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PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

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Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#101

Post by aennassiri »

This is alarming.

I believe it is probably a combination of several factors:

- Social media and doomscrolling without sufficient parental controls: Several OECD countries are already addressing this by introducing or considering restrictions on teenagers’ access to social media.

- App UX/UI: Many apps are designed to compete for our attention, which can gradually reduce our ability to sustain focus.

- LLMs: The impact of AI is more recent and still needs to be properly assessed. However, LLMs could significantly affect attention and critical thinking for both adults and children, especially as we increasingly delegate parts of our thinking to AI models.

- Changes in the education system: In France, for example, mathematics was removed as a mandatory subject for some high-school tracks for a period of time. In my view, that was a major mistake.

- COVID-19: Many students experienced significant gaps in their education during the pandemic, with the effects often being more pronounced among students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#102

Post by jakozaur »

The drop is not uniform; see Table I.2.6 (2022 -> 2025). Focusing on math:

Stable, above OECD average: Taiwan, Macao, Korea, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Italy, New Zealand

Stable, around or below OECD average: United States, Slovakia, Greece, Croatia, Qatar, Montenegro, Mongolia, Mexico, Brunei

Dropping, previously above OECD average: Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Latvia, Portugal, Norway, Spain, France, Hungary

Dropping, around or below OECD average: Iceland, Israel, Malta, Serbia, Chile, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Malaysia, Romania, Peru, Ukraine, North Macedonia

Improving, all below OECD average: Türkiye, Thailand, UAE, Philippines, Jordan, Georgia, Cambodia

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#103

Post by wongarsu »

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #91
somenameforme wrote: post #76

IQ scores in most of the Western world began reversing sometime from the 90s to early 00s. [1] That link is for the US but similar stuff has also been observed in most of every Western/OECD nation. By contrast they're still rapidly increasing in the 'Global South'. You'd expect this to manifest in reduced test scores and reduced quality of outcomes across a breadth of fields over time paired with the inverse happenin…

I get the feeling you want to blame "woke" ideologies for this decline. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In my opinion we just have it too easy nowadays. Too much entertainment, screens and not enough challenges to keep kids thinking they need to be as sharp as they can be.

The "Fox News" right is just as guilty of letting ideology override reason as the "woke" left. As are many other groups (most of Western politics is a bit more complicated than the US's left/right split)

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#104

Post by idoubtit »

rayiner wrote: post #39

The U.S. scores are interesting. On page 28, look at the column that says "Share of top performers" (in science, reading or mathematics): https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report... . The U.S. is at 17.8% top performers, well behind Japan and Korea but around the same as Canada and Switzerland. But the U.S. is significantly ahead of the big EU countries: Germany is at 14%, France is at 9.8%, Italy…

> The U.S. scores are interesting.

Unfortunately, those scores are not reliable. It is a recurring problem with the USA for the PISA studies.

The preliminary chapter explains why data has lower confidence is some places. For the USA, there were many problems, including political reluctance in some states or schools, that lead to uncontrolled biases. Notably, the ratio of unreachable children is 40 %, twice more than their upper limit for valid results.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#105

Post by NitpickLawyer »

gonzalohm wrote: post #68

Anecdotal, but in Spain kids don't take these tests seriously. I remember when we were in school we would ask if the tests counted towards the final note for the subject and they didn't so we would just basically finish asap so we could do other things. And I think this wasn't a "just my class" kind of thing.

Interesting. On page 34 of the report there's this:

> Hasty responses (percentage of responses that are both incorrect and fast – average across reading items)

Spain is at 9.7%, which is a bit over 8.9% oecd average.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#106

Post by Tade0 »

HSO wrote: post #95
Tade0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a data point that should help: Poland's math score dropped by just 5 points. As for other tests: Science: -4 Reading: -7. Much like with GDP per capita, my country is climbing the rankings, but only via walkover.

> but only via walkover. what that means?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkover

In sports it's victory because the opponents didn't show up or were disqualified.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#107

Post by rayiner »

BeetleB wrote: post #96
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference between different immigrant groups. In the U.S., children of immigrants are also often the lowest performers. The U.S. tracks test scores by race and not immigration status. But looking at test scores for hispanic students is a rough proxy because more than 60% of hispanic students are immigrants or the children of immigrants: https://www.equityinhighered.org/indicators/secondary-school... .…

> There is a big difference between different immigrant groups. In the U.S., children of immigrants are also often the lowest performers. My comment did not preclude either of these from being true. I didn't say "On average, children of immigrants do better in the US." I said "often the highest performers are children of immigrants." > But looking at test scores for hispanic students is a rough proxy because more tha…

I guess I left out what I thought was a shared premise: immigration patterns in Europe are heavily skewed towards refugees and economic migrants. But yes you’re right that the kids of skilled immigrants can score very high (as you’d expect), I just think that’s not as relevant to Europe.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#108

Post by R_D_Olivaw »

rtkwe wrote: post #86
goalieca wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s many books and established schools of thought about computers being terrible for learning even before the latest wave AI edtech nonsense. Simply put, there’s nothing better than old school pen to paper.

The biggest speedbump to that is teacher time. Grading and returning worksheets for students is a huge unpaid time sink for teachers.

As you say, like most of any of our current issues, it's not the act of doing something that is the issue, it's the lack of remuneration for doing that thing. Any region would gain an immense amount of more "smart point metrics" (what I choose to refer these scores as) if students had their own personal tutors that helped them along. But that doesn't fit our "profit or perish" economic models.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#109

Post by Aerroon »

amadeoeoeo wrote: post #42
blululu wrote: post #35

Framing this as a pattern across the entire industrial world is a bit misleading. Looking through the data at Math Scores since 2015 shows big country level split: Japan: -3 S Korea: -1 Singapore: +1 Taiwan: +9 --- Germany: -45 France: -38 Sweden: -33 US: -10 This is an issue with the western industrialized world. Which ought to make the analysis simple since we can look at what those countries have done differently…

I see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media. Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries? Any other reason why this gap might happen? Thanks

>Given the big gap between the east and the west

I thought the reason that China and Singapore were so far ahead of everyone else was that they were urban populations vs everyone else include rural areas.

I assumed that Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang were purely urban, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

I'm very curious about this as well, because BSJZ is almost an entire proficiency level above (almost) everyone else. That's an insane gap.

Re: PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD

#110

Post by samudrijan »

nixon_why69 wrote: post #59
amadeoeoeo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see news and forums claiming the problem is screens/smartphones and social media. Given the big gap between the east and the west... does anybody know if these are somehow less used/abused in asian countries? Any other reason why this gap might happen? Thanks

Living in one Asian country, phone scrolling still happens with adults but kids get a lot of homework and definitely do it. Honestly excessive amounts, quantity over quality but at least studying is happening. If some third type of country didn't do doomscrolling but ignored their homework to play outside, that's better than scrolling but it's still not homework.

At what age does the homework kick in for kids growing up in Asia?
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