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OECD

Swiss students best for maths outside Asia: Pisa

Students from Switzerland and neighbouring Liechtenstein outperformed those from the rest of the world outside of Asia in a global survey of 15-year-olds, released on Tuesday.

Published: 3 December 2013 12:54 CET
Swiss students best for maths outside Asia: Pisa
Photo: OECD

The 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results, issued by the OECD, showed the Swiss in ninth place for maths with 531 points, four points behind eighth-placed Liechtenstein and just ahead of the Netherlands.

The programme, testing 510,000 students in 65 countries and regions, put Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong at the top of the tables, ahead of Chinese Taipai, Korea, Macao and Japan.

The Pisa 2012 survey focused on mathematics, with reading, science and problem-solving as minor areas of assessment.

The Chinese region of Shanghai notched the highest score for maths — 619 points —119 points, or the equivalent of nearly three years above the OECD average.

The share of top performers in mathematics in that region amounted to 55.4 percent, compared to 21.4 percent in Switzerland and an OECD average of 12.6.

Switzerland was among 25 countries with students showing improvements in maths skills from comparable results in 2009.

In the 2009 Pisa tests, focused on reading, the Swiss ranked 14th.

“Top performers, notably in Asia, place great emphasis on selecting and training teachers, encourage them to work together and prioritize investment in teacher quality, not classroom sizes,” the OECD said in its report.



“They also set clear targets and give teachers autonomy in the classroom to achieve them.”

The Pisa report found that overall boys continue to perform better than girls in maths.

They scored better in 37 out of the 65 jurisdictions surveyed.

The gender gap is the reverse for reading and is widening, the report said.

For more on the Pisa 2012 findings, check here.

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EDUCATION

Why Spain is failing in maths and science teaching

The latest PISA results reveal Spain's education system to have a gaping north south divide.

Published: 3 December 2019 16:10 CET
Why Spain is failing in maths and science teaching
Photo: spaces/Depositphotos

Spain earned its worst ever result for science in the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, a worldwide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) of 15-year-old students across the world.

According to the report published on Tuesday, Spanish students scored an average of 483 points in the science tests, plummeting 13 points since the last study in 2015 to score the lowest results since the PISA test began in 2000.

They didn’t fare much better in maths, dropping five points to score 481 and falling below the OECD average of 489 which puts the nation on  a par with Hungary and Lithuania.

The breakdown of scores reveals the huge north-south divide when it comes to educational standards across Spain. Students in the northern half of the peninsula scored much higher in mathematics and science, in the extreme cases showing students who studied in the north had proficiency of more than one school year above their peers in the south.

The OECD suggests a 30 point difference represents a year’s study but students in Navarra held a 43 point lead over those in the Canary Islands for Mathematics while in sciences top scoring Galicia held a 40 point lead over the Canary Islands.

The lead stretched to over three times when comparing top of the league Galicia and Navarra to lowest scoring communities of Ceuta and Melia which fell behind 92 points in maths and 95 points in Science – effectively indicating that students in the north are three school years ahead of their peers in Spain’s North African enclaves.

“Socio-economic status is a strong predictor of results in mathematics and science in all countries, and explains 12 percent of the variation in results in mathematics and 10 percent in science in Spain,” explained a spokesman from the Ministry of Education during the presentation of the 2018 PISA Report.

The results revealed that while boys in Spain performed better than girls in maths, they achieved the same results in science. 

Spain was not included at all on the reading literacy results after the OECD detected “anomalies” in the data collection. Madrid’s education board also requested that the science and maths results be omitted after concluding anomalies also appeared in the collection of those results.

Madrid dropped 29 points in science and 17 in maths compared to three years ago, while Catalonia saw a loss of 15 points in science and 10 in maths.   

Spanish newspaper 20 Minutos produced a map to compare all the regions across Spain.

El Pais explained the poor showing as the result of austerity cuts in education brought in under the conservative PP government of Mariano Rajoy.

While the head of PISA, Andreas Schleicher, recommended that Spain change its teaching methodology focusing less on rote learning and memorizing and more on critical thinking and analysis.

On a positive note, Spanish students expressed high than average satisfaction with their lives. Some 96 percent of students in Spain reported sometimes or always feeling happy and only about 4 percent of students reported always feeling sad.

Overall, Spain ranks among the top 13 in the list of 79 countries, a position that has not significantly changed.

 

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