s mathematics testing doesn’t test mathematics. Weird, huh? Who knew?
Well, we kinda knew. Trustworthy colleagues had suggested to us that PISA was slanted, but finding out the extent of that slant, like lying-on-the-ground slant, was genuinely surprising. (We’re clearly just too optimistic about the world of education.) Not that we had any excuse for being surprised; there were clues of mathematical crime in plain sight, and it was easy enough to locate the bodies.
The first clues are on PISA’s summary page on “Mathematics Performance“. The title is already a concern; qualifications and elaborations of “mathematics” usually indicate some kind of dilution, and “performance” sounds like a pretty weird elaboration. Perhaps “mathematics performance” might be dismissed as an eccentricity, but what follows cannot be so dismissed. Here is PISA’s summary of the meaning of “mathematical performance”:
Mathematical performance, for PISA, measures the mathematical literacy of a 15 year-old to formulate, employ and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts to describe, predict and explain phenomena, recognising the role that mathematics plays in the world. The mean score is the measure. A mathematically literate student recognises the role that mathematics plays in the world in order to make well-founded judgments and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens.
The alarms are set off by “mathematical literacy”, a pompous expression that promises more than, while signalling we’ll be getting much less than, straight mathematics. All doubt is then ended with the phrase “the role that mathematics plays in the world”, which is so fundamental that it is repeated verbatim.
What this sums to, of course, is numeracy, the noxious weed that inevitably chokes everything whenever there’s an opportunity to discuss the teaching of mathematics. What this promises is, akin to NAPLAN, PISA’s test of “mathematical performance” will centre on shallow and contrived scenarios, presented with triple the required words, and demanding little more than simple arithmetic. Before investigating PISA’s profound new world, however, there’s another aspect of PISA that really could do with a whack.
We have been told that the worldly mathematics that PISA tests is needed by “constructive, engaged and reflective citizens”. Well, there’s nothing like irrelevant and garishly manipulative salesmanship to undermine what you’re selling. The puffing up of PISA’s “world” mathematics has no place in what should be a clear and dispassionate description of the nature of the testing. Moreover, even on its own terms, the puffery is silly. The whole point of mathematics is that it is abstract and transferrable, that the formulas and techniques illustrated with one setting can be applied in countless others. Whatever the benefits of PISA’s real world mathematics for constructive, engaged and reflective citizens, there will be the exact same benefits for destructive, disengaged psychopaths. PISA imagines Florence Nightingale calculating drip rates? We imagine a CIA torturer calculating drip rates.
PISA’s flamboyent self-promotion seems part and parcel of its reporting. Insights and Inpretations, PISA’s summary of the 2018 test results, comes served with many flavours of Kool-Aid. It includes endless fussing about “the digital world” which, we’re told, “is becoming a sizeable part of the real world”. Reading has changed, since it is apparently “no longer mainly about extracting information”. And teaching has changed, because there’s “the race with technology”. The document wallows in the growth mindset swamp, and on and on. But not to fear, because PISA, marvellous PISA, is on top of it, and has “evolved to better capture these demands”. More accurately, PISA has evolved to better market itself clothed in modern educational fetishism.
Now, to the promised crimes. The PISA test is administered to 15 year old students (typically Year 9 or, more often, Year 10 in Australia). What mathematics, then, does PISA consider worth asking these fifteen year olds? PISA’s tests questions page directs to a document containing questions from the PISA 2012 test, as well as sample questions and questions from earlier PISAs; these appear to be the most recent questions made publicly available, and are presumably representative of PISA 2018. In total, the document provides eleven scenarios or “units” from the PISA 2012 test, comprising twenty-six questions.
To illustrate what is offered in those twenty-six questions from PISA 2012, we have posted two of the units here, and a third unit here. It is also not difficult, however, to indicate the general nature of the questions. First, as evidenced by the posted units, and the reason for posting them elsewhere, the questions are long and boring; the main challenge of these units is to suppress the gag reflex long enough to digest them. As for the mathematical content, as we flagged, there is very little; indeed, there is less mathematics than there appears, since students are permitted to use a calculator. Predictably, every unit is a “context” scenario, without a single straight mathematics question. Then, for about half of the twenty-six questions, we would categorise the mathematics required to be somewhere between easy and trivial, involving a very simple arithmetic step (with calculator) or simple geometric idea, or less. About a quarter of the questions are computationally longer, involving a number of arithmetic steps (with calculator), but contain no greater conceptual depth. The remaining questions are in some sense more conceptual, though that “more” should be thought of as “not much more”. None of the questions could be considered deep, or remotely interesting. Shallowness aside, the breadth of mathematics covered is remarkably small. These are fifteen year old students being tested, but no geometry is required beyond the area of a rectangle, Pythagoras’s theorem and very simple fractions of a circle; there is no trigonometry or similarity; there is no probability; there are no primes or powers or factorisation; there are no explicit functions, and the only implicit functional behaviour is linear.
Worst of all, PISA’s testing of algebra is evidently close to non-existent. There is just one unit, comprising two questions, requiring any algebra whatsoever. That unit concerns a nurse (possibly a CIA torturer) calculating drip rates. Minus the tedious framing and the pointless illustration, the scenario boils down to consideration of the formula
D = dv/(60n) .
(The meaning of the variables and the formula needn’t concern us here, although we’ll note that it takes a special type of clown to employ an upper case D and a lower case d in the same formula.)
There are two questions on this equation, the first asking for the change in D if n is doubled. (There is some WitCHlike idiocy in the suggested grading for the question, but we’ll leave that as a puzzle for the reader.) For the second question (labelled “Question 3” for God knows what reason), students are given specific, simple values of D, d and n, and they are required to calculate v (with a calculator). That’s it. That is the sum total of the algebra on the twenty-six questions, and that is disgraceful.
Algebra is everything in mathematics. Algebra is how we name the quantity we’re after, setting the stage for its capture. Algebra is how we signify pattern, allowing us to hunt for deeper pattern. Algebra is how we indicate the relationship between quantities. Algebra is how Descartes captured geometry, and how Newton and Leibniz captured calculus.
It is not difficult to guess why PISA sidelines algebra, since it is standard, particularly from numeracy fanatics, to stereotype algebra as abstract, as something only within mathematics. But of course, even from PISA’s blinkered numeracy perspective, this is nonsense. You want to think about mathematics in the world? Then the discovery and the analysis of patterns, and the analysis of relationships, of functions is the heart of it. And what makes the heart beat is algebra.
Does PISA offer anything of value? Well, yeah, a little. It is a non-trivial and worthwhile skill to be able to extract intrinsically simple mathematics from a busy and wordy scenario. But it’s not that important, and it’s hardly the profound “higher order” thinking that some claim PISA offers. It is a shrivelled pea of an offering, which completely ignores vast fields of mathematics and mathematical thought.
PISA’s disregard of algebra is ridiculous and shameful, the final stake in PISA’s thoroughly nailed coffin. It demonstrates that PISA isn’t “higher” or “real”, it is just other, and it is an other we would all be much better off without.
