After receiving below-average marks in maths, science and reading in the previous report in December, new PISA data now show that Spanish children are not great at creative problem solving.
Spanish children’s overall score for creative problem solving was 477, 23 points below the OECD average mark of 500, and a full 85 points behind world leader Singapore, which scored 562.
The top European country is Finland, which scored 523 points.
Spain is thus squarely in the bottom third of the 44 countries that participated in the new evaluation, at the same level as countries such as Croatia, Poland, Serbia, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia.
The data show that the problem is: “particularly large among students with moderate and low performance in mathematics”, and, for a country that over the past fifteen years has seen an enormous rise in the size of its immigrant population, the report highlights the “significantly lower” marks earned by immigrant children in Spain.
There is a difference of 39 points between the marks of immigrant and non-immigrant children.
The OECD problem-solving report noted that: “When asked to perform problem-solving tasks, Spanish students struggle to use all the skills that they demonstrate in other curricular domains. On average, Spanish students score 20 points lower than expected in problem solving, based on their performance in mathematics, reading and science”.
The report suggests Spanish children are lacking in computer skills and are unwilling to engage with new ideas: “The comparatively low problem-solving performance among Spanish students may be partly due to these students’ relative unfamiliarity with computers (the problem-solving assessment was delivered on computers), which, in turn, is related to students’ openness to engage with novel situations and devices”.
Spanish students scored average marks on interactivity, knowledge acquisition and knowledge utilisation.
Spanish students also scored below average in a PISA survey on whether “success is earned through hard work is associated with better mathematics performance”.
In this survey, Spanish students are at the same below-average level as children in Greece, Luxembourg, Portugal and Ireland.
PISA defines problem solving for test purposes as: “…an individual’s capacity to engage in cognitive processing to understand and resolve problem situations where a method of solution is not immediately obvious. It includes the willingness to engage with such situations in order to achieve one’s potential as a constructive and reflective citizen”.