Towards a Better Future

Chapter Four: Assessment: Primary and Junior Cycle
Performances were relatively similar across the three Cognitive areas except for a small weakness in
Knowing. Increases in the percentages of students across all four benchmarks were noted compared
with 1995, but these were only statistically significant at the Intermediate level. As in other subject
areas, ‘lower-achieving’ students performed relatively well and ‘higher-achieving’ students somewhat
poorer when compared with their counterparts in other countries. No significant gender differences
were found.
Science was a major assessment domain in the PISA 2015 survey. Students in Ireland achieved a mean
score of 503, significantly above the OECD average, and ranked Ireland 13th among all OECD
countries and 19thamong all 45 participating countries. This represented a small but non-significant
drop of six score points compared with 2006, the last year in which Science was a major domain,
and compares with an OECD drop of five points. Ireland’s mean score dropped by 19 score points
between 2012 and 2015, compared with an OECD average of eight points. Twelve of the top
countries in 2012 also had significantly lower scores in 2015. The introduction of computer-based
testing and the inclusion of new items, including those linked to interactive visual experiments have
been suggested as reasons for this decline.
The range of achievement of students in Ireland is much narrower than that of the corresponding
OECD average. Ireland has fewer lower-achieving students at 15% students (below Level 2)
compared with the OECD average of 21%, while the percentage of higher-achieving students is the
same as the OECD average but well below that of the a number of higher-achieving countries.
Ireland’s mean score on all three competency subscales and on the Content Knowledge and
Procedural and Epistemic subscales were all above the corresponding OECD averages. Male students
outperformed females by 10.5 score points. The corresponding OECD average was 3.5 points. This
represents a reversal of performances in 2006 when female students outperformed males by a nonsignificant
0.4 score points. While similar proportions of both male and female students performed
below Level 2 in 2015, a greater percentage of males than females performed at or above Level 5.
Possible reasons for this decline have already been noted.
REVIEW OF PERFORMANCE PATTERNS AT PRIMARY & JUNIOR CYCLE
(a) Performance Patterns at Primary Level
As already stated, the abolition of the Primary School Certificate examination and two revisions of the
curriculum (with another in prospect) have re-focused attention on the role of assessment in schools,
with considerable emphasis now being placed on linking instruction, learning and assessment policies
into a coherent process, and monitoring pupil outcomes at every stage in the system. In-school
assessment practices incorporating both Assessment of Learning (AoL) and Assessment for Learning
(AfL), and the increasing use of standardised testing both by the schools themselves and through
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