ABSTRACT
This qualitative research aimed to determine experiences of learners and teachers in preparation for the administration of PISA as bases for program intervention. Emergent themes were drawn in terms of views, experiences, challenges and ways of management. Learners viewed PISA as it helped raise awareness and overcome challenging tasks while teachers viewed it as it encouraged Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS), helped diagnosed weaknesses in reading, and pushed schools for competency-based approaches. Learners experienced familiarization activities, learners’ practices and emotional experiences while teachers experienced instructional adjustment, administrative preparations and emotional responses. Learners’ challenges included limited familiarity, difficulty with real-world application and test anxiety, while teachers dealt on insufficient training and difficulty in teaching HOTS. Learners managed challenges through targeted practice, time management and emotional resilience. Teachers coped it through engagement in professional development, support for learners’ foundational skills and effective resource utilization. Intervention design was proposed based on results of the study.
Keywords: Experiences, Preparation, Intervention Design
INTRODUCTION
One of the key elements that supports a country’s development is education. It has favorable implications on a nation’s long-term economic growth, citizens’ social stability, and their health and way of life.
The growth of a society in which people have greater possibilities in life in terms of employment opportunities and better health is correlated with proper and high quality education.
As a result, investing in high quality education is crucial for a nation to prosper. The potential to share data and technology among nations has been made possible by living in the twenty-first century. By doing this, school systems can absorb effective techniques from other nations and apply them to their own. Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is one of the projects devoted to this.
PISA is an international comparative study for 15-year-old learners to test their performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. PISA has been conducted every three years except for one-year delay in the current cycle (from 2021 to 2022) due to the pandemic. Following the 2025 data collection, PISA will adopt a four-year assessment cycle. In each cycle, the primary focus alternates among mathematics, science, and reading. Additionally, PISA evaluates broader, cross-curricular skills, including collaborative problem-solving.
The Philippines made its inaugural participation in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018. The results indicated that Filipino students achieved the lowest scores in reading comprehension and were ranked second to last in both mathematics and science literacy. According to PhilStar Global (2024), Education…
As an English teacher in the district of Janiuay I, the researcher also encountered some challenges and perceptions while the school was involved in the preparation of (PISA). While much attention was placed on learners’ performance and national rankings, there was far less focus on the actual experiences of those who implemented the assessment specifically the teachers. The researcher who was directly involved in administering PISA had experienced first-hand technical and administrative difficulties like scheduling conflicts, school readiness, problems with digital testing platforms and lack of training or unclear guidelines.
Based on the researcher’s experiences as a classroom teacher, it was observed that many learners struggled when exposed to assessment tasks that required higher-order thinking, real-world problem-solving, and extended reasoning skills that were central to the PISA. In addition, the researcher had personally encountered instructional challenges in aligning daily lessons with the competencies emphasized in PISA. For this reason, the researcher thought that this study was necessary to be conducted as part of the preparation and results would serve as bases for some interventions and would be studied for best practices in terms of preparing the learners.
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