National Center for Education Statistics, December 2001
American 15-year-olds are about average compared with their peers in other advanced countries when it comes to their ability to apply reading, math and science skills to real-life situations. This according to the new Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the results of which were released this week. In both math literacy and science literacy, U.S. students scored well below their counterparts in countries such as Japan, Korea and Finland. In reading literacy, Finland, Canada and New Zealand led the pack. For this project, the United States joined with 27 other member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and four non-OECD countries to devise a survey that was given to 265,000 students in 32 lands. Unlike other international education appraisals, this one focuses on students' knowledge and skills in the context of everyday situations rather than their curricular mastery. The PISA results are in line with other international studies that show American students to be average in their understanding of math and science. According to the OECD's deputy director for education Barry McGaw, the explanation is that many young Americans score very badly; what the U.S. needs to do, he says, is pull up the bottom. In countries like Finland, Japan, and South Korea there is a much narrower gap between the highest and lowest performers than is in the United States. For those American students who scored well, one explanatory factor seems to be access to teachers with university degrees in the subjects they're teaching. You can access the report - a print version of which is forthcoming - online at http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2002115.
