Pisa study: the big problem for German teachers

Status: 11:21 am | Reading time: 4 minutes

reThe Corona crisis has proven to be a strict teacher in many areas. This is particularly true in the educational system. Schools were blocked in the spring, too chaotic, and a system of trial and error determined the situation. There were big gaps in distance learning and digital equipment. Meanwhile, Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) has made digitizing schools a top priority.

A school summit has already met twice at the Chancellery after the summer holidays. The decision was made to purchase service laptops for the 800,000 teachers, hire systems administrators, and establish a nationwide educational platform. The message: Germany is acting.

A special assessment of the 2018 Pisa Study released on Tuesday shows just how big the gap is in Germany, because especially when it comes to digital, Germany is practically a developing country within the OECD. When it comes to the availability of effective online learning platforms, Germany only ranked 66th out of 78 participating countries.

While in countries like Singapore, the Chinese provinces of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang or in Denmark, more than 90 percent of schools have modern online learning platforms, in Germany it is only a third. That is well below the OECD average of 54 percent.

The problem of German teachers

And it looks even worse with digital teacher training. Here Germany came in 76th out of 78, behind all other countries except Hungary and Japan.

“Less than 44 percent of school heads in Germany consider their teachers to be technically and pedagogically competent to sensibly integrate new technologies into the classroom,” said OECD Director of Education Andreas Schleicher WELT. An extremely bad starting position for pandemic-related school closings.

“The Corona crisis has revealed that the school system in Germany is susceptible to shocks and has greatly increased the existing opportunity injustices,” says Schleicher. On the other hand, the virus crisis also caused a lot of technological and social innovation. “You can build on that. Real change often takes place in deep crises, and the moment certainly offers the opportunity to grow beyond the status quo when things get back to normal. “

The foundation stone for this has been laid in many places over the past few months, as experience reports from the federal states show. Many municipalities have greatly improved schools: laptops were purchased for needy students, and learning software and video conferencing systems were experimented with. Schleicher acknowledges it too. Above all, however, the Corona crisis assigned a completely new role to digital technologies. “Distance learning has become the lifeblood of education, so to speak.”

A lifeline that is by no means available to all students to the same extent; This was also demonstrated by the 2018 Pisa study. In a comparison of countries, but also in a comparison of educated and disadvantaged households, there were large differences in the availability of technical resources. While 95 percent of students in Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands have their own computer, in Indonesia it is only 34 percent.

In wealthy American households, virtually all 15-year-olds can access their own computer; only three out of four young people from poor households. These results indicated that digital technology tends to exacerbate rather than alleviate social disadvantage, according to the Pisa report.

In 2018, 37 percent of students from better-off households in Germany attended a school that uses modern learning platforms, but only 30 percent of the poorest students. Only 83 percent of them had a home computer for school work, compared to 98 percent in wealthier households. During the Corona crisis, the team was significantly improved by purchasing home loan devices.

After all, the possibilities offered by digital technologies are much more than an emergency solution, Schleicher noted. “Digital technologies make it possible to find completely new answers to what people learn, how people learn, where people learn and when they learn,” he told WELT.

Smart digital learning systems could not only impart knowledge to students, but also simultaneously observe how students learn differently, what tasks interest them, and what problems they find boring or difficult, and then tailor the learning experience with great precision to personal learning styles.

“All of this caught Germany pretty cold,” Schleicher said. Much remains to be done to seize the opportunities that digitization offers. “The digital pact is only the first step here.”