Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » USA Teens 29th in Science

December 6, 2007

USA Teens 29th in Science

The 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report has been released. The report examines the science of 15 year olds from 57 countries in math, science and reading. Once you get passed the poor design of the PISA web site you can find a great deal of data (which gives a great deal more depth to the results than just a simple listing of the top countries by mean score). But that list is interesting too.

*Rant* I find it amazing that sites can be so poorly run that they fail to even display without Javascript enabled. That is how badly run the PISA web site is, though. Here is the home page they direct you too: www.pisa.oecd.org/pages/0,2987,en_32252351_32235731_1_1_1_1_1,00.html - they need to have some people read about web usability (they should hire someone that knows how to apply the ideas of Jakob Neilsen, Jared Spool or 37 Signals).

Results for the Science portion (rank - country - mean score)(I am not listing all countries):

1 - Finland - 563
2 - Hong Kong - 542
3 - Canada - 534
4 - Taiwan - 532
6 - Japan - 531
7 - New Zealand - 530
8 - Australia - 527
9 - Netherlands - 525
11 - Korea - 522
13 - Germany - 516
14 - United Kingdom - 515
25 - France - 495
29 - USA - 489
49 - Mexico - 410

Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It measures student literacy in science, math, and reading (focusing this year on science) among 15-year-olds
…
“What once was the gold standard [for international education] is now not even at the OECD average, which shows you how much the world has changed,” says Andreas Schleicher, who helped write the report. The US is average in the number of students at the highest levels of scientific literacy, but has a much larger pool – nearly 1 in 4 – at the bottom, Mr. Schleicher notes. “We have stand-alone studies that suggest these kids have grim prospects in the labor market,” he says.

by curiouscat Tags: Economics, K-12, Science
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One Response to “USA Teens 29th in Science”

John Wilberforce Says:
December 7th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Very interesting! I always look forward to the PISA report, if only to see the newspaper articles getting all worked up discussing it. I agree with you about the poor website design too, it’s a shame more effort and awareness doesn’t go into important sites like this.