Unpacking Underperformance: Learning Mindsets and the Challenge of Academic Achievement Among Filipino Students

The 2018 PISA report revealed that 71.8 percent of participating students from the Philippines have failed to reach minimum basic learning thresholds, raising doubts about the state of education in the country. While most East Asian economies lead the world in terms of their significant share of high-performing students, Filipino students are critically left behind by their peers. Before the PISA, the discourse on policies surrounding educational improvement processes lacked a strong evidence base, mainly due to the absence of a robust learner-centered evaluation mechanism. In addition, despite prior discussions on how the Philippines suffers from systemic issues of access and equity, learners’ characteristics and backgrounds were rarely considered.

To contribute to the policy discussions, we unpack the primary sources of inequalities in science, mathematics, and reading achievement using the PISA data. We also explored how performance is construed by factors such as learners’ backgrounds, learning mindsets (such as the implicit beliefs about intelligence, i.e., growth vs. fixed mindset beliefs), reading difficulties, and other self-reported characteristics. Our results indicate that (1) inequalities are highly persistent among regions, between public and private schools; (2) significant gains in academic achievement are contingent on the interaction between students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and the possession of a growth mindset. However, the associated positive effect of growth mindset on test scores interacts only among higher-SES students and not among students with lower-SES. Further, (3) reading difficulties are prevalent among Filipino students, which are comorbid with science and mathematics achievement. Lastly, (4) students with a history of repetition are severely disadvantaged, particularly males from public schools.

The paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of academic achievement through a large-scale assessment framework. Several actionable policy insights related to learning mindsets are also presented in the paper, particularly improving the curriculum and intensifying teacher training. Thus, the education sector needs to strategically commit to long-term education quality goals to prevent the otherwise late detection of learning comorbidities among Filipino students.