The Department of Education (DepEd) on Wednesday disclosed plans to form a Task Force on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to improve learners’ performance on both local and international tests.

This, after President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. underscored the need to produce learners who are “critical thinkers and problem solvers” during his third State of the Nation Address (SONA).

For the 2022 PISA, the Philippines landed in the bottom 10 out of 81 participating countries in areas of reading comprehension, mathematics, and science; and second to the last in creative thinking.

“One of our recommendations is to put up a Task Force for PISA exams specifically because we need to modify local conditions to be able to perform better in these exams,” DepEd Secretary Juan Edgardo “Sonny” Angara said in a hybrid post-State of the Nation Address (SONA) forum.

Besides the Task Force on PISA, Angara underscored short- and long-term strategies to tweak the pedagogy or the way of teaching in public schools.

“We are injecting some periods in the everyday curriculum for reading to strengthen the foundations of literacy and numeracy,” Angara said, citing 30-minute reading periods in between classes.

“We’re supplementing current initiatives like catch-up Fridays with a focus on science projects because the focus on the coming 2025 PISA exam is going to deal with science,” he added.

For the long-term reforms, the education chief said the DepEd targets to have periodic and granular monitoring to assess how learners are adapting to these strategies.

“We’re also going to craft some PISA-type quizzes and examinations to give to our students periodically because we need to monitor their progress, to see if the interventions we are providing are making an effect,” Angara said.

Angara, meanwhile, echoed the President’s intent to modernize and digitalize the country’s education system to solve perennial problems.

“We need our students to be technologically savvy at the same time across the Philippines, we need to provide better inputs for our students,” he said.

These efforts include digitalization as standard features in schools, learners’ utilization of computers, smart televisions, and digital books, and the use of solar power, among others. (PNA)