As part of the Updated Philippine Development Plan, the Philippines participated for the first time in Program for International Student Assessment in 2018. The Philippines ranked 78 in mathematics out of the 79 participating countries. This study was conceived to help mathematics educators understand the poor performance of Filipino students. In particular, it aimed to investigate students’ procedural fluency and adaptive reasoning when solving computational items, simple context items, and PISA-like items. The ultimate goal was to investigate whether context might be a primary reason for their performance on PISA-like items. Both context familiarity and context complexity were the key objects of investigation. Mixed methods research design was employed in this study. Eighty randomly selected Grade 9 students took three sets of test materials namely: computational items, simple context items, and PISA-like items. It was found that there is a significant difference in procedural fluency and adaptive reasoning across the three item types. Tukey’s HSD Post Hoc Analysis revealed that students’ procedural fluency and adaptive reasoning were significantly different between computational items and PISA-like items. A checklist on context familiarity and interviews conducted after the testing revealed that familiarity of context does not improve students’ performance in PISA-like items. Context complexity, however, affects students’ performance in PISA-like items. It can be concluded that Filipino students are not ready for contextual PISA items. This study advocates further research on PISA-like items intertwined with other strands of mathematical proficiency.

Authors:
Donna Bautista, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
Catherine Vistro-Yu, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

About the Presenter(s)
Ms Donna Bautista is a University Postgraduate Student at Ateneo de Manila University in Philippines

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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