The OECD and China have announced that they will expand their cooperation in PISA, following the successful implementation of PISA 2009 and 2012 in Shanghai.

How educational resources are allocated is just as important as the amount of resources available.

Countries where 15-year-old students perform at high standards internationally tend to be the same countries where these young adults tend to perform well at the age of 26 to 28.

Can PISA results predict the quality of a country’s labour force one decade later? To find out, we compared some of the results from the PISA 2000 and PISA 2003 tests with results from the 2012 Survey of Adult Skills (a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC).

The PISA 2012 Technical Report describes the methodology underlying the PISA 2012 survey, which tested 15-year-olds’ competencies in mathematics, reading and science and, in some countries, problem solving and financial literacy.

While most 15-year-old students spend part of their after-school time doing homework, the amount of time they spend on it shrank between 2003 and 2012. Socio-economically advantaged students and students who attend socio-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework.

Greater anxiety towards mathematics is associated with lower scores in mathematics, both between and within countries. The better a student’s schoolmates perform in mathematics, the greater the student’s anxiety towards mathematics.

This month, PISA in Focus examines the impact of good teacher-student relations on both students’ well-being and performance. It’s not surprising that when students feel that their teachers are interested in them and support them they feel happier at school and often do better in school.

Children spend about a third of their waking hours in school during most weeks in the year. Thus, schools have a significant impact on children’s quality of life – including their relationships with peers and adults, and their dispositions towards learning and life more generally.

When choosing a school for their child, parents in all participating countries value academic achievement highly; but they are often even more concerned about the safety and environment of the school and the school’s reputation.

The quantity and quality of resources available to schools improved significantly between 2003 and 2012, on average across OECD countries.

The share of students with an immigrant background increased between 2003 and 2012, both in traditional and new destination countries. The performance difference in mathematics between immigrant and non-immigrant students decreased, on average, between 2003 and 2012.

There is no real consensus on how much class time is enough when it comes to learning mathematics, science and reading. But educators and policy makers generally agree that while it’s important for students to spend considerable time in school lessons to acquire new skills, spending more hours and minutes in class is not enough to ensure that students succeed in school.

The top-performing country in the PISA assessment of digital reading was Singapore, followed by Korea, Hong Kong-China, Japan, Canada and Shanghai-China.

On average across OECD countries, students’ belief that they can solve mathematics problems (mathematics self-efficacy) is associated with a difference of 49 score points in mathematics – the equivalent of one year of school.

Only in some countries is a larger proportion of immigrant students in schools related to lower student performance – and this relationship is mostly explained by the concentration of disadvantaged students in these schools.

Since 2000, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been measuring the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in over 70 countries.

Across OECD countries, 5% of students expect to work as teachers: 3% of boys and 6% of girls. The academic profile of students who expect to work as teachers varies, but in many OECD countries, students who expect to work as teachers have poorer mathematics and reading skills than other ambitious students who expect to work as professionals but not as teachers.

In 2012, 15-year-old students spent over two hours on line each day, on average across OECD countries. The most common online activities among 15-year-olds were browsing the Internet for fun and participating in social networks, with over 70% of students doing one of these every day or almost every day.

No country or economy participating in PISA 2012 can claim that all of its 15-year-old students have achieved basic proficiency skills in mathematics, reading and science. Some 28% of students score below the baseline level of proficiency in at least one of those subjects, on average across OECD countries

One in ten students at the master’s or equivalent level is an international student in OECD countries, rising to one in four at the doctoral level.

Fewer 15-year-olds in East Asian countries reported that they use memorisation than did 15-year-olds in some of the English-speaking countries to whom they are often compared.

Despite the progress observed by PISA over the last decade, Latin American education systems still have a long way to go to reach world class standards. Ibero-American countries will also need to rethink their instructional system to better anticipate the knowledge and skills it will need to reignite its economy.

How are policy makers in the United States using data to help districts maximise their impact? And, what tools do districts need to work together in order to build stronger communities?

On average across OECD countries, the 20% of students who are most exposed to pure mathematics tasks (equations) score, on the PISA mathematics test, the equivalent of almost two school years ahead of the 20% of students who are least exposed.

Today’s schools must equip students with the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in an uncertain, constantly changing tomorrow. But many schools look much the same today as they did a generation ago, and too many teachers are not developing the pedagogies and practices required to meet the diverse needs of 21st-century learners.

Schools nowadays are required to learn faster than ever before in order to deal effectively with the growing pressures of a rapidly changing environment.

Even when all students, including the most disadvantaged, have easy access to the Internet,a digital divide, based on socio-economic status, still persists in how students use technology.

Exposure to complex mathematics concepts and tasks is related to higher performance in PISA among all students, including socio-economically disadvantaged students.

PISA 2015 focused on science, with the understanding that, although not every student is interested in becoming a scientist, all of us now need to be able to “think like a scientist” sometimes.

The most recent round of the assessment, PISA 2015, focused on 15-year-olds’ science literacy, defined as "the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen".

Tomorrow, the OECD will publish the 2015 PISA results. The world’s premier global metric for education will tell us which countries have the best school systems, based on the performance of 15-year-olds in science, mathematics and reading over a two-hour test.

On December 6 2016 the Education Policy Institute will host the global launch of the 2015 results from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) - a test of reading literacy, mathematics, and science given every three years to fifteen-year-olds in more than seventy countries and economies worldwide. This year's results will focus on science.

Singapore outperforms the rest of the world in the OECD’s latest PISA survey, which evaluates the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems. The top OECD countries were Japan, Estonia, Finland and Canada.

学校制度の質、公平性、効率を評価するOECDのPISA調査の最新結果によると、シンガポールの成績が世界の他の国々を凌ぎ、トップになりました。OECD加盟国で最も成績が良かったのは、日本、エストニア、フィンランド、カナダでした。

More than half a million 15-year-olds took part in the OECD’s latest global education survey, known as PISA. The main focus was on science, an increasingly important part of our economic and social lives.

Register for a webinar "PISA 2015: Q&A Session Closing the Achievement Gap" with Andreas Schleicher (December 15th, 14h Paris time)

For the first time in PISA a teacher questionnaire provides valuable information on teaching practices and learning activities in the classroom. This webinar will focus on insights from the PISA findings on teacher policy and practice.

As governments around the world seek to tackle stubbornly high levels of youth unemployment, new attention has been focused on the relationship between education and employment.

The persistence of social inequities in education – the fact that children of wealthy and highly educated parents tend to do better in school than children from less privileged families – is often seen as a difficult-to-reverse feature of education systems.

On average across OECD countries, almost one in four students – whether boy or girl – expects to work in an occupation that requires further science training beyond compulsory education. This brief highlights the kinds of science careers 15-year-olds anticipate for themselves in the future.

In 2015, PISA asked students about the occupation they expect to be working in when they are 30 years old. Students’ responses were later grouped into science-related and non-science-related careers – with the former including science and engineering professionals; health professionals; science technicians and associate professionals; and information and communication technology (ICT) professionals.

In countries that performed above the OECD average in science, at least 80% of the students are in schools that invite specialists to conduct teacher training or organise in-service workshops for teachers or where teachers cooperate with each other. This is higher, on average, than what is observed among other countries.

with Andreas Schleicher, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills

In an increasingly competitive international environment, providing workers with the right mix of skills can help ensure that globalisation translates into new jobs and productivity gains rather than negative economic and social outcomes, according to a new OECD report.

Globalisation is connecting people, cities, countries and continents, bringing together a majority of the world’s population in ways that vastly increase our individual and collective potential, and creating an integrated market in products and services.

24 May 2017: PISA 2015 Results (Volume IV): Students’ Financial Literacy explores students’ experience with and knowledge about money and provides an overall picture of 15-year-olds’ ability to apply their accumulated knowledge and skills to real-life situations involving financial issues and decisions.

PISA 2015 Results (Volume IV): Students’ Financial Literacy, explores students’ experience with and knowledge about money and provides an overall picture of 15-year-olds’ ability to apply their accumulated knowledge and skills to real-life situations involving financial issues and decisions.

Unlike earlier PISA reports, the 2015 PISA report (Volume I and Volume II) highlights differences in sample coverage – how many students were eligible to participate in PISA – between countries.

In some countries and economies, such as Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China), Qatar,Thailand, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, students spend at least 54 hours per week learning at and outside of school combined, whereas in others, like Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Uruguay, students spend less than 40 hours studying.