Opportunities and difficulties for students’ engagement in PISA Science items

• This paper presents an empirical study on how 15-year old students engage in and discuss three PISA science items. The purpose is to describe and raise questions about what the students’ written answers on a PISA assessment may represent, in the light of how the 71 students in this study understand and choose to answer questions in the test. Departing from a socio cultural perspective on knowledge and action (Säljö, 2000), we chose a design where the students worked with the items in small groups, allowing us to study their conversations in action. We have analyzed the video recorded material in order to describe what difficulties and opportunities the students may meet in PISA. Our results indicate problems with interpretations of the tasks due to translation, to the meaning potential of many of the words used in the text and to the context provided by the items.

Keyword

science education

assessment

sociocultural perspective

PISA

written tests

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)