PISA tests in Catalonia: The Backfire effect

Alana Jordan – Pixabay

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Josep Oton

Sometimes, when people are confronted with information that contradicts their existing views, they do not revise their position; instead, they cling to their convictions even more firmly. They close ranks around their existing beliefs, reaffirming them despite evidence that disproves them. Social psychology refers to this phenomenon as the “backfire effect”, also known as belief perseverance, conceptual conservatism or ideological inertia.

It is a defence mechanism, because ideas are often deeply embedded in an individual’s personality and come to form part of their identity. In such circumstances, evidence is no longer received as relevant information, but as a threat. Being forced to admit that one is mistaken is experienced as a personal attack. Intellectual debate gives way to visceral confrontation.

This cognitive bias is commonly associated with political or religious beliefs, often lodged at an unconscious level and sustained by intense emotions arising from a sense of belonging to a particular group. Yet even fields such as science, which ought to be governed by objectivity, are not immune to these mechanisms. Changing one’s mind is no longer simply an intellectual matter: it can mean becoming isolated from one’s reference group, undermining one’s sense of internal coherence by demanding a restructuring of one’s thinking, and calling into question the decisions that have shaped one’s personal history.

The backfire effect reveals that, quite often, the purpose of a debate is not to acquire plausible knowledge, but to protect an individual or collective identity. When that identity is perceived to be at risk, rationality gives way to the instinct for self-preservation.

Perhaps certain educational discourses that have taken shape in Catalonia are imbued with this psychological bias, giving rise to a distorted view of the problems confronting the school system.

Catalan education policy, driven by the Administration but promoted by groups of educational theorists, teachers and families, has at times viewed the state school system and its civil-service model with suspicion, preferring more business-oriented approaches to management, as has become clear with the Staffing Decree, which gives school headteachers considerable powers to select the members of their teaching staff.

The emphasis on innovation has its origins in a particular model of schooling — one rooted, precisely, in private initiative — that demonstrated its remarkable effectiveness during the 1960s and 1970s. It promoted the use of Catalan, co-education, non-denominational schooling and active pedagogy, in contrast to a monolingual school system that separated boys from girls, was explicitly religious and relied on rote learning.

That model, in turn, drew inspiration from the nouvelle pédagogie, the Instituto-Escuela of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, Catalan educational experiments during the first third of the twentieth century, the Anglo-Saxon comprehensive school and, no less importantly, the Catalan tradition of leisure-time education.

Even so, for all its considerable achievements, this style of teaching may not have proved equally effective when extended to the education system as a whole. The family, migratory, social, cultural, linguistic, religious and economic context today is very different. It is more diverse and considerably more complex. A formula that works well in one setting may prove counterproductive in another.

And so, globalising methodologies have been embraced at the expense of teaching specialisms. Content has been digitised at the expense of the textbook. Discovery learning has been promoted while direct instruction has been pushed into the background. Individualised learning plans, once an exceptional resource, have become a routine measure, while grouping pupils according to their needs and abilities has been discarded.[1]

The result has been a free fall in academic standards, something that can be observed in the day-to-day life of schools. Nor are the use of Catalan, gender equality, critical thinking and support for the most vulnerable in particularly good shape among young Catalans. Teachers have had enough. They are being asked to achieve the impossible, and they can take no more.

External assessments reflect this worrying situation. Yet they have become an unwelcome guest, best avoided. The basic skills assessments that were once administered to the entire cohort are now based on samples. No longer do all pupils sit them; only a statistical sample does. In the past, families could find out what level their son or daughter had reached, or how their school performed, and could use that information to introduce corrective measures. Now it is merely a survey — and we all know how surveys are cooked. What is more, this year language skills have been assessed through multiple-choice tests, without pupils having to write a single word.

As for PISA, the latest results have been catastrophic. The Department of Education has commissioned the OECD to investigate possible improvements. It is a rather controversial decision. It would be rather like a family hiring as a private tutor the very teacher who would later be responsible for assessing the student.

Despite a strategy that is so questionable, reality has surpassed even the worst fears. In the 2026 PISA tests, a quarter of pupils were deliberately excluded. Had these boys and girls been required to complete the exercises, the deterioration in the results would have been even more striking.

It may be dismissed as a technical error, but a process as costly as this cannot afford mistakes of such a nature. Can anyone imagine the same thing happening in an election? In that case, we would have no hesitation in calling it electoral fraud.

The blunder in the administration of the PISA tests will presumably serve to conceal the collapse in the academic standards of Catalan pupils. It is a grotesque example of the backfire effect. When the evidence contradicts the theory, the response is to distort the data in order to preserve an official narrative that has been maintained for decades.

Digging in behind outdated assumptions, systematically discrediting anyone bold enough to point out that the emperor has no clothes, or squandering public resources on ineffective methodologies will do nothing to solve the problem. Quite the contrary: it will make it worse. In the end, the whole thing has backfired on them.

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[1] Art. 18.1 of Decree 299/1997, which remains in force.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons