Testing the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in Malta : 15-year-olds' achievement in reading literacy and the comparability of Maltese tests to PISA

Abstract

International student assessments in general, and the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in particular, are becoming ever more influential tools in the formulation of the new, globalized educational discourse. The present quantitative study focused on only one domain tested by PISA, that of reading literacy. A test paper was produced using a number of assessment items that were released by PISA, and a Maltese language version of this test was constructed. These test items were attempted by 498 students attending twelve schools coming from three different sectors of the Maltese Secondary schools sector. The results achieved by the Maltese student sample show that, in line with other countries, Maltese girls perform significantly better than boys in English language reading proficiency tasks and that the results that students achieve is closely tied to the schools that they attend. Academically high achieving students did better in the Englishlanguage version of the test while low achievers did better in the Malteselanguage PISA test. Although significant correlations were registered when the PISA test scores were compared to the scores achieved by the same students in the two tests employed in the study these correlations were generally low, especially in the whole sample. When this was partitioned in terms of individual schools the correlation, in a number of cases, ranged from medium to high. The results also suggest that Maltese students are not familiar with the type of assessment items that make up the PISA test. It is argued that student selection, as was practiced in Maltese schools up to recently, works against low-achieving students catching up with their peers and that current attempts to remove this selection from the Maltese educational system are to be lauded.