Dutch students have again deteriorated sharply in mathematics, natural sciences and reading skills over the past four years. Reading in particular is doing even worse than in 2018.
The Netherlands now performs well below the average of the OECD countries in this subject. This is evident from the international PISA survey among 15-year-olds in 81 countries. Of the fourteen participating EU countries, only Greece scores worse on reading skills.
This time the PISA study focused extra on mathematics. There is one bright spot: here the Netherlands still scores well above the OECD average and the best of the fourteen participating EU countries. There are also relatively many Dutch students who achieve the excellent level. However, the performance of Dutch students has also fallen on average in this subject. This is especially true for girls, who report suffering from ‘math anxiety’ more often than boys. Girls are better readers than boys.
Mathematics performance among VMBO students has fallen more sharply than that of HAVO and VWO students. Their decline is almost four times greater than in pre-university education. The difference between the best and worst mathematics students is greater in the Netherlands than in most other countries. When asked about their favorite subjects at school, less than a third of Dutch students mention mathematics.
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the previous PISA study
School closures
The Netherlands is not the only country where performance in the tested subjects has deteriorated. In other countries, students are also doing less well than in 2018. The researchers suspect that the declines are partly the result of school closures during the corona pandemic, although this does not explain everything. In the Netherlands, among others, performance was already declining before corona.
Dutch students themselves say that when they had to rely on online classes, they fell behind in their school work. On the positive side, three quarters of them are positive about the availability of their teachers if they needed help while learning from home. Girls and pre-vocational secondary education students in particular appear to have been affected by the school closures. Not only did their performance deteriorate, but also their mental well-being, according to questionnaires that students completed.
30 percent of 15-year-olds say they felt lonely when schools had to remain closed. Girls struggled with this feeling the most, especially at pre-vocational secondary education. Dutch students also have less of a sense of ‘belonging’ at school than the 15-year-olds who were surveyed in 2018. Yet Dutch students rate their lives higher than peers in surrounding countries: 7.3. There is a visible decline here: in 2015, Dutch students still gave their lives a 7.8. Girls give a lower grade (7.0) than boys (7.6).
Mobile phone
The use of digital devices during lessons was also examined. The mobile phone appears to be a major distraction in classrooms. About a quarter of Dutch students never or almost never turn off notifications from social networks during class. More than a third of students feel pressure during class to be online and answer messages. More than a third also feel nervous or anxious when they are away from their digital devices. Girls suffer from this more than boys.
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non-reading teachers
Education crisis
Theo Witte, Dutch scholar at the University of Groningen and chairman of the RED Education Team, is “terribly shocked again” by the Dutch PISA results. “Especially in the field of reading skills. That is the basis for being able to survive in our complex society, so if it continues to decline, it is very worrying for our knowledge economy and the livelihoods of new generations.”
The RED Education Team analyzes problems in education and provides advice on them. “There is a deep education crisis,” says Witte, “but if you look at the election manifestos of political parties, it appears that no major party has a convincing plan to restore the quality of our education. These are all loose ideas and ideals, most of which are impossible to implement due to the teacher shortage.”
According to him, the teacher shortage is one of the causes of the Netherlands’ decline in international comparisons. “The workload has increased enormously in all subjects. Teachers no longer have time to check whether students really understand a text. To ask questions about it, to have a conversation about it.” According to him, the other cause is didactics. “It has gone completely to the wrong side.” In addition, external factors, such as telephone use in the classroom and at home, also play a role. “Reading requires concentration and focus.”
Witte believes that reading didactics must change “fundamentally”. “Dutch should be more about taking in the content of a text. Now it is mainly about applying strategies and tricks, such as recognizing signal words, determining the main idea, extracting the key sentence from a paragraph, and so on. This has been the practice for several decades. We must immediately stop this mind-numbing approach.”
It’s actually very simple, he says. “Make sure that students simply have to read a lot of texts on topics and themes that match their prior knowledge. About topics that they need for school, or that they find interesting themselves. And let them talk and write about that topic. That is the essence.”
Long division
Sezgin Cihangir, director of the Netherlands Mathematical Institute, a private educational institution, is also critical of the didactics used in education. According to him, the decline in Dutch results in mathematics is due to so-called ‘realistic arithmetic and mathematics education’. That didactics has been in vogue since the 1970s and emphasizes children’s own solutions, in contrast to traditional arithmetic, in which fixed arithmetic procedures and practice are paramount.
“In the Netherlands we came up with the idea of offering everything in a very language,” says Cihangir. “The always-working long division is seen as old-fashioned in the Netherlands. We have gone too far in this regard. The sad consequence is that we no longer belong to the top, while the Netherlands has always been a country of strong mathematicians, a technical country with companies such as Philips, ASML and Shell.”
The top now includes Singapore, China, Japan, Korea, Estonia and Switzerland. Cihangir: “A country like the Netherlands, which relies on the knowledge economy, cannot afford to no longer be one of those big boys.”
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