Students' Readiness in Solving Contextual Pisa-Like Items: A Focus on Procedural Fluency and Adaptive Reasoning

Date of Award

12-1-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Mathematics Education

First Advisor

Catherine P. Vistro-Yu, PhD

Abstract

Following the Updated Philippine Development Plan, the Philippines made its inaugural participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2018. Results from this assessment showed that only 19% of the participating Filipino students can perceive and recognize how a basic situation can be represented mathematically. Hence, this study aimed to assist mathematics educators in understanding the underwhelming performance of Filipino students in PISA 2018. This study aimed to determine if context, specifically context familiarity and context complexity, had any significant impact on students’ performance in PISA-like items. The study utilized a mixed methods research design and involved forty-four Grade 9 students enrolled in a private school in Region I. The students completed three sets of test materials: computational items, simple context items, and PISA-like items. Validated rubrics were used to assess students’ procedural fluency and adaptive reasoning. Interviews were conducted after all test materials were administered. The results show that students scored low in PISA-like items, and average in both simple context items and computational items. The Analysis of Variance and Tukey’s HSD Post Hoc Analysis further show that students’ procedural fluency and adaptive reasoning significantly differed between computational items and PISA-like items and between simple context items and PISA-like items. In addition, it was found that familiarity with the context does not contribute to students’ performance on PISA-like items. It can be concluded that context contributes to the low performance of students in PISA-like items. However, it was observed that context complexity negatively impacts their performance on PISA-like items. For a better understanding of Filipino students’ performance in PISA, this study recommends further research on the other strands of mathematical proficiency.

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