Publication - Country Note Key findings from PISA 2015 for the United States
Executive summary
© 2016 Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development
This report describes the performance of 15-year-olds in the United States in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and compares it to that in four countries/economies: Canada, Estonia, Germany and Hong Kong (China). The report then examines policies from these four education systems, which were all selected for their high performance and high or improving levels of equity. It concludes with a discussion of science instruction in the United States.
Key Findings from PISA
The United States remains in the middle of the rankings
Among the 35 countries in the OECD, the United States performed around average in science, the major domain of this assessment cycle. Its performance was also around average in reading, but below average in mathematics. There has been no significant change in science and reading performance since the last time they were the major domains (science in 2006 and reading in 2009).
One in five (20%) of 15-year-old students in the United States are low performers, not reaching the PISA baseline Level 2 of science proficiency. This proportion is similar to the OECD average of 21%, but more than twice as high as the proportion of low performers in Estonia, Hong Kong (China), Japan, Macao (China), Singapore and Viet Nam.
At the other end of the performance scale, 9% of students in the United States are top performers, achieving Level 5 or 6, comparable to the average of 8% across the OECD. By contrast, over 15% of 15-year-old students in Japan, Singapore and Chinese Taipei achieve this level of performance.
Attitudes towards science are positive overall
Students in the United States display high levels of epistemic beliefs, or those beliefs that correspond with currently accepted representations of the goal of scientific enquiry and the nature of scientific claims. Over nine in ten 15-yearolds in the United States agree that ideas in science sometimes change, that good answers are based on evidence from many different experiments and that it is good to try experiments more than once to be sure of one’s findings.
Some 38% of 15-year-olds in the United States expect to work in a science-related career at age 30. Only 24% of students across the OECD, by contrast, expect to do so. The majority of these students in the United States (22%) expect to become health professionals; 13% science and engineering professionals; 2% ICT professionals; and 1% science-related technicians and associates.
Girls are more likely than boys to expect to become health professionals (35% vs. 9%), but boys are more likely than girls to expect to become science and engineering professionals (20% vs. 6%) and ICT professionals (4% vs. 0.5%).
The influence of socio-economic status on student performance is about average, but equity has improved since 2006
In the United States, 11% of the variation in student performance in science could be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status, similar to the average variation in performance observed across the OECD. A one-unit increase in the PISA index of economic, social, and cultural status (ESCS) in the United States is associated with an increase of 33 score points in the science assessment, which is below the average of 38 score points across the OECD.
Disadvantaged students in the United States were 2.5 times more likely to be low performers than advantaged students. However, disadvantage does not consign students to low performance: 32% of disadvantaged students in the United States were resilient, performing above expectations and among the top quarter of students with the same socio-economic status across all countries and economies in PISA. This proportion has increased by 12 percentage points since 2006.
Equity has improved in the United States since 2006, when socio-economic status accounted for 17% of the variation in student performance in science, and a one-unit increase in the ESCS index was associated with an increase of 46 score points. However, mean performance did not increase over the same period. The increase in equity can be attributed to gains in performance among disadvantaged students, but these were not large enough to significantly increase the country’s mean performance. There has been little change in science performance among advantaged students.
Students’ science performance is also associated to the socio-economic composition of their schools
In the United States, a 91-point gap in science performance exists between students attending advantaged schools and those attending disadvantaged schools. This is larger than the gaps of less than 70 points observed in Canada and Estonia.
The level of between-school variation in science performance in the United States is below the OECD average, whereas within-school variation is higher than the OECD average. The bulk of variation in performance in the United States is observed among students attending the same schools rather than different schools. This is partly due to the fact that schools sort and track students to a lesser extent in the United States than in other OECD countries.
page source http://www.oecd.org/
