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The 2009 PISA Results for Mathematics

Posted by Catherine Conway on Mon, Feb 14, 2011 @ 02:17 PM

Every few years, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures the academic achievement of countries around the world. In 2009, students from 65 different countries and economies participated – 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries and 31 partner countries.

The top 5 performers were Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Korea and Finland, with scores of 600, 562, 555, 546 and 541, respectively. The United States’ score was 487, 17th of OECD countries (31st overall), and 9 points below the OECD average.

The results also showed that among OECD countries, boys outperformed girls by an average 12 points in math (whereas girls outperformed boys by 39 points in reading). Countries overall showed little change in math performance since the 2003 testing, with 6 OECD countries and 2 partner countries having significant gains. For the other 28 OECD countries, the percentage of top math performers decreased slightly.

Read the executive summary of the PISA 2009 Results

Photo credit: www.oecd.org

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Tags: PISA, PISA 2009, OECD, Programme for International Student Assessment, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop, Assessment

Math Performance in the US: How ARE We Doing?

Posted by David Dockterman on Mon, Jan 24, 2011 @ 09:48 AM

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The release of the 2009 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results last month prompted another round of hand-wringing over the United States' mediocre performance. Shanghai (China), South Korea, Finland, and Singapore topped the charts in math. The United States ranked 17th, slightly above the average of other advanced OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) members. The latest PISA results followed the publication of the report U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective, which summarized the importance of creating a population of high mathematical performers to feed a growing STEM-based economy. Sadly, the report concluded that the U.S. is lacking compared to its international peers. There’s an accessible article articulating the findings of the report at Education Next.

However, not everyone thinks the situation is so dire. The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado has challenged the methodology of the Harvard and Education Next report. The NEPC review calls the report’s comparison across countries and tests (PISA versus NAEP) “deceptive”, offering “essentially no assistance to U.S. educators seeking to improve students’ performance in mathematics.” Those sound like fighting words to me. Noted economist Robert Samuelson joined the fray with a recent article in The Washington Post, where he suggested that schools in the United States aren’t as bad as they are often depicted. Of course, that piece prompted a response in Education Next.

What’s the story? Are American schools short-changing us in the competition for top mathematical talent or not? Well, we can certainly do better, and we should seek to learn from countries like Singapore that have turned a largely illiterate population at the time of its independence in the 1960s into one of the world’s top academic and economic performers. And one area where everyone agrees (I think) is the need to remedy the performance gap among sub-groups in the United States. Blacks and Hispanics continue to lag behind whites. While some may argue that a focus on raising the bottom has taken resources from elevating the top, I certainly wouldn’t want the reverse.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maaorg/ / CC BY 2.0

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Tags: math, David Dockterman, assessment, PISA 2009, OECD, NEPC, Education Next, Robert Samuelson

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