VietNamNet Bridge – The “PISA
international education fever” has spread out to Vietnam when. In the dispatch issued on March 10, the
Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) requested heads of local departments
to release decisions on establishing steering committees for the PISA program.

In the
dispatch, MOET requested local education departments to send officials to
attend all the conferences, workshop and training courses to be organized by
the ministry to prepare for the PISA
program. The events will be organized to help local education managers,
teachers and students well understand the basic requirements and the main
activities of the program.

Vietnam has registered to join PISA program in 2012 initiated by the
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD.

The Program
for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide evaluation of the
scholastic performance of 15-year-old school pupils’, performed first in 2000
and repeated every three years.

Undertaken
since 1997, PISA
aims at testing literacy in three competence fields: reading, mathematics,
science, and the ability to handle situations.

The PISA mathematics literacy
test asks students to apply their mathematical knowledge to solve problems set
in various contexts. In the reading test, students should be able to construct,
extend and reflect on the meaning of what they have read.

It is
estimated that about 4500-10,000 students participate in the project in every
country.

Deputy Minister
of MOET Nguyen Vinh Hien said that joining PISA
will give Vietnam the
opportunity to have the right outlook about Vietnam’s education and point out
the strengths and weaknesses of the education system. This will allow Vietnam to
learn lessons and realize what it should do to settle problems.

Do Tien
Dat, a member of PISA taskforce from the Vietnam
Education Science Institute, said that the knowledge required by PISA in multiple-choice
tests is not unfamiliar to Vietnamese students. However, there are differences
between the testing and assessment of PISA and
the traditional way of testing and assessment applied in Vietnam.
Therefore, Dat thinks that it will not be easy for Vietnamese students to
attain high results.

To date, 63
countries, mostly developed countries, have joined PISA 2009.

After four
tests, Finland
has been found as the country whose students gained the highest testing results
in the world, if considering general results in all the three fields of
mathematics, science and reading.

The New Republic
newspaper published an article which shows interesting comparisons and analyses
about American and Finnish educations. The article said that there are many
things that the US
reformers need to learn.

In Asia, Japan, Republic
of Korea and Hong
Kong have joined the program. In China,
only Shanghai joined for a trial test and it
usurped the throne which had held kept by Finland for many years.

The latest
report (PISA 2009) shows that US students rank the 31^st among 65
economic territories in mathematics, the 13^th in science and 17^th
in reading.

Arne
Duncan, US Secretary of Education, said in the interview given to Washington
Post that as for him, the result has opened US people to the quality of US education.
Last week, Foreign Policy published an article where it raised a question if US
students are lagging behind.

Meanwhile,
LiLiu Jinghai, Headmaster of the High School No 8 Zhabei in the north of Shanghai told The New Republic that developed countries
like the US
should not be too surprised abut the result. This is just a test which measures
the good points of the education of Shanghai and
China,
while the result cannot conceal the weak points of the education.

N. Hien