China students edge their peers from developed nations in PISA
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STUDENTS from the Chinese mainland scored the highest level in reading, science and mathematics in the latest PISA global education test hosted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, results released yesterday showed.
They were followed by students from Singapore and China’s two special administrative regions — Macau and Hong Kong.
The top OECD countries were Estonia, Canada, Finland, and Ireland.
The PISA survey is carried out every three years by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this time among its 37 member states and 42 partner countries and economies.
The latest study, which was conducted last year among 600,000 15-year-old students who all took two-hour tests, showed that students from Beijing, Shanghai, provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, representing the Chinese mainland in this test, scored significantly higher than their peers from other countries.
In reading, which the OECD considers its headline indicator of education potential, the best performing OECD state was the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia, followed by Canada, Finland and Ireland.
Angel Gurria, the OECD’s secretary-general, said the students from the Chinese mainland had “outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems.”
About one in six students in China’s mainland, and one in seven in Singapore, perform at the highest level in math, compared to only 2.4 percent in OECD countries.
Moreover, the 10 percent most socio-economically disadvantaged students in these four areas “also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10 percent most advantaged students in some of these countries.”
The combined populations in the four regions amount to over 180 million people, and the size of each region is equivalent to a typical OECD country.
“What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average,” Gurria said in a preface to the study. “The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow.”
Looking at the results of the developed OECD countries, he said it was “disappointing” that most member states had seen “virtually no improvement in the performance of their students” since the first PISA survey of 2000. This outcome came despite expenditure per primary and secondary student rising by more than 15 percent across OECD countries over the past decade.
The OECD praised Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey and Uruguay for enrolling many more 15-year-olds in secondary education “without sacrificing the quality of the education provided.”
With reading the main focus of the test, it found that one out of four students in OECD countries could not complete basic reading tasks, leaving them dangerously ill-prepared for a life in an increasingly digitalized economy.
Gurria also sounded a warning over how ready students were to deal with the challenges of the modern world, where it is important not just to read but to sort good information from bad. “Fewer than 1 in 10 students in OECD countries was able to distinguish between fact and opinion, based on implicit cues pertaining to the content or source of the information,” he said.
In science and math, around one in four students in OECD countries, on average, do not attain the basic level of science or math.
That means they cannot, for example, convert a price into a different currency.
Students’ social and economic background remained a leading factor for success at school, with the richest 10 percent of students in OECD countries reading at a level three years ahead of the poorest 10 percent.
Gurria said that while some countries had shown that socio-economic status should not be an indicator of educational performance, “it remains necessary for many countries to promote equity with much greater urgency.”
The test found that girls significantly outperformed boys in reading on average across OECD countries.
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