Measuring up: Canadian results of the OECD PISA 2015 study: the performance of Canadian 15-year-olds in collaborative problem solving

The skills and knowledge of a population are crucial to the well-being of both individuals and society. For individuals, high skill levels contribute to economic security and personal fulfillment; for society, they promote productivity and economic growth. In Canada - as in most countries - education systems recognize that competencies beyond knowledge and skills in core subject areas are critical: these competencies are required for learning and fully participating in modern society. The skills needed to perform non-routine tasks, adapt to new circumstances, and learn from one's mistakes are increasingly needed in today's workplace. To assess these skills, both the 2003 and the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) included an individual problem-solving assessment to evaluate how well students were able to solve non-routine problems on their own. Yet much of the problem-solving work carried out in the world today is performed by teams in an increasingly global and computerized economy. Therefore, today's workplaces require people who can solve problems in concert and collaboration with others by combining their ideas and efforts (OECD, 2017b). Equipping students with collaboration skills, in addition to developing their cognitive abilities, is increasingly a goal of today's education systems. However, in general, collaboration is not a skill that is explicitly taught in schools but is, rather, acquired as a result of teaching approaches in academic subjects. For example, when teaching traditional academic subjects, teachers may often ask students to work in groups. Despite the increased importance placed on collaboration skills, very few attempts have been made to assess how well students collaborate with one another. To address this data gap, PISA 2015 introduced for the first time a collaborative problem-solving assessment to measure the ability of 15-year-olds to collaborate in order to solve problems.

This report provides a high-level description of the Canadian results from the collaborative problem-solving component of PISA 2015. All of the scores are reported at an aggregate level only, never at the student level. The [report describes] what PISA is, how collaborative problem solving is defined, and how it was measured in the assessment. A description of the PISA framework for collaborative problem solving is included in [the] Introduction, which provides detailed information about how the assessment was designed to ensure that the test items provided adequate coverage of the domain. The PISA 2015 test questions are highly confidential and cannot be shared. However, a publicly released collaborative problem-solving task from PISA 2015 is presented in Appendix A. Chapter 1 provides information on the performance of Canadian 15-year-old students on the PISA 2015 assessment in collaborative problem solving. Further, it looks at the collaborative problem-solving performance of students by language of the school system, gender, immigrant status, and socioeconomic status. Chapter 1 also explores the extent to which students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science is associated with their performance in collaborative problem solving. Finally, that chapter examines the extent to which students' performance on the collaborative problem-solving assessment in PISA 2015 is correlated with the individual problem-solving assessment in PISA 2012. Chapter 2 presents results on student attitudes toward cooperation and how these are associated with their performance in collaborative problem solving. The major findings in relation to the PISA 2015 collaborative problem-solving assessment are summarized in the Conclusion.

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