Teaching Practices and Collaborative Problem Solving - Evidence from PISA 2015

Sammanfattning: There is a heated debate on what teaching practices should be used to foster the skills students need for the current and future workplace. The 21st-century skills movement, among others, argue that 21st-century skills such as creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration should be actively taught to students using more modern teaching practices (for example students working in small groups and focusing on critical thinking) and less traditional teaching practices (for example lecturing and focusing on fact-based knowledge). In this thesis, the relationship between teaching practices and the 21st-century skill collaboration is examined. To investigate this relationship, data on teaching practices and students’ Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) test scores from PISA 2015 was used in OLS regressions including country dummies as well as control variables at the student, teacher, and school level. Results differed significantly based on whether student- or teacher-reported teaching practices were used in the regressions. In the results based on student-reports, traditional teaching practices were indicated to have a large, statistically significant positive effect on CPS test scores, whereas modern practices had a statistically significant negative effect. In contrast, no statistically significant relationships where observed when teacher-reported teaching practices were used. This discrepancy in results based on who reported the teaching practices is discussed and future research is recommended to investigate this further. It is concluded that the relationship between traditional teaching and CPS is either zero or positive, while it is either zero or negative for modern teaching. The policy recommendations made by the 21st-century skills movement in regards to CPS are therefore discredited.