PILNA identifies room for improvement

Pacific Island teachers are satisfied and proud of their work, but many of them have high stress levels.

This is one of the newly-released findings of the Pacific Islands Literacy and Numeracy Assessment (PILNA) for 2021.

PILNA, which measures numeracy and literacy in Year 4 and Year 6 students in 15 Pacific island countries, found that while 95% of teachers were frequently satisfied with their jobs, only 75% of them were satisfied with their salaries and 80% reported feeling frequently stressed.

“This needs to be understood in more detail to ensure that the education workforce has the salaries needed to continue providing good education and retain good workers,” the report states.

Feelings of being overwhelmed by work are also common (70% of respondents), and 40% of teachers said they believe their job is having negative effects on their physical and mental health.

More than 40,000 students took part in PILNA 2021, which looks at numeracy and literacy standards, comparing them to benchmarks developed for the Pacific context. 

The survey found that student performance—particularly in numeracy— decreased in most areas compared to 2018, apart from year four writing, which improved. 

Across the region, students are on average, exceeding minimum expected numeracy proficiency levels, leading the report’s authors to suggest that those benchmarks may be too low, or that students’ performance is very high in numeracy throughout the region. They say these results need more investigation.

The results have prompted the Pacific Community’s (SPC) experts to identify three main areas where students commonly misunderstood or answered incorrectly in the numeracy tests; solving word problems involving numbers, identifying and interpreting data presented in graphs, and subtracting simple sets of numbers, and gives recommendations of how these areas might be improved.

Reading

There is an urgent need to improve reading levels according to PILNA 2021.

“Reading performance decreased in comparison to PILNA 2018; on average, year four students are not meeting the expected minimum proficiency level and year six students are barely achieving the expected minimum proficiency level,” the report states. It continues, “Reading performance has not shown any substantial increases over time for either year four or year six students. Identifying and addressing the reasons why reading performance is struggling to increase over time is, therefore, a priority.”

Writing performance, the third area to be tested, stayed about the same for year six students in 2021, but improved dramatically for year four children surveyed.

However a proficiency scale for writing is still to be developed, so performance cannot yet be measured against stakeholder expectations.

Students’ views

The survey also asked students how they felt about school and learning.

“Only half the students in the region reported frequently having a good day, being cheerful, and looking forward to the next day. Further, one in five students reported frequent negative experiences, such as hunger, tiredness, feeling upset, or not having enough friends,” the report states.

“In short, the regional well-being findings show a clear need to act for improved student well-being and should be a key future research focus for regional and national stakeholders.”

Students also talked about their learning challenges, most commonly reporting difficulties “learning or remembering, controlling their behaviour, and concentrating and focusing their attention (about 20% of students).”

Teachers surveyed observed related problems; difficulty focusing attention and concentrating, and a lack of basic knowledge and skills.

Higher performance scores were found in students who attended at least one year of early childhood education, had parents with a university level of education or higher, and who belonged to households with higher than average wealth levels.

More in-depth analysis of these results is planned.

Learning environments

PILNA 2021 was undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic, and considered this and; “pandemics, epidemics, natural disasters and factors specified by respondents.”

Pandemic-related school closures affected 66% of the students surveyed,  and some of these schools were closed for up to eight weeks.

About the same proportion of students were affected by natural disasters, although in general, school closures for this reason were much shorter.

The report noted that while schools took action to continue learning during closures, a digital divide emerged: “Physical learning continuity methods, such as the provision of learning materials, were the commonest measures (40–51%), although there were significant efforts by some schools to ensure learning continuity through social media and email (36%). Small proportions of students attended schools with other non-physical learning continuity measures, such as digital distribution of materials (20–24%).

“This may highlight difficulties with implementing digital learning measures in the region and it appears that physical learning materials are still key to the learning experience in many countries.”

The report suggests future research on any differences in the learning attainment of students who were taught by the various learning continuity measures would be useful.

Many schools reported other resource constraints, including shortages or inadequate classrooms, shortages or inadequate learning materials, and shortages or absenteeism of teachers. Inadequate instruction materials was the most commonly reported problem, with half the students in the region attending schools where this was an issue.

“At the classroom level, only one in three students have access to their own textbook and one in three teachers felt that they did not have enough time to work with students who are slow learners.” 

While most teachers reported feeling confident in teaching numeracy and literacy, fewer “were confident in teaching unstructured literacy subjects (such as quality of ideas in writing).” The report suggests there may be a need for professional development in this area.

Other recommendations include prioritising intervention on student reading performance, with the report noting, “students require reading ability to not only engage with texts but also to understand problems and succeed in all subjects. The relatively low reading scores from PILNA 2021 may, if left unaddressed, cause lower performance in all subjects as the students progress through school. Targeted interventions for reading performance are needed from a household level to a governmental and regional level.”

It also suggests prioritising formative assessment practices, or frequent, informal assessments of student learning, to check in on student understanding, and identify where extra teaching support is needed.

“It is recommended that regional entities, ministries of education, teacher education institutions, school leaders and teachers strengthen, develop and utilise formative assessment practices,” the report states.

Writing in the forward, the Pacific Community’s Director General, Dr Stuart Minchin observes, “In this region, ocean science, biodiversity, health, climate change, each play a fundamental role in driving our development, but if the Pacific wants to be a leader in these fields, it will need future generations to be ready to take on this region’s most pressing challenges.”