Alberta students receive top marks on PISA test

Immigrants also tend to perform worse than natives – though the gap is narrowing – and while girls do better than boys in most Western states, boys dominate the very top results in science, in every country but Finland.

In the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measuring math literacy in 2015, USA students ranked 40th in the world. The US underperformed the OECD average in math. The U.S. average score was 470, below the overall OECD test average of 490.

Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education, said that despite their lower scores American students were more science-minded than some of their Asian counterparts.

The study noted that France saw a 20 percent variation in science performance due to students’ socio-economic status, compared to a 12.9 percent average across the OECD. Singapore was the top performer in all three subjects on the PISA test.

The UK remains a middle-ranking performer – behind countries such as Japan, Estonia, Finland and Vietnam.

The Programme of International Student Achievement, or PISA, tests thousands of 15-year-olds from 72 countries in science, maths and reading. The number of countries taking part has expanded to 73. The US survey was based on an assessment administered to students in North Carolina and MA.

Asian education systems dominate the upper reaches of the these results tables – accounting for the top seven places for maths, with Singapore followed by Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan, China and South Korea.

The OECD said that the main focus of the 2015 exam was science, because the PISA views science literacy as “skills that are required to engage in reasoned discourse about science-related issues”.

She said findings that 80 per cent of the Canadian participants had mastered baseline proficiencies in all three domains – and 90 per cent had in science – is encouraging “though we can’t be complacent”.

If we want to address these sliding results then we must address the issue of educational inequality in Australia… “That is a proposal for economic disaster”.

Similar statistics were seen in science, with 12% of students classed as excellent – up from 11% in 2011, while 16% were reported to have difficulties in 2015, compared to 12% four years prior.

The research also found New Zealand still had a large gap between poor and well- off students in results, and that Maori and Pasifika students were still lagging, with little change since 2012.

“We need to put more resources into schools within areas of high poverty so those kids get opportunities to succeed, and those kids with special learning needs”.

He added: “Things are not how we would them to be. We don’t have to really jump on this, let alone try to borrow policies or ideas from other places”.

“The PISA programme is now the only way for Switzerland to make an global comparison of students’ skills”, SERI said.

“I disregard all these tests because no test actually measures exceptionality”, he said.

U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr. expressed disappointment.

The study involved just over half a million 15-year-olds across the globe, with the two-hour tests including some multiple-choice answers.