Opportunities and difficulties for Swedish students’ engaging 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 first observations of their interactions demonstrate in particular difficulties in completing some of the tasks, due to problems in understanding scientific language, complicated formulations and uncommon Swedish words, and confusing translation mistakes. It also occurs that what the students treat as relevant is not always identical to the constructer’s intentions. Our conclusion about the language use in and the relevance of some PISA tasks should have implications in how new items should be constructed and how written results should be interpreted.

Nyckelord

scientific knowledge

PISA

sociocultural perspective

written tests

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

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