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PISA & IQ The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a world- wide evaluation of 15-year-old school pupils' scholastic performance, first performed in 2000 and repeated every three years. It is coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with a goal to improve the educational policies and outcomes. Recent 276-pages report on the 2009 student performance in reading, math, and science was published for 34 OECD-member countries and 25 other PISA participating countries. Here I, for your convenience, forward the PISA 2009 overall scores [TABLE] as well as the data on proficiency levels for reading [GRAPH_B], math [GRAPH_C], and science [GRAPH_D]. The report goes into great details, and some very instructive graphs, to analyze social and economic backgrounds of the education systems in the participating countries. A very informative report, but I believe the correlation with the students’ intellectual potentiality is missing. I know, any comment upon the intelligence quotient (IQ) puts you on politically (and not only politically) slippery grounds, and I understand that. I can easily state that I can’t run 100 meters in 10 seconds but you don’t expect me to say that I’m not smart, don’t you? However, the differen- ces on IQ scale are a fact of life with many profound consequences (see, for instance my thoughts on GDP & IQ [WEEKLY]). Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to understate the implication of social environment on education, I’m concerned with the failure to consider something else just because it’s not nice to talk about. Also, the fact that two values (parameters) look correlated does not necessarily mean there is a causality among them, they both could be governed by a third one, more basic one. True, some of the deviations on the PISA score vs IQ graphs are probably indicators of a very different social environment but if we don’t understand the human intellectual variability, it could prevent us from learning how to achieve optimal intellectual capacity for all individuals. It would be of vast benefit to mankind if the human intellectual variability could be erased by something as simple as better education. Actually, the PISA records suggests otherwise. Then again, don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling for a stratification of human beings by IQ. More likely it’s a call for responsibility through empathy. However, we can not ignore the importance of the brightest among us, the importance for the whole humanity and its future. In a way, the authors of PISA 2009 report recognize the issue, they are aware that average scores don’t tell enough about the performance differences among the countries, so they present top performers [GRAPH_E]. And I would like to repeat once more the Kenneth Clark’s quote: "Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible." [WEEKLY] |
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Krešimir J. Adamić
