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Finnish Women and Shanghai Rock the World

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Today’s results from the 2009 PISA in reading, math and science skills of 15 year olds were released. See results (here) and commentary on it (here and here).There is always something of interest to be found in assessments like this. Clearly the highlight in this release was the amazing performance of Shanghai students. While China did not compete as a country, Shanghai did for the first time, and outperformed all of the OECD countries including Finland and Korea, the two highest performing countries. It did not just outperform other participants it crushed them. To put it in perspective, in math the average student in Shanghai outscored 90 percent of students in the U.S. For science the Shanghai average was around the 80th percentile in the U.S.

This comes a day after an odd post by Valerie Strauss that tries to make the point (unconvincingly for me) that the U.S should not worry about these international comparison because even though a smaller portion of U.S students score highly in math and science, we still have a large portion of the worlds top performers. This year’s results throw should throw her conclusions right out the window. It is true that Shanghai is smaller than the U.S. with a population of around 20 million. But, its population would make it a middle sized OECD country – 4 times the size of Finland and Singapore whose education systems have received a lot of attention in the last few year. And Shanghai is just a small representation of the number of high achieving math and science students in China in total. Will this be a wake-up call for the U.S.? Doubtful, but there will be a lot of talk about it.

The other finding that interested me from a quick look at the data was the impressive performance of Finnish women. Finland again performed well, but their high performance appears to be driven largely by their female students. The gender gap in Finland is the largest of all of the OECD counties in reading (55 points) and science (16 points). To put these numbers in perspective in reading, Finnish men scored at roughly the U.S. average which is only slightly higher than the OECD average, while Finish women outscored everyone including Shanghai. I guess in their cold and dark winters, their young men are off playing hockey while the young women are reading about science. It will be interesting to learn about what Finland is doing to support its young women so well, and whether they start to take on their large gender gaps.

How did the U.S. fare? They were basically middle of the pack. Out of 34 OECD countries, we scored:

  • 14th in reading
  • 25th in math
  • 17th in science

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