Ricardo Braginski
10/22/2020 5:20 PM
Clarín.com
Society
Updated 10/22/2020 5:20 PM
The PISA test is known for being the one that shows how much 15-year-old students, from different countries, learn about Mathematics, Reading and Science.
But in the last edition, of 2018, they added a complementary questionnaire, which points to "global competencies".
The results were released today and among them there is one that draws attention:
Argentine students are among the least aware of public health problems, including a pandemic
.
Argentina was, in this matter,
in position 63 out of 65 countries evaluated, only above Indonesia and Saudi Arabia
.
Students from Hong Kong, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine, meanwhile, are the ones who showed the most knowledge.
The test was taken in 2018,
before the coronavirus pandemic broke out
.
Put in numbers, while more than 80% of 15-year-old Hong Kong students show awareness of public health issues, in Argentina
that percentage falls to less than 50%.
The average of the 65 participating countries is 65%.
“The global competencies that this evaluation measures arose from international tables whose agenda is the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of UNESCO and the projection of education to 2030 of the OECD.
This evaluation -experimental and the first to measure this- represents
an enormous advance
and forces educational systems to
review their content designs, values, capacities and attitudes
”, explains to
Clarín
Mercedes Miguel, former secretary of Innovation and Educational Quality of the Ministry National Education.
And he adds that, “In the case of Argentina, at the point of health and pandemics, the low level of knowledge is
proportionally linked to the absence of the subject in the official curricula
.
This knowledge is
generally resisted
in the country, from a very local perspective away from the global ”.
Norberto Liwiski, director of the specialization "Education, public policies and rights of girls, boys and adolescents" of the National Pedagogical University (UNIPE) has a different vision.
He considers that, before the pandemic, what may have had an influence is that the health service, for adolescents,
is an "unfriendly" field.
“There are services for adults and for children, but there is no place for adolescents.
Where are they treated?
Today they are in a situation of limbo and this makes them
avoid preventive consultations
and that impacts interest on the subject, "he says and clarifies that" it is not a lack of interest on the part of adolescents, but that health services do not considered appropriate mechanisms to the current culture of adolescence.
It is not that adolescents are not very interested in health
but health is not very interested in them
”, he says.
Liwiski also believes that, in a pandemic, things have changed in Argentina.
“A Unicef report, made in the first months of compulsory isolation, shows that
69% of adolescents showed a willingness to comply
.
It is difficult to imagine that this is so, if you do not have information that is ordering your lives in this way.
Without detracting from the fact that there was a psychological discomfort that was reflected in sadness, depression and anguish for the adolescents, of a greater or lesser level according to the family and community context ”.
“In my opinion, adolescents, as they have been given information and a place to participate, have become actors of protection and care.
This does not mean that there are not those who do not find reasons or information and have a tendency to transgress the guidelines, "he added.
How is the study
Experts from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which organize the PISA tests, explain that they evaluated the awareness that students have from a series of questions that led them to answer on four possible scales: “Never I had heard of this ”;
"I have heard of this but I could not explain what it is really about";
"I know something about this and it could explain the general problem";
and "I'm familiar with this and could explain it well."
They asked them about different topics such as climate change;
public health;
migration;
international conflicts;
hunger or malnutrition;
causes of poverty;
and equality between men and women.
From these data they put together an
"index of awareness about global problems"
where Argentina is in a bad way.
“The findings show wide variations between countries in terms of their students' awareness of global issues.
Those of Albania, Greece, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates scored substantially higher than the OECD average, while those of
Argentina, Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Romania, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam
scored
substantially lower
”, they explain in the document.
International health and conflict issues are the least familiar to adolescents around the world.
And in the case of public health, which includes pandemics, Argentina is at the bottom of the table.
The first report of the PISA 2018 tests was released in December last year.
Argentina had
ranked 63rd out of 77 countries evaluated
.
More than half of the students could not understand the most basic of a text and seven out of ten could not solve a simple calculation.