UAE needs ‘creative thinkers, not just pupils who memorise’

The UAE needs to produce creative thinkers, not rote learners, if it is to climb to the top of the world rankings of the international assessment, Pisa, said the official who heads the exam.

“The kind of things that are easy to teach and easy to test are going to have less and less relevance in Pisa,” Andreas Schleicher, the head of the OECD’s directorate of education and skills and co-ordinator of the programme for international student assessment, said at the Qudwa 2017 Forum in Abu Dhabi.

“Pisa is not a test you can teach to. It rewards thinking skills. The best way to prepare your students for the test is to teach them well, to teach them to think, to teach them to work collaboratively,” he said.

Pisa is issued to a random sample of more than 500,000 15-year-olds selected by the OECD around the world every three years to measure reading, maths and science comprehension.

The UAE Government has listed students’ rank in Pisa as a key education performance indicator in the UAE Vision 2021 National Agenda. The last time public and private school pupils from the UAE participated, in 2015, they scored below the OECD average.

In preparation for Pisa 2018, the Abu Dhabi Department of Education and Knowledge has prepared mock exams for all 15-year-old pupils in the emirate and beefed up teaching resources to get schools ready.

Mr Schleicher said the assessment was challenging for this region because education here historically focused on memorisation and the reproduction of subject-matter content.

“The shift in education is really important,” he said. “It’s easy to prepare young people for our past. But we need to prepare them for their future. If this country is serious about a post-oil economy, education will have to be its No 1 priority.”