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Ángel Sanz Moreno. Faculty of Education, University of Salamanca
- I'm going to try to answer this question briefly on three levels. First of all, What?: what results do we have.
Secondly why?: we're going to put forward a hypothesis; perhaps the most interesting part of the question.
And thirdly, what is truly important, how?: how we can improve. We are the product of our own story.
The LOGSE education law is still a recent thing, it seems like a long time, but really it’s barely any time ago at all.
It’s really not that long ago since we brought in compulsory education up to age 16. Other countries have been school even older than that,
but we can’t do anything about this, what’s done is done.
Secondly: cultural and academic levels in the adult population. This is very tightly linked to results, but it's all water under the bridge.
Thirdly: social and economic level and culture of the student body and their families. This is what it is, we cannot improve that.
But I’m not interested in that perspective. I’m interested in another perspective, and here comes the question which should interest us:
Why are we at OECD level for some things – even better than OECD level – and yet worse in other areas?
I'm going to put forward a possible theory. I'm going to cross reference the TALIS report, this international study on learning and teaching.
This is a graph taken from the OECD report on this assessment. The top line orders the countries
depending on whether they use an education system based on more constructivist teaching and on the right we find the schools
with a more transmissive form of teaching.
And I asked myself a question: “Might this have anything to do with results for reading?"
I put a star next to the countries with results above the average results in PISA 2006.
And what I'm going to present to you now, you must take with some caution, because technically it has many failings.
What I’ve done is to cross these two variables and here we have it: methods which promote thought.
For example, I’ll just read four or five items: Opportunities to put what has been learnt into practice;
helping them to resolve problems; if the students reason and argument, if they interact with each other and with their ideas,
if they offer intellectually stimulating classes…
Here we have the line of regression; the more constructivist the educational system, the better the level of reading.
Look carefully how the improvement we can seen in terms of reading. So we may have a clue here.
Is it possible that the teaching style leads to a style of learning and, in turn (a hypothesis),
does the teaching style promote or favour a certain type of reading ability?
So, a transmissive-memoristic teaching will result in learning strategies
using repetition and a style of reading which we could call superficial, literal, etc.
An in-depth, inquisitive teaching awakens curiosity, a search for the reason.
It results in learning strategies based on the personal construction of knowledge;
and here the hypothesis would be that this results in reading styles which search for interpretation, search for meaning, inferences…
Finally, and no less important is a life-like, experiential learning style will result in learning experiences
of integration with our life experiences, our way of thinking, our own thoughts, our affections,
our values, and this will result in a reflective and critical reading ability.
Let’s look at Korea. Korea is a country which in 2006 came top of the international ranking, ahead of Finland. What happened there?
Mee Kyeong Lee, from the Syllabus and Assessment Institute in Korea gave this explanation. Just read it a bit.
At to conclude I'll move on to the following slide, and I’ll leave you to reflect with Confucius.