PISA - Measuring student success

The lastest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) ranking, showed that the UK is fairly average in its scores (although ranked 11th in Science) throughout the 34 participating countries and has been stagnant for the past few years. This animation gives an interesting overview of the assessment process behind the PISA rankings are made and it is important to understand the impact that these have on how government's shape educational policy. PISA looks at the correlation between what is learnt at school and then applied in contexts outside of school. The following statement is made in the PISA 2009 Assessment Framework:

PISA 2009 covers the domains of reading, mathematics and science not merely in terms of

whether students can reproduce specific subject matter knowledge, but also whether they can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply their knowledge in novel situations

There is no mention of creativity, possibly because it is difficult to quantify and compare easily, but I can't help thinking that it needs to be more explicit in the types of intelligences it aims to measure, especially since it is focused on very traditional academic concepts of intelligence with respects to reading, maths and science. It would be interesting to know how they might measure according to Gardner's Multiple Intelligences:

Guildford's Structure of the Intellect

Joy Guildford was a psychologist that started to examine the creative process in more depth in the 1950s since he felt that our understanding of creativity was limited to the assumption that it was a result of intelligence, traditionally measured by IQ. The following extract was taken from a summary worksheet produced by the Co-Creativity Institute in Illinois:

'Guildford sought to develop tests for each combination of the possibilities on these three dimensions, expecting that a person could be high on some of these abilities while being low on others.  In The nature of human intelligence (1967) and Way beyond the IQ (1977), he lays out the results of his efforts and the modified model which evolved from his research.' - Christopher Barlow, The Co-Creativity Institute, 2000

You can read about these dimensions and how they link to creative thinking by downloading the following pdf document or by clicking on the images below: