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Which country does best at reading and science? Are young students well equipped with the 21st-century skills they will need to face tomorrow's challenges? The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in science, reading and mathematics, intends to answer these questions.
The 2015 survey covered some 540,000 students in 72 countries and economies. This time, the main focus was on science, an increasingly important part of today's economy. PISA is about a lot more than ranking though: its aim is not to encourage competition but to highlight the many social, economic and cultural factors that determine school performance, in order to improve education systems.
While spending per student in primary and secondary education increased by almost 20% since 2006 in OECD countries alone, only 12 of the 72 countries and economies assessed in PISA have seen their science performance improve over this period. These include high-performing education systems, such as Singapore and Macao (China), and low-performers, such as Peru and Colombia.
Singapore leads the field this time, with one in four students performing at the highest level in science, compared with one in ten in the OECD. In second place was Japan, which was the top OECD country, followed by Estonia in third, Finland in fifth behind Chinese Taipei,...