U.S. Students on Par With Peer Nations

U.S. 15-year-olds perform at an average level compared to peers in other highly industrialized countries in their ability to apply reading, math and science skills to real-life situations, according to test results.

The findings, released Monday, were based on the performance of students from 32 of the world’s most industrialized countries. They took the exam, the first of its kind, in spring 2000.

The results are in line with other recent test data indicating that the performance of U.S. students in math and science slip further behind that of their peers in many other nations as they get older. The news was met with dismay by the nation’s top education official.

“Unfortunately, we are average across the board compared to other industrialized nations,” Education Secretary Rod Paige said. “In the global economy, these countries are our competitors--average is not good enough.”

The test, called the Program for International Student Assessment, is sponsored by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris think tank for 30 developed nations that include the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and Australia. The exam was managed by the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics.

The nations developed the test to devise a periodic, dependable measurement that could help steer education policy.

The U.S. was one of 20 nations that achieved “average” scores in reading literacy. Finland, Canada and New Zealand scored significantly higher than the U.S. average. Scoring significantly below the U.S. average were Greece, Portugal, Luxembourg and Mexico.

In math and science literacy, the U.S. also was average. In math, eight countries, including Japan and South Korea, scored significantly higher than the U.S. average and five nations were significantly below. In science, seven countries scored significantly higher than the U.S. average and four nations fell below.

Education officials said the U.S. results could not be explained solely by the diversity of the tested population and their linguistic skills.

Finland, Canada and New Zealand were the only countries that achieved above-average performance in all three subjects.

The test will be given every three years. Each cycle will focus on a particular subject, although all three subjects will be assessed each time. Reading was the chief focus of the 2000 version; math will be the featured topic in 2003, science in 2006.

The reading items are designed to measure the ability of students nearing the end of their required schooling to comprehend material they would encounter in life, such as bank forms, government documents, maps and newspaper articles.

In one sample item, students are asked to choose an answer that best identifies the aim of a pugnacious letter to the editor. They also are asked to write a response about what sort of reply the letter writer hoped to generate.

In another, they must analyze the hours of operation of a community’s various library branches, as outlined on a bookmark. Another asks students to fill out a warranty card using a receipt for a new camera. Items range from simple to complex.

Breakdowns indicated that U.S. students did better reflecting on texts’ meanings than they did on finding relevant information or interpreting texts.

An official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said the results offered clear policy implications for the U.S.

“The reason the U.S. is average, on average, is that many people do badly,” said Barry McGaw, the organization’s deputy director for education. “What the U.S. needs to do is to pull up the bottom. You don’t have to sacrifice quality to get equality.”

Other countries, he said, have shown that the negative effects of a challenging social background can be overcome.

Many educators noted similarities between these results and those of the Third International Math and Science Study, an ongoing look at math and science performance in industrialized and developing nations.

An average performance by U.S. students is “not surprising, given . . . the fact that the U.S. is in the middle on the [math and science study’s] eighth-grade results, which these would be most similar to,” said James Hiebert, a professor of math education at the University of Delaware. Unlike this real-world test, the math and science test for eighth-graders probes how well students do on items related to their school curricula.

Hiebert found it intriguing that Japan and South Korea, which often fare better than the U.S. on international tests, also were in the “average” pack on reading literacy.

Among other key findings:

* On average, 10% of 15-year-olds in the world’s most developed countries have top-level reading skills and are able to understand complex texts, evaluate information and build hypotheses. In Australia, Canada, Finland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the figure is from 15% to 19%. In the U.S., the figure is 12%.

* An average of 6% of students--and in some countries more than twice that proportion--fall below the lowest level of reading proficiency. That means they could not locate a simple piece of information or identify the main theme of a text. The U.S. figure is 6%.

* Japan and South Korea are the top performers in math and science literacy.

* Some countries--notably Finland, Japan and South Korea--maintain a comparatively narrow gap between the highest and poorest performers while still attaining high average levels.

* In many countries, boys are falling far behind in reading literacy. In every country surveyed, girls are, on average, better readers than boys.

* In about half the countries, boys perform better than girls in math literacy. In most others, they are about even.

In the United States, 7,000 students in the ninth and 10th grades participated in the test, with each student taking a 90-minute assessment and a 25-minute questionnaire. Education officials said the students constituted a highly representative sample. Sample items are available on the Web at https://www.pisa.oecd.org.

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