ET 2020 Newsletter

Abstract

On 3 December 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the 2018 results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The survey compares the reading, mathematics and science performance of 15-year-old pupils around the world every three years. Over half a million 15-year-olds from 79 countries and economies, including all EU Member States, took the PISA test in 2018, with a special focus on reading. Overall, PISA 2018 results show that the EU has notyet met its target for underachievement. More than one in five 15-year-olds in the EU (21.7% in reading, 22.4% in mathematics and 21.6% in science) cannot complete even simple tasks in the tested domain. In the EU as a whole, over the past decade underachievement has increased in science and reading and remained stable in mathematics. Lastly, gender differences in underachievement are rather small in mathematics and science, but remain sizeable in reading, where girls strongly outperform boys in many countries. For more details, please visit the dedicated PISA webpage.