Novel teaching methods may help PISA ranking says solon

Senator Nancy Binay said the Department of Education may shift to an actual teaching methodology to help the country improve its ranking in the Programme for International Student Assessment.

Binay made the recommendation during Wednesday’s public hearing on the recent outcome of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2022 PISA by the Senate Committee on Basic Education.

Binay said that most students had been used to memorizing their lessons, but after taking their examinations, they tended to forget what they memorized all along.

She, then, suggested that is high time for educators to start teaching actual applications of school lessons, especially in mathematics and science, instead of asking learners to memorize their subjects.

“It’s difficult to break old habits. The big question is how do we teach our new teachers? Maybe it’s time to revisit and change the curriculum on how we are teaching our teachers as well,” Binay said in mixed Filipino.

In the 2022 PISA ranking, the Philippines placed 76th out of 81 countries in Reading, 75th in Mathematics, and 79th in Science.

For Mathematical Literacy, the Philippines scores increased from 353 in 2018 to 355 in 2022, and for Scientific Literacy, from 357 in 2018 to 356 in 2022.

From 340 in 2018, the country's 15-year-old learners scored 347 in 2022 for Reading Literacy.

The analysis of learner-level data by the OECD revealed that the increases in Reading and Math scores among Filipino learners are “not statistically significant” while there’s a decrease in the Science score —which is also not statistically significant.

Senator Win Gatchalian, the panel chairperson, said he is “pleasantly surprised” that the performance of Filipino learners did not regress despite the effects of the pandemic lockdowns.

Gatchalian was pertaining to a slight improvement of +2.66 points in the Philippines' PISA 2022 average performance.

Gatchalian said the recent PISA results will pave the way for the government to further improve the country’s quality of education.

“The results could be used to come up with meaningful solutions to the problems facing the country's education sector. How do we go up? How do we implement solutions so that we will improve learner performance?” Gatchalian said, suggesting that DepEd should come up with initiatives on how to improve the country’s PISA performance.