Assessing Tenth-Grade Students’ Mathematical Literacy Skills in Solving PISA Problems

Abstract

We tested the mathematical literacy (ML) proficiency of 204 grade 10 “advanced track” students in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) using 34 questions from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 released items. Using a quantitative descriptive approach, we analyzed the performance of males (n = 106) and females (n = 98) on items spread across the four content subdomains (quantity, space and shape, change and relationship, and uncertainty), the processes of problem-solving (formulate, employ, reasoning, and interpret), and the four PISA contexts (personal, occupational, societal, and scientific) across six PISA proficiency levels. The test was formulated in three types of response format (multiple choice, closed- and open-ended). Results showed that overall student performance was in the very low category. Female students outperformed male students in all aspects of mathematical literacy. The highest percentage achieved in the modelling process was in the interpreting and then employ and formulate tasks. Students performed almost perfectly in problems that covered the uncertainty content area but fared poorly with problems dealing with change and relationship. Students performed better on personal mathematical problems than occupational, societal or scientific problems. These findings are important for UAE teachers regarding direct application to classroom practice and for researchers and officials to shape future research and recommendations for future new educational policies.

Unlocking the secrets of students’ mathematical literacy to solve mathematical problems: A systematic literature review

“…Based on the results of a systematic review with PRISMA process, collected 20 review articles from seven countries. Turkey dominates the distribution of research location with a percentage of 40% (Aksu et al, 2017;Aksu & Guzeller, 2016;Altun, 2017;Canbazoglu & Tarim, 2020;Kozakli Ulger et al, 2022;Ozgen, 2019;Tapan Broutin et al, 2021;Yenmez & Gokce, 2023), followed by Indonesia with a percentage of 35% (Dewantara et al, 2015;Fauzi & Chano, 2022;Firdaus & Herman, 2017;Jailani et al, 2020;Kholid et al, 2022;Kusuma et al, 2022;Zainiyah & Marsigit, 2019), and 5% of each in Korea (Hwang & Ham, 2021), South Africa (Botha et al, 2013), Saudi Arabia (Almarashdi & Jarrah, 2023), Norway (Haara, 2018), and Slovenia (Kolar & Hodnik, 2021). The distribution of countries can be seen clearly in Figure 3.…”

“…Based on the 20 articles obtained, the majority of students still need to improve their mathematical literacy, and 19 articles show low-quality mathematical literacy. From some countries (Figure 3), Turkey is the dominating country with eight studies (Aksu et al, 2017;Aksu & Guzeller, 2016;Altun, 2017;Canbazoglu & Tarim, 2020;Kozakli Ulger et al, 2022;Ozgen, 2019;Tapan Broutin et al, 2021;Yenmez & Gokce, 2023), followed by Indonesia with six studies (Dewantara et al, 2015;Fauzi & Chano, 2022;Firdaus & Herman, 2017;Jailani et al, 2020;Kholid et al, 2022;Kusuma et al, 2022), and South Korea with one study (Hwang & Ham, 2021), South Africa (Botha et al, 2013), Saudi Arabia (Almarashdi & Jarrah, 2023), Norway (Haara, 2018), and Slovenia (Kolar & Hodnik, 2021). Then, one of the studies located in Indonesia had high mathematical literacy results (Zainiyah & Marsigit, 2019).…”

“…From 19 studies, it can be observed that the quality of mathematical literacy is low. 14 studies revealed that students had difficulty formulating mathematical problems (Aksu et al, 2017;Aksu & Guzeller, 2016;Altun, 2017;Botha et al, 2013;Canbazoglu & Tarim, 2020;Fauzi & Chano, 2022;Firdaus & Herman, 2017;Haara, 2018;Hwang & Ham, 2021;Jailani et al, 2020;Kholid et al, 2022;Kolar & Hodnik, 2021;Ozgen, 2019;Tapan Broutin et al, 2021), three studies revealed that students had difficulty implementing formulas (Almarashdi & Jarrah, 2023;Dewantara et al, 2015;Kusuma et al, 2022), and the rest revealed difficulties in developing mathematical problems (Kozakli Ulger et al, 2022;Yenmez & Gokce, 2023;Zainiyah & Marsigit, 2019).…”

“…Internal factors are factors that arise from within the individual, while external factors come from outside the individual. Internal factors obtained are beliefs, motivation (Altun, 2017), motivation (Altun, 2017), motivation, the quantity of training (Dewantara et al, 2015;Kozakli Ulger et al, 2022), gender (Almarashdi & Jarrah, 2023), self-efficacy (Aksu & Guzeller, 2016), anxiety (Aksu & Guzeller, 2016), learning discipline (Aksu et al, 2017), reading literacy habit (Zainiyah & Marsigit, 2019), academic value (Yenmez & Gokce, 2023), age (Jailani et al, 2020), and students experience in working on problems (Ozgen, 2019). Then external factors cover the learning process (Botha et al, 2013;Canbazoglu & Tarim, 2020), student and teacher ratios (Aksu et al, 2017), learning models (Firdaus & Herman, 2017), mathematical modeling (Tapan Broutin et al, 2021;Yenmez & Gokce, 2023), learning approaches, teacher support (Kolar & Hodnik, 2021), ICT (Kolar & Hodnik, 2021), textbooks (Kolar & Hodnik, 2021), school level (Jailani et al, 2020), meaningful learning (Fauzi & Chano, 2022), culture (Haara, 2018), local resources (Haara, 2018), and teacher experience (Botha et al, 2013).…”

“…Various conditions suggest that age influences mathematical literacy. Regarding gender, there are conflicting opinions or findings compared to review articles that claim gender influences mathematical literacy (Almarashdi & Jarrah, 2023). However, a study by Firdaus and Herman (2017) showed that gender does not impact mathematical literacy, as particular abilities cannot be determined by gender.…”