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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