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Anna Stokke: In my latest episode with @MichaelPetrilli, I mentioned that I think TIMSS is a better math test than PISA. Steve Wilson sent me this article from 2009, which gives PISA a D and TIMSS an A. Why does PISA get more attention than TIMSS? đ€@tomloveless99 math.jhu.edu/~wsw/papers2/e⊠Subject-matter experts reviewed the content, rigor, and […]
Joanne Jacobsâ summary: They analyzed the 2012 PISA exam, which includes questions on how math is taught, as well as demographic information. That made it possible to control for socioeconomic status, family structure, use of the test language at home and immigrant status. Comparing similar students, math instruction makes a meaningful difference in student learning, […]
Cremieux I’m delighted to see my charts have been posted in response to this multiple times. If you look at American PISA performance, you see a consistent picture: Americans utterly dominate once you split them by race.
We link geospatial data on 3G coverage over time with 2.3 million student-level PISA records from 82 countries. PISA urbanicity data + pop. density data + 3G coverage shapefiles = within-country variation in 3G coverage over time. Hereâs how this linkage looks in Czech Repub. pic.twitter.com/5RCqNfj414 — Sam Stemper (@samstemper) December 19, 2023
The German PISA results are nothing short of a disaster. pic.twitter.com/mqmKPCTiYP — Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) December 5, 2023
By Dale Chu The latest PISA results dropped earlier today and, perhaps to no oneâs surprise, they werenât good. U.S. students saw a 13-point drop in math, which was âamong the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematicsâ for the U.S., according to the OECD. This morningâs headlines summarize the bad news: âU.S. studentsâ math scores plunge […]
OECD, via a kind reader: OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning […]
PISA, via a kind email: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to school closures across the world and forced teachers and students in many countries to adapt quickly to teaching and learning online. But a new OECD PISA report reveals wide disparities both between and within countries in the availability of technology in schools and of […]
The Economist: When Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 it took the chance to reshape the countryâs education system. Mailis Reps, the current education minister, says officials and politicians looked everywhereâfrom America to the Netherlandsâfor inspiration. But they kept coming back to their Nordic neighbours. As Ms Reps recalls, the concluding argument […]
Yi-Jhen Wu, Claus H. Carstensen & Jihyun Lee: This study examined learning strategy use in mathematics among East Asian students in East Asian educational systems. By employing latent class analysis on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data, we found four classes of learning strategy types, namely memorization with metacognitive strategies (17.49%), metacognitive […]
Mark Schneider: In a recent commentary in Ed Week, I discussed two emerging problems in PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). I identified OECDâs insufficient attention to research and development (driven in part by its pursuit of âinnovativeâ topics) and the too-short three-year testing […]
Andreas Schleicher: OECD PISA. “The kind of things that are easy to teach are now easy to automate or outsource”.
The Economist: But Estonia has also taken a deliberately inclusive approach, argues Mart Laidmets, a senior official at its ministry of education. It tries to avoid at all costs having pupils repeat years of school. Holding pupils back can help. But too often it is used as an excuse not to teach difficult kids. It […]
Steve Sailer: Here are the overall 2015 PISA scores (averaging the Science, Reading, and Math scores equally), with color coding to put the various American scores (red bars) in perspective. Keep in mind that some countries didnât do a good job of rounding up everybody who was supposed to take the test, which probably serves […]
Andreas Schleicher: Pisa tests, an international standard for comparing education systems around the world, could include a new measurement of global skills in the next round of tests in 2018. The OECD, which runs the tests in maths, reading and science, is considering adding another test which would look at how well pupils can navigate […]
John Morgan: England will not take part in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Developmentâs project to measure learning outcomes of graduates around the world, delivering a blow to the plan. The OECD had described the Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes project, seen as a potential university-level equivalent of the organisationâs Pisa tests in […]
Sean Coughlan: There will be a much wider sample of Chinese pupils taking part in the next round of the international Pisa tests. Shanghai took part in the most recent tests and had the highest results. But there were claims that the city was not representative of schools in other parts of China. The Organisation […]
Like children headed home with their report cards, the nations of the globe recently received grades on the educational achievement of their students via the test known as the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. Reactions ranged from celebration to resignation to recrimination, depending upon the results.
In the United States, France and Great Britain, educators and political leaders bemoaned another disappointing showing despite their enviable wealth. They looked to East Asia and Eastern Europe and sought to understand how poorer countries in these regions could achieve so much more with fewer resources.
In Germany, educators took a measure of satisfaction that they had arrested an alarming decline, though they were far from declaring victory. In Poland, where leaders congratulated themselves for a breakout performance, the impressive results reinforced a controversial set of reforms.
The unleashing of the latest PISA scores occasioned a familiar debate over the merits of reducing the quality of schooling to a data point. Even the man who coordinates PISA, Andreas Schleicher, cautions that the numbers can be taken too far.
“Any assessment is a partial reflection of what matters,” he told The WorldPost. “Math, science and literacy are the foundation for most of the other things, but they’re not everything.”The data was provided to The WorldPost by Pablo Zoido, an analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the group behind PISA. It shows that students’ wealth does not necessarily make them more competitive on an international scale. In the United States, for example, the poorest kids scored around a 433 out of 700 on the math portion of PISA, while the wealthiest ones netted about a 547. The lower score comes in just below the OECD average for the bottom decile (436), but the higher score also comes in below the OECD average for the top decile (554).
“At the top of the distribution, our performance is surprisingly bad given our top decile is among the wealthiest in the world,” said Morgan Polikoff, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Education who reviewed the data.
Elaine Weiss and Dr. Thomas W. Payzant:
Every three years, American policymakers eagerly anticipate the release of scores for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). While any single test, no matter how strong, can explain only a limited amount about our education system, PISA provides some unique insights, testing students’ ability to apply knowledge and skills both in and out of school. It is taken only by 15-year-olds, making it a decent proxy for the “college-and-career readiness” that is the focus of current debates.
The 2013 headline is basically that the United States falls right in the middle of the pack, as it has for several decades. The U.S. Department of Education and its allies used those rankings to argue that U.S. schools are “stagnating” and to advance specific reforms it says will fix them. However, average scores may obscure and confuse more than they inform. Indeed, scores from individual states that have their own PISA rankings offer more policy-relevant insight than overall U.S. rankings. This makes sense — U.S. education looks more like a diverse patchwork than a unified system. Public investments in schools, and in students and their families, vary greatly across states, as do other policies that may boost or depress scores. Luckily, this year, three states received individual PISA rankings — as if they were independent countries. This can help us connect the dots between those disparities and scores.
Massachusetts is the good news story. If it were its own country, it would rank sixth in reading of 65 countries and economies included, behind only Singapore, Japan, Korea, and the Chinese regions of Shanghai and Hong Kong. Its students rank just above Finland and Canada, some of the world’s best readers. Though its math scores are slightly lower, Massachusetts keeps company with Belgium and Germany and is only slightly behind Finland and Canada, ranking 16 of 65. In science, Massachusetts ranks 11th, ahead of Canada and Germany. Connecticut, the second of three states with its own scores, falls just below Massachusetts, ranking 9th in reading, 18th in math, and 17th in science.
In October 2013, I posted an essay, “PISA’s China Problem,” that called on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to fully disclose its arrangement with China regarding Shanghai’s participation in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The latest PISA scores were to be released in December, offering an excellent opportunity for the OECD to dispel the mystery surrounding Shanghai’s 2009 involvement with PISA. I noted that Shanghai, the wealthiest, most educated province in China, was the only mainland province officially participating in PISA 2009 and PISA 2012. Other data from rural areas of China had been talked about by PISA officials over the years, but never released to the public domain. I called on PISA to release those data.
When the latest PISA scores came out in December, nothing had changed. I followed up with a second essay. I again urged full transparency. I also challenged PISA’s portrayal of Shanghai as a “high equity” school system. An extensive literature–including excellent journalism and both qualitative and quantitative scholarship–documents the cruel effects of the hukou system on migrants in Shanghai. Hukou is an internal registration system in China that limits rural migrants’ access to urban public services, in particular, to schools. These migrants are Chinese citizens, mind you, not immigrants from other countries. They have simply moved from rural areas to China’s big cities, or, because the hukou is inherited, they were born in one of China’s big cities but because of their family’s rural hukou, have become second generation migrants in the eyes of the state.
Students in 2012 were more likely than their counterparts in 2003 to have attended at least one year of pre-primary education.
While more 15-old students reported to have enrolled in pre-primary education during the period, many of the students who reported that they had not attended pre-primary school are disadvantaged – the students who could benefit most from pre-primary education.
If offered a choice of schools for their child, parents are more likely to consider such criteria as “a safe school environment” and “a school’s good reputation” more important than “high academic achievement of students in the school”.
The results from a global exam that evaluates students’ reading, science and math skills are in and, once again, Chinese students appear to be reigning supreme while American students continued to underperform.
But before you shake your head ruefully and scoff at the decline of Western-style education, take a look at how the data is organized.
The OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exams are held every three years. Coming first and third respectively in the 2012 exams are the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong.
However, China is uniquely not listed as a country in the rankings — unlike the U.S., Russia, Germany, Australia and other nations judged on the basis of their country-wide performances. Instead, China only shares Shanghai’s score with PISA. (Hong Kong, a Special Autonomous Region of China, sends its own data.)
PISA 2012 is the programme’s 5th survey. It assessed the competencies of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science (with a focus on mathematics) in 65 countries and economies.
Around 510 000 students between the ages of 15 years 3 months and 16 years 2 months participated in the assessment, representing about 28 million 15-year-olds globally.
The students took a paper-based test that lasted 2 hours. The tests were a mixture of open-ended and multiple-choice questions that were organised in groups based on a passage setting out a real-life situation. A total of about 390 minutes of test items were covered. Students took different combinations of different tests. They and their school principals also answered questionnaires to provide information about the students’ backgrounds, schools and learning experiences and about the broader school system and learning environment.Among the 34 OECD countries, the United States performed below average in mathematics in 2012 and is ranked 26th…Performance in reading and science are both close to the OECD average. The United States ranks 17 in reading, (range of ranks: 14 to 20) and 21 in science (range of ranks: 17 to 25). There has been no significant change in these performances over time.
Mathematics scores for the top-performer, Shanghai-China, indicate a performance that is the equivalent of over two years of formal schooling ahead of those observed in Massachusetts, itself a strong-performing U.S. state.
While the U.S. spends more per student than most countries, this does not translate into better performance. For example, the Slovak Republic, which spends around USD 53 000 per student, performs at the same level as the United States, which spends over USD 115 000 per student.
Just over one in four U.S. students do not reach the PISA baseline Level 2 of mathematics proficiency – a higher-than-OECD average proportion and one that hasn’t changed since 2003. At the opposite end of the proficiency scale, the U.S. has a below-average share of top performers.
Students in the United States have particular weaknesses in performing mathematics tasks with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems. An alignment study between the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and PISA suggests that a successful implementation of the Common Core Standards would yield significant performance gains also in PISA.While these results always make news, this year there is an added tempest in the teapot of the education policy world: The OECD and the Obama administration worked in advance with a selected group of advocacy organizations to launch a media campaign called PISA Day. Which organizations? The College Board, ACT, America Achieves, and the Business Roundtable–all key architects of the Common Core, the new national curriculum standards whose increased rigor and standardized tests have led to a much-publicized protest movement among some parents, teachers, and kids. Groups that support the Core have an interest in calling attention to low American test scores, which today they will use to argue that the Core is the solution not only to our academic woes, but also to reviving the American economy. Happy PISA Day!
But the truth is that the lessons of PISA for our school reform movement are not as simple as they are often made out to be. PISA results aren’t just about K-12 test scores and curricula–they are also about academic ability tracking, income inequality, health care, child care, and how schools are organized as workplaces for adults.Not much has changed since 2000, when the U.S. scored along the OECD average in every subject: This year, the U.S. scores below average in math and ranks 17th among the 34 OECD countries. It scores close to the OECD average in science and reading and ranks 21st in science and 17th in reading.
Here are some other takeaways from the report:
America Is Struggling at Math
The U.S. scored below the PISA math mean and ranks 26th out of the 34 OECD countries. The U.S. math score is not statistically different than the following countries: Norway, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Sweden, and Hungary.
Do American Schools Need to Change? Depends What You Compare Them To
On average, 13 percent of students scored at the highest or second highest level on the PISA test, making them “top performers.” Fifty-five percent of students in Shanghai-China were considered top performers, while only nine percent of American students were.For the last few years, many U.S. educators and policy makers have looked to Finland, noting its high test scores and laser-like focus on attracting and retaining the best teachers. Although Finland still posts high scores, they have slid in the past few years.
Poland, on the other hand, has seen sharp improvement. The only European country to have avoided the recession, Poland undertook a host of education overhauls in 1999, including delaying by one year the system that places students into academic or vocational tracks, and crafting better systems to identify struggling students and get them help.
“Poland launched a massive set of reforms and, while we cannot say for sure they caused the improvement, they certainly are…a sort of plausible explanation,” said Andreas Schleicher, deputy director for education and skills at the OECD.
In Massachusetts, educators and policy makers credit the good showing, in part, to a 1993 effort that boosted spending and ushered in rigorous standards and achievement tests that students have to pass to graduate.Related: www.wisconsin2.org
Taksin Nuoret: Ever since December 2001, when the results of the first PISA survey were made public, the Finnish educational system has received a lot of international attention. Foreign delegations are flocking to Finland, in the hope of discovering Finland’s secrets. Finland is also trying to take advantage of its PISA success by exporting its […]
How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.
My Facebook feed today has lots of links to this article. The upshot: a new Pew study showing that Americans think that US 15 year olds rank “near the bottom” on international science tests, whereas the truth is that they “rank in the middle among developed countries.”
I guess “the middle” covers a lot of terrain, but the way I look at the data, this assertion doesn’t hold.
The international comparison in question is the 2009 PISA. Here are the rankings. (Click for larger image)Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
“America’s Woeful Public Schools: TIMSS Sheds Light on the Need for Systemic Reform”[1]
“Competitors Still Beat U.S. in Tests”[2]
“U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science”[3]
These are a few of the thousands of headlines generated by the release of the 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS results today. Although the results are hardly surprising or news worthy, judging from the headlines, we can expect another global wave of handwringing, soul searching, and calls for reform. But before we do, we should ask how meaningful these scores and rankings are.
“Numbers don’t lie,” many may say but what truth do they tell? Look at the following numbers:Valerie Strauss has more.
Zeit Online, via a kind Richard Askey email:
How do families live these days? OECD’s comprehensive world education ranking report, PISA 2009, was published in December of 2010. All participants of the test (fifteen-year-old pupils) completed a questionnaire about their living situation at home. ZEIT ONLINE analyzed and visualized this data to provide you with a unique way of comparing standards of living in different countries. Click on any icon to see further details.
That is a request from J. and here is one recent story, with much more at the link:
A global study of learning standards in 74 countries has ranked India all but at the bottom, sounding a wake-up call for the country’s education system. China came out on top.
On this question, you can read a short Steve Sailer post, with comments attached. Here are my (contrasting) observations:
1. A big chunk of India is still at the margin where malnutrition and malaria and other negatives matter for IQ. Indian poverty is the most brutal I have seen, anywhere, including my two trips to sub-Saharan Africa or in my five trips to Haiti. I don’t know if Pisa is testing those particular individuals, but it still doesn’t bode well for the broader distribution, if only through parental effects.
Gary W. Phillips & Tao Jiang via a Dan McGrath email:
This study describes how the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was used for internationally benchmarking state performance standards. The process is accomplished in two steps. First, PISA items are embedded in the administration of the state assessment and calibrated on the state scale. The international item calibrations are then used to link the state scale to the PISA scale through common item linking. The second step is to use the statistical linking as part of the state standard setting process to help standard setting panelists determine how high their state standards need to be in order to be internationally competitive. This process was carried out in Delaware, Hawaii, and Oregon, and results are reported here for two of the states: Hawaii and Delaware.
Key words: Equating, linking, item response theory, international benchmarking.
Introduction
In 2010, the American Institutes for Research obtained permission from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to use secure items from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for purposes of linking state assessments within the United States to the PISA scale. The OECD provided a representative sample of 30 secure PISA items in Reading, Mathematics, and Science. The PISA items covered the 2006 and 2009 PISA assessment cycles. In addition to the PISA items, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), which is the current vender for the OECD contracted to conduct PISA, provided the international item parameters and their standard errors, as well as the linear transformations needed to link the state assessments to the PISA scale. The administration, security, and scoring of the PISA items were carried out by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) based on a License Agreement between AIR and the OECD and monitored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).Review Wisconsin’s position vs Minnesota, Massachusetts and Singapore, here.
The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann’s work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)
Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.
As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn’t as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.
Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the “low scores” achieved in the most recent PISA đ
To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.
NYTimes: … PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.
In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.
In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
Pisa tests 15-year-old students in reading, maths and science. More than 400,000 students from 57 countries and regions took part in 2006 when Hong Kong students came second in science and third in maths and reading. This year, 72 countries and regions will participate. The test takes place from next month until May.
On Monday, the HKCISA appealed to schools to take part after not enough signed up for the test, saying they were too busy dealing with education reforms. The bureau brushed aside the centre’s concern the next day, calling it a “false alarm” and saying there was “no question of Hong Kong not participating”.
But Professor Ho said the message was wrong. The government failed to “understand the actual situation” and sent out “a wrong message” to the public by misjudging the sampling requirement.
“It was very irresponsible to make such a comment,” she said.
Professor Ho also expressed a concern that schools might be pressured by the administration to take part in the test.
“If Hong Kong is lacking students and falls out of Pisa’s international rankings, the government will have to take up the responsibility,” Professor Ho warned.
She said she had been working on Pisa for 10 years and did not want to see the hard work jeopardised. This year’s test was particularly significant because it was the first time Macau, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore would be compared internationally at the same time.
Education Week U.S. Students Fall Short in Math and Science Teenagers in a majority of industrialized nations taking part in a leading international exam showed greater scientific understanding than students in the United Statesâand they far surpassed their American peers in mathematics, in results that seem likely to add to recent consternation over U.S. studentsâ […]
Jenna Telesca Joseph Pisani and Jennifer Calfas: A federal judge ordered immigration authorities to stop their efforts to detain a Columbia University junior who participated in pro-Palestinian protests until further notice from the court. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order, a day after Yunseo Chung sued the Trump administration to […]
John Richards: Education, Skills and Labour MarketIn terms of national scores in reading, mathematics, and science among sampled students at age 15, Canada continues to rank among the top ten countries in the 2022 PISA survey. At first glance, one might conclude all is well. However, Canadaâs national trends have consistently declined since initial benchmarking […]
John Richards and Tingting Zhang Scores on international tests have been falling. Without better teaching, students will be ill-prepared for a data-driven world. Canadaâs declining K-12 education system is sending out worrying warning signals. In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), Canadian students ranked in the top 10 among OECD countries. But that doesnât mean all is […]
Tom Loveless: The watchword of this yearâs Brown Center Report is cautionâcaution in linking state tests to international assessmentsââbenchmarkingâ is the termâcaution in proceeding with a policy of âalgebra for all eighth graders,â caution in gleaning policy lessons from the recent progress made by urban schools. State and local budget woes will restrain policymakers from […]
Tom Loveless: It is true that scores from the two tests are highly correlated at the national level. But the two tests do not measure the same learning. Scores from NAEPâs math and reading tests are also highly correlated when aggregated to the state level. No one would argue that NAEPâs reading and math tests […]
Miles Kruppa: Record labels have the Billboard Hot 100. College football has its playoff rankings. Artificial intelligence has a website, run by two university students, called Chatbot Arena. Roommates Anastasios Angelopoulos and Wei-Lin Chiang never imagined the graduate school project they developed last year would quickly become the most-watched ranking of the worldâs best AI […]
David Wakelyn: A lot of California policymakers journeyed to Finland to see what was in their special sauce when they scored well on PISA a few years ago. Mississippi’s growth has been more durable. We have a lot to learn if we bring an open mind. Madisonâs well funded k-12 system and city government are […]
Katherine Bindley and Joseph Pisani: Postings for software development jobs are down more than 30% since February 2020, according to Indeed.com. Industry layoffs have continued this year with tech companies shedding around 137,000 jobs since January, according to Layoffs.fyi. Many tech workers, too young to have endured the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, […]
Siobhan Merlo Australian studentsâ results on international tests of mathematics (TIMMS) and numeracy (PISA) lag behind many comparable countries and have stagnated or declined compared to previous years. Around two-thirds of Australian Years 4 and 8 school students achieved the TIMMS 2019 National Proficient Standard â compared to 92-96% of students from highest ranking countries […]
Timothy Walker Since I first moved to Finland in 2013, I have witnessed an ever-deepening societal problem that has devastated student learning. Childhood has become dominated by digital devices. This is a global trend, but it disproportionately affects Finnish children. Finlandâs teenagers, formerly the worldâs highest achievers, still perform above average on the Program for International […]
Christopher Brunet Some of these scandals are from a few months ago, some are from this week. 1: Northwestern Cancels Former Trustee I am partial to boosting fellow Substack writers, so I am starting with this one about Northwestern.. 2: Northwestern pimps out cheerleaders (allegedly) I am putting this second because it is also about […]
Philip Greenspun: So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born). The NYT journalists and editors donât mention what happened in the one state where school closure […]
The Economist: When the pisa worldwide educational comparisons came out late in 2023, most countries fell to wondering how to do better. In Catalonia the results were seen through the lenses of nationalism and languageâas everything is. Spain had lost ground since the last time the tests were done, in 2018. But students in Catalonia lost […]
Oof. International PISA test scores came out. Wisconsin folks, America ranks 34th in mathematics, nearly below the OECD average! (We are 9th in reading, phew) A phenomenally wealthy nation ought to score higher, or we won't stay wealthy.@DaleKooyenga @DrJillUnderly @CJSzafir pic.twitter.com/f5FW0bv35w — Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) December 5, 2023
PISA HOT TAKE: 15yo U.S. students' reading scores are back to pre-Pandemic levels while their math scores plunged. Countries that improved in math had "shorter school closures during the pandemic & fewer impediments to remote learning" @DeAngelisCorey https://t.co/TvjWKAdNa0 — Patrick Wolf (@P_Diddy_Wolf) December 5, 2023
Joseph Pisani: The exercises are part of a new effort in the nationâs largest school district to teach teenagers how to relate to older Americans. The youngsters are watching videos of their elders doing yoga, hanging out with them and learning how to talk to them without using the old-age labels baby boomers hate. (Goodbye, […]
Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the […]
Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the […]
Ben Sixsmith: Britain has had minimal economic growth for years. Poland has long been enjoying some of the highest economic growth in Europe. It even emerged from the pandemic better off than other European nations with, as PaweĆ Bukowski and Wojtek Paczos wrote for the LSE, âa relatively lax approach to economic lockdown and a bit of sheer luckâ. […]
Steve Hsu Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, …) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the […]
Gijsbert Stoet David C. Geary: We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescentsâ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination with student achievement in mathematics, reading, […]
Evita Duffy: Right now in China, 195 million students K-12 are learning in-person in Chinese public schools. Meanwhile, millions of American public school students are learning in a failed remote system that canât even keep track of thousands of students who havenât shown up for class all year. In 2018, 15-year-olds in dozens of countries […]
NBER: Patience and risk-taking â two cultural traits that steer intertemporal decision-making â are fundamental to human capital investment decisions. To understand how they contribute to international differences in student achievement, we combine PISA tests with the Global Preference Survey. We find that opposing effects of patience (positive) and risk-taking (negative) together account for two-thirds […]
Shannon Watkins: When it comes to math performance, the United States has a pitiful record. Each year, about 1 million students enroll in college algebra and about 50 percent of those students fail to earn a âCâ or better. And according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. considerably underperforms in high school […]
Corey Keysor: Spending is the guiding principle for how most people make sense of education policy. We have very high expectations for what our public schools need to offer and, on top of that, we frequently assume that reform means more spending. This spiral has led to the United States spending more than almost any […]
Erin Richards: American students struggle in math. The latest results of an international exam given to teenagers ranked the USA ninth in reading and 31st in math literacy out of 79 countries and economies. America has a smaller-than-average share of top-performing math students, and scores have essentially been flat for two decades. One likely reason: U.S. high schools teach math differently than […]
Mark Seidenberg: Lucy Calkins has written a manifesto entitled âNo One Gets To Own The Term âScience Of Reading’â. I am a scientist who studies reading. Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins. Ms. Calkins is a prolific pedagogical entrepreneur who has published numerous curricula and supporting […]
Jenny Anderson: In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, itâs just 11.5%. In the US, 13.5% of 15-year-olds can distinguish between fact and opinion when trying to interpret a complex reading task. In the UK, itâs just 11.5%. Those […]
Dana Goldstein: The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. […]
Dalmeet Singh Chawla: In a move likely to attract criticism, a peer-reviewed journal has agreed to publish an Italian physicistâs highly contested analysis of publications, which concludes that female physicists donât face more career obstacles than their male colleagues. The journal says it will also simultaneously publish critiques of the paper, which one member of […]
Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp : Women remain strongly underrepresented in math-related fields. This phenomenon is problematic because it contributes to gender inequalities in the labor market and can reflect a loss of talent. The current state of the art is that studentsâ abilities are not able to explain gender differences in educational and career […]
The Economist: The reforms had little time to work. Just 171,000 teachersâless than 10% of the totalâwere hired on merit. A further 36,000 head teachers and supervisors were promoted on ability rather than loyalty to union bosses. But even this may leave a mark. A study published this year by the Development Bank of Latin […]
Michael Crawford: Among the 29 countries and economies of the East Asia and Pacific region, one finds some of the worldâs most successful education systems. Seven out of the top 10 highest average scorers on internationally comparable tests such as PISA and TIMSS are from the region, with Japan, Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Hong […]
osi.bg: The Northwestern European countries have the highest potential for resilience to the impact of fake news due to the quality of education, free media and high trust among people. At the other extreme are the Balkan countries, which would be more vulnerable to the negative influence of fake news and the “post-truth” phenomenon mainly […]
Mckinsey: To understand what matters in student achievement, we applied analytics to data from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These reports take on a few of the most active debates: Do mindsets matter? If so, to what extent? What teaching practices work best? […]
Betsy DeVos: To a casual observer, a classroom today looks scarcely different than what one looked like when I entered the public policy debate thirty years agoâŠThe vast majority of learning environments have remained the same since the industrial revolution, because they were made in its image. Think of your own experience: sit down; donât […]
Jill Barshay: The United States may be known for its rugged individualism. But it turns out American teens are, surprisingly, much better at group collaboration than at individual academic work. Thatâs according to a new, unusual version of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tested collaborative problem-solving skills among 15-year-olds in more […]
Sarabeth Berman: The village had such a large, congested school because, in surrounding villages, the schools had been closed. For two decades, the number of children in the countryside had been dropping because of the one-child policy and urban migration, so the government had shuttered empty schools and created overstuffed campuses like the one at […]
John Hart: Finnish education is rarely out of the news, whether itâs outstanding Pisa results, those same results slipping, the dropping of traditional subjects, not dropping subjects, or what makes Finnish teachers special. I worked in England for two years as a teacher before moving to Finland eight years ago. My colleagues in the UK […]
Sean Coughlan: When there are debates about the world’s top performing education systems, the names that usually get mentioned are the Asian powerhouses such as Singapore and South Korea or the Nordic know-alls, such as Finland or Norway. But with much less recognition, Canada has climbed into the top tier of international rankings. In the […]
OECD: The framework illustrated in this document represents a new, ambitious and still experimental approach to global competence which the OECD has developed in consultation with the international community of experts and which could provide a starting point for the PISA 2018 assessment. In particular, its emphasis on attitudes and values is novel in comparative […]
Chester E. Finn: While ersatz âcredit recoveryâ and grade inflation devalue the high school diploma by boosting graduation rates even as NAEP, PISA, PARCC, SAT, and sundry other measures show that no true gains are being made in student achievement, forces are at work to do essentially the same thing to the college diploma. Observe […]
Imogen West-Knights In the auditorium of Beijing Bayi School, on a cold morning thick with smog, props are broken, lines unlearnt and the mechanical curtain has blown a fuse. In four hours, my cast of 22 Chinese 14-year-olds, who have never acted before, will perform Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to an audience of 1,500 […]
Who likes talking about what youâre doing wrong? Pretty much nobody, and that has certainly applied to educators and education institutions for many years, both locally and nationally. Everyone has opinions on what should be changed; few are willing to look in the mirror. But schools are one of the best examples of places where […]
Laura Isensee In the latest round of global test results, the United States remained in the middle of the pack. But one Houston school stood out and highlighted how the United States did the best out of all developed countries to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged kids and their more affluent peers. The test […]
Amanda Ripley Hereâs what the models show: Generally speaking, the smartest countries tend to be those that have acted to make teaching more prestigious and selective; directed more resources to their neediest children; enrolled most children in high-quality preschools; helped schools establish cultures of constant improvement; and applied rigorous, consistent standards across all classrooms. Of […]
Luigi Guiso, Ferdinando Monte, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales: results, we classified countries according to several measures of gender equality. (i) The World Economic Forumâs Gender Gap Index (GGI) (10) reflects economic and political The existence (1), degree (2), and origin (3, 4) of a gender gap (difference between girlsâ and boysâ scores) in mathematics are […]
The Economist: motivated people into teaching is a struggle in many countries. Low pay is often blamed, especially when it is combined with long working hours. The difficulties of teacher recruitment, one argument goes, is why pupils in some countries do so poorly in school. But data from the OECD, a club of mostly rich […]
Dave Baskerville (7 April 2016) Mr. Ed Hughes, Member, MMSD Board 4/7/16 Ed, I finally got around to reading your âEight Lessons Learnedâ article in the 3/9/16 edition of CT. Interesting/thanks. As you know from our previous discussions, we have similar thinking on some of the MMSD challenges, not on others. For the sake of […]
Eduardo Porter: âThere is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States,â said Andreas Schleicher, the O.E.C.D.âs top educational expert, who runs the organizationâs PISA tests. âWhen you look at all dimensions of social background, the United States does not suffer a particular disadvantage.â Mr. Schleicher criticized the analysis […]
Chester Finn & Brandon Wright: A great problem in U.S. education is that gifted students are rarely pushed to achieve their full potential. It is no secret that American students overall lag their international peers. Among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, whose students took the PISA exams in 2012, […]
The Economist: Each year 122,000 pupilsâ17% of the totalâleave school with no high-school diploma. Last year the French army evaluated national levels of reading and comprehension during a compulsory day of military and civic service for 17-year-olds. It found that one in ten attendees could not understand basic French. Such difficulties are concentrated in the […]
Kevin Donnelly: Seventy teachers from the UK were sent to Shanghai to study classroom methods to investigate why Chinese students perform so well. Upon their return, the teachers reported that much of Chinaâs success came from teaching methods the UK has been moving away from for the past 40 years. The Chinese favour a âchalk […]
Kabir Chibber: Finland already has one of the best school education systems. It always ranks near the top in mathematics, reading, and science in the prestigious PISA rankings (the 2012 list, pdf) by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Teachers in other countries flock to its schools to learn from a country that is […]
Joe Yeado: While at the gym last week, I overheard two fathers discussing the homework their elementary and middle school children were bringing home. The general feeling was that the homework was too hard and that students were being asked to do complex tasks in earlier grades than when the dads were kids. They lamented […]
OECD Pisa: Equipping citizens with the skills necessary to achieve their full potential, participate in an increasingly interconnected global economy, and ultimately convert better jobs into better lives is a central preoccupation of policy makers around the world. Results from the OECDâs recent Survey of Adult Skills show that highly skilled adults are twice as […]
Grant Wiggins: An old lament. Hereâs what bugs me. Many of us made this argument 25 years ago. The limited value of secret one-shot standardized tests as feedback has been known for decades. They may be acceptable as low-stake audits; they are wretched as feedback mechanisms and as high-stakes audits. Why donât audits work when […]
The Economist SOCIAL mobility, or the lack of it, gnaws at the consciences of governments. Better opportunities for those born without the local equivalent of a silver spoon in the mouth is a common electoral promise. Some recent data suggest it is hard to deliver. The OECDâs latest “Education at a Glance” report compares how […]
Hechinger Report By any measure, Poland has made remarkable education progress since the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the most recent 2012 international tests of 15-year-olds, known as PISA tests, Poland ranked 9th in reading and 14th in math among all 65 countries and sub-regions that took the test. It used to be on […]
The Oklahoman: STUDENT achievement has surged dramatically in several countries around the world, surpassing the United States. Journalist Amanda Ripley convincingly suggests those nations’ experiences should inform education policy in Oklahoma. In writing âThe Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way,â Ripley reviewed other nations’ school systems and interviewed foreign-exchange students. […]
Rebecca Ratcliffe: England’s “unimaginative” exam system is little changed from Victorian times and fails to prepare young people for modern working life, Eton’s headmaster has said. Tony Little said there was a risk that “misleading” test scores may become more important than education itself, and warned against a narrow focus on topping rankings. “There is […]
Roberto Ferdman: It isn’t easy to be a disadvantaged high school student anywhere, but the U.S. education system appears to be particularly unkind to its less privileged youth. Poor students have a tougher time overcoming their socioeconomic odds in the U.S. than in Canada, France, Russia, and 33 other countries, according to a new global […]
Ray Fisman: very three years, Americans wring their hands over the state of our schools compared with those in other countries. The occasion is the triennial release of global scholastic achievement rankings based on exams administered by the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests students in 65 countries in math, science, and […]
Michelle Hackman: When it comes to financial literacy around the world, American teens are middling. The United States may fuel the worldâs largest economy and operate its most robust financial system. But compared to the financial prowess of teenagers in 17 other countries, U.S. teens come off downright mediocre. Thatâs according to a new study […]
Kevin Carey: Americans have a split vision of education. Conventional wisdom has long held that our K-12 schools are mediocre or worse, while our colleges and universities are world class. While policy wonks hotly debate K-12 reform ideas like vouchers and the Common Core state standards, higher education is largely left to its own devices. […]
John Fallon: And if the âdoublingâ part may seem a little ambitious, remember this. If every class in every school in every country that participates in PISA could get even close to the highest performing comparable ones, you would comfortably achieve that goal of doubling learning outcomes. This is the challenge: how can we help […]