Teachers' awareness, understanding and challenges regarding the PISA implementation

Abstract

Brunei Darussalam officially participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018. It has been in the planning and implemented by the Ministry of Education in phases since 2014. In order to investigate the secondary school teachers' awareness, understanding and the challenges in relation to the implementation of PISA in Brunei, a small-scale study has been conducted. An online 5-point Likert scale survey was distributed using convenient sampling of teachers across the nation. In total, 90 teachers responded to the survey. From the six school clusters in Brunei, the majority with 53% of the respondents was from School Cluster 3. The results of the survey revealed only one respondent had not heard of PISA, 75% of the teachers are aware that PISA is an assessment developed for 15-year old students, and 57% responded correctly that PISA is tested once every three years. Meanwhile, when asked about their understanding of PISA, not everyone was confident in responding to the some of the survey items. This was evident because of the missing number of a few respondents. Interestingly, only 61% of the respondents are interested to know the results of the first PISA implementation in Brunei. Some of the challenges that most of the respondents agreed on during the school's preparation of PISA were related to the constraint of national examinations to complete the syllabus, insufficient computers and inadequate Internet connection in their schools and the concerns with students experiencing language barrier in answering the questions. The findings from this present small-scale study provided brief yet useful glimpses on how we can further promote the awareness and understanding of the PISA implementation in the country, and to propose useful suggestions to the challenges encountered.