Workshops And A Report About PISA 2021

The results of the 2018 PISA assessment, published in December 2019, caused a big public concern. It revealed that Israel is still lagging behind, as excellence-levels are low and gaps are wide. Other countries, such as Poland, Norway and Estonia, that elevated the level of teaching and learning in middle school, have moved up significantly. Other countries, such as Singapore and Ontario, which reduced the middle school curriculum to enable deeper understanding and higher thinking skills, have maintained their leading position.
A few months earlier, the OECD convened a press conference in Oxford University, in which it presented the mathematics framework for the PISA test that will be conducted in 2021. This updated framework emphasizes the concept of mathematical reasoning, which allows students to use mathematics in order to solve real-life problems. The head of PISA, Andreas Schleicher, said in this conference that many countries are stuck with a 20^th century mathematics curriculum that prefers pure, theoretical mathematics, which in many cases ends up with focusing on procedural fluency.

This new framework aroused a controversy among mathematics educators and researchers in Israel. They all agree that in practice, the current middle school curriculum does not support applying mathematics in real-life contexts. Many of them believe that the current emphasis in middle school on fluency and technique is vital in order to move up to high-order thinking in high school. They fear that if we start too early, students will not reach the advanced mathematical level. Others claim that there is a gap between middle school and high school that needs to be bridged by raising the level of studies in middle school.

This discourse is currently circulating in emails, social media and op-eds. In order to provide it with structure and depth, the Levinsky College of Education is proposing to convene a series of seminars. They are suggesting to invite 30 scholars, school principals, teachers, students and government officials to four workshops, in which they will discuss these issues and their implication for the coming years. The OECD’s Group of Mathematics will be consulted during the meetings, and experts from abroad will be invited to share knowledge.

The series of seminars will be held in the first half of 2020. Following the meetings, the Levinsky College will prepare a report that will present an outline of the ideas and approaches that were suggested during the meetings as well as recommendations for next steps.

* The text presented above shows the grant as approved by the Foundation Board / Grant 366