PISA 2018 Results (Volume I): What Students Know and Can Do

Abstract

Among its many findings, our PISA 2018 assessment shows that 15-year-old students in the four provinces/municipalities of China that participated in the study -Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang -outperformed by a large margin their peers from all of the other 78 participating education systems, in mathematics and science.Moreover, the 10% most disadvantaged students in these four jurisdictions also showed better reading skills than those of the average student in OECD countries, as well as skills similar to the 10% most advantaged students in some of these countries.True, these four provinces/municipalities in eastern China are far from representing China as a whole, but the size of each of them compares to that of a typical OECD country, and their combined populations amount to over 180 million.What makes their achievement even more remarkable is that the level of income of these four Chinese regions is well below the OECD average.The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow.In this context, and given the fact that expenditure per primary and secondary student rose by more than 15% across OECD countries over the past decade, it is disappointing that most OECD countries saw virtually no improvement in the performance of their students since PISA was first conducted in 2000.In fact, only seven of the 79 education systems analysed saw significant improvements in the reading, mathematics and science performance of their student…