The results of the PISA 2022 educational quality evaluation prepared by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) will be announced this Tuesday. The expectation, which is already usually high in the education sector, is, on this occasion, much greater due to the introduction of a disruptive variable that breaks with the historical trends of these reports: the impact that the closure of schools had during the pandemic.
The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures the level of learning in reading, mathematics and science of 15-year-olds from 90 countries since 2000. In total, in 2022, they have passed the test 3 million students. It is published every three years with the exception of this edition when, due to the pandemic, it has been delayed one year.
The current PISA is significant because it will measure the educational setback caused by the lack of presence, as well as the recovery capacity of educational systems. All of this results in the educational gap that can open between different geographical areas, different countries, as well as internally, within the same country.
A generalized and global drop to pre-2020 levels can be expected, but what analysts want to know with this extensive evaluation is how the real impact was in different countries and whether educational administrations were able to recover part of what was lost.
International studies ensure that the greater the confinement, the less time at school, the greater the loss of learning. In this sense, Spain has an advantage as it was one of the countries in the world where educational centers were closed for the least amount of time. With some exceptions, because classrooms opened in May-June, students were without school for half a year, from March to September 2020.
With the new 2020-2021 academic year, in-person schooling resumed, although with restrictive measures to avoid infections.
Other governments decided to keep schools closed for longer. It was not proven until a year later that the infectious capacity of coronavirus in minors was lower than that of adults and also the impact on their health.
The variability of closures is very high. Latin American and Caribbean countries kept schools closed for between a year and a half and two years, in a continent where it was difficult to maintain educational continuity remotely since only 50% of the population had devices or an internet connection. In contrast, families in Asian countries such as some areas of China, Japan or Korea invested in extracurricular courses to improve their children’s education.
Precisely digital environments are another key element considered by analysts to guarantee the continuity of distance education. Those communities that had tablets, computers or mobile phones, access to Wi-Fi and their teachers and students were familiar with digital resources, lost fewer studies compared to others with fewer conditions.
In this sense, the European Commission activated emergency funds to provide all students with mobile devices. But having financing was not everything.
The greatest difficulty for regional governments was the lack of availability of the productive industry (some regional communities already had digital environments and their students had tablets).
In general, the students with the highest income had devices, unlike the most vulnerable. To these, the schools gave their own computers and were the first to receive devices from the administration.
The greater the academic loss, the greater the recovery effort. Therefore, the administration’s strategies to move forward (curriculum reduction, reinforcement classes, and measures to repair the mental and emotional health of minors, essential to guarantee learning) also count in the PISA 2022 results.
The PISA results will show the difference between Asian countries, whose families invest much more time and money in improving results, and the rest of the educational systems.
In Spain, furthermore, a profound educational transformation took place during this period. The educational law (Lomloe) and the reform of curricula with learning by competencies were approved.
