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Spotlight on teachers as Indonesian student competence worsens
The triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that Indonesia suffered a decline in all three assessed abilities in 2018, with reading experiencing the highest drop.
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Students listen to a teacher in their classroom at state junior high school SMP N 10 in Gulung hamlet, Ruan village, East Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara. (JP/Markus Makur)
I
ndonesia's declining scores in a recent global education quality survey has raised doubts about whether the country would be able to take full advantage of its highly flaunted demographic bonus, which was supposed to provide an abundance of young and productive people in the next decade.
The triennial survey, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), showed that Indonesia suffered a decline in all three assessed abilities in 2018, with reading experiencing the greatest drop from 397 to 371.
Mathematics also saw a decline from 386 to 379 and science from 403 to 396. All the scores were below OECD's average scores of 487 for reading and mathematics and 489 for science.
The survey was carried out on 15-year-old students in 79 countries, including 12,098 students from 397 schools across Indonesia. The figure represented Indonesia's 3.7 million students who are aged 15 years.
These scores put Indonesia within the nineth lowest rank in each assessed ability, placing it below four other Southeast Asian countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei Darussalam and Thailand.
Education expert Totok Amin Soefijanto of Paramadina University said the government would have to reform its education system if it wanted to make the best use of the demographic dividend. He said it should start by equipping teachers with more training and pre-service preparation, including by reforming the recruitment process.
"Our children are being taught by teachers who are never trained and whose knowledge is never updated. As a result, their delivery and content is also not updated, so it's no wonder that our PISA scores declined," he said.
