International standardised test scores: Are they culturally relevant?
Citing New Zealand’s declining performance on the Programme for International Students Assessment (PISA) for the past two decades, the National Party’s education policy requires one hour of teaching of literacy and math each for year zero to year 8 students daily, and two standardised tests each year for years 3 to 8 to assess the progress in literacy, math, and science.
It would be remiss not to say that relying on international standardised test scores as the foundation for educational policy is fundamentally problematic. On the one hand, international standardised tests such as PISA or the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) are “flawed business” that can “misguide education”. On the other hand, comparative culturology research demonstrates that the mean differences in these scores at a country level are intimately associated with how self is construed across cultural contexts. Worldwide, the flexibility and monumentalism cultural continuum proposed by Michael Minkov and colleagues is highly correlated with the country-level PISA scores and explains a large proportion of the cross-nation differences. Based on this universal assumption, pinning the responsibility of increasing New Zealand’s ranking on the PISA scores in OECD countries solely on schools and teachers will turn out to be futile given its unique cultural context. So, here we focus on Minkov and colleagues’ cultural dimension of flexibility and monumentalism to highlight and acknowledge the reasons for differences in standardised test scores across nations.
Minkov and colleagues proposed that the national differences in self-enhancement and self-stability or self-consistency can predict various cross-national variations in human behaviours and developmental outcomes. These differences are captured with the flexibility and monumentalism continuum. Monumentalism refers to cultures that tend to see self as stable and consistently based on strong personal values and a sense of personal superiority. Monumentalistic cultures take pride in self, and enjoy high self-esteem, but are less open to self-improvement. On the contrary, flexible cultures see the self as deficit by default and needing improvement. People from these cultures tend to be self-reliant and have a modest self-concept. They feel ashamed to ask for help because it is one’s own responsibility to improve themselves. These cultures tend to have long-term orientations and delay gratification.
Assessed through large-scale cross-cultural studies such as The World Values Survey, African and Latin American cultures score high on monumentalism, while East Asian cultures tend to score high on flexibility. Being a uniquely multicultural nation, Aotearoa New Zealand scores just about in the middle on this flexibility to monumentalism continuum. The flexibility and monumentalism continuum can help us reflect on differences across cultures, rather than provide a mechanism to predict someone’s behaviour based on their cultural heritage. It is important to acknowledge there will always be variations within and across cultures and people.
The flexibility to monumentalism cultural dimension has been used to explain global variations in models of democracy, population obesity, and even COVID mortality at the national level. Of particular interest here is the link between the flexibility and monumentalism cultural dimension and the national academic achievements assessed in PISA and TIMSS. It is well documented that East Asian countries score high in international standardised tests. Minkov and colleagues attributed the East Asian countries’ PISA success to their self-enhancement cultural characteristics that emphasise adaptability, work ethic, and focus on effort and humility. Paradoxically, it is also these characteristics that contribute to the lower academic self-efficacy and worse wellbeing of East Asian students.
The flexibility and monumentalism dimension does not assume a good vs. bad culture, instead, it functions as a useful tool to describe and explain things. Of course, strengthening math and literacy education in schools will enhance students’ learning. However, when a large proportion of the variance in the PISA scores is associated with a nation’s cultural DNA, improving New Zealand’s ranking in standardised tests based on schooling alone can be a futile effort. Aotearoa as a multicultural country embraces different beliefs and self-construal within its unique multicultural backdrop. Hence, it is time to shift attention, instead of focusing on the deeply flawed PISA as an indicator of educational achievement, what schools really should be doing is to facilitate authentic learning and build up students’ competency.
References:
Minkov, M., Bond, M. H., Dutt, P., Schachner, M., Morales, O., Sanchez, C., ... & Mudd, B. (2018). A reconsideration of Hofstede’s fifth dimension: New flexibility versus monumentalism data from 54 countries. Cross-Cultural Research, 52(3), 309-333.
Zhao, Y. (2020). Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA. Journal of Educational Change, 21(2), 245-266.
Bio:
Associate Professor Dr. Zhenlin Wang is an expert in human development. Her research focuses on social cognition in the early years. She is also interested in how culture shapes development and parenting.