PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores
PISA has many peculiar and surprising discoveries…
Fear of failure improves academic performance.
That’s a conclusion one can draw from PISA’s analysis of its data. This is true at the system level. “At the system level, the greater the fear of failure expressed by students, the higher the reading scores in that education system” (OECD, 2019, p. 193). This is especially true for high performing East Asian education systems and some English speaking systems. PISA found that:
a large number of English-speaking and East Asian education systems were amongst those whose students were both more likely to report a fear of failure and to be high performers in reading. (OECD, 2019, p. 193).
It is also true within systems: “in a majority of school systems, students who expressed a greater fear of failure scored higher in reading than students expressing less concern about failing, after accounting for the socio-economic profile of students and schools” (OECD, 2019, p. 192).
Moreover, self-efficacy or self-confidence, the opposite of fear of failure, does not seem to lead to better academic performance, according to PISA’s analysis.
The strongest positive associations between general self-efficacy and reading performance were observed largely in countries and economies whose average reading performance was below the OECD CONTINUE READING: Education in the Age of Globalization » Blog Archive » PISA Peculiarities (3): More Fear, Better Scores