In 2016 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a report for maths teachers based on data from its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It was based upon the 2013 round of PISA when mathematics had been given special attention by researchers. I noticed something very odd about this report and a subsequent article forScientific American that was also based on PISA 2013. The report and article focused on everything other than one of the most obvious conclusions from the data: that ‘teacher-directed’ instruction was more effective than a ‘student-oriented’* classroom climate where, for example, teachers assign problems for students to work on in groups (at least as far as the OECD have defined these terms and collected the relevant data). You can read my various investigations here, here, here and here.

When data from the science-focused PISA 2015 round was released later…