Angara wants student exams to match PISA

MANILA, Philippines — Education Secretary Sonny Angara wants schools to develop examinations that will match the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in measuring students’ problem-solving and comprehension.

Examinations should be presented in a way that students can harness their skills and apply them to real-life situations, Angara told PTV-4 yesterday.

“I think we need to have more test exams that are PISA-like,” he said.

PISA is a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development designed to evaluate 15-year-olds’ competencies in mathematics, science and reading.

Angara said these school assessments would encourage students to be analytical and critical thinkers.

“They (PISA) present you the situation and you must react to it and analyze it. So, it’s not like a normal exam asking what happened on this date, or what causes this. So they really give you a problem set. It’s very real-world type,” the education chief said.

Angara stressed the need to change the culture of assessment and measurement where decisions “are not based on what we think or what we feel, but really based on evidence.”

He referred to these plans as having “more objective tools to measure our education outcomes.”

In 2022, PISA showed that Filipino students lagged behind in reading, math and science. The results “were about the same” as in the assessment conducted in 2018.

PISA also conducted its first-ever creative thinking assessment in 2022, where the Philippines was second to the last among 64 countries and economies worldwide.

In his third State of the Nation Address last July, President Marcos challenged Angara to “recover” the country’s quality of education from its current dismal state, where more than half of junior high school students fail to reach the required proficiency levels.

The President also cited recent assessments that revealed more than half of grades 6, 10 and 12 students have failed to reach the ideal proficiency levels, faring low in information literacy, problem-solving and critical thinking skills.