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International Internet Magazine. Baltic States news & analytics Thursday, 28.03.2024, 21:22

Collaborative problem-solving skills of Estonian pupils the best among EU OECD member states

BC, Tallinn, 22.11.2017.Print version
Estonian 15-year-old students achieved the best score among European countries in a global PISA collaborative problem-solving assessment based on data for 2015, informs LETA.

Globally Estonia shared the fifth and sixth place with Canada, while Singapore placed first, Japan second, Hong Kong third and South Korea fourth, according to findings of the survey.

 

Every second Estonian student has good or very good collaborative problem-solving. The same result was achieved by students from 12 countries.

 

On average across OECD countries, 28% of students are able to solve only straightforward collaborative problems, if any at all. By contrast, fewer than one in six students in Estonia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao and Singapore is a low achiever in collaborative problem solving.

 

Estonia scored the best in Europe in guaranteeing the efficiency and equality of primary education and was also among the highest scorers in this category globally.

 

Estonian students have equal access to quality education - students' skills are good irrespective of a family's wealth or place of residence. The impact of a socioeconomic background on students' skills is one of the smallest in the world. Differences between schools are small, including between rural and city schools.

 

In Estonia 5,587 students were tested from 206 schools, 2,788 of whom were girls and 2,799 boys. Of the students tested, 78% took the test in Estonian and 22% in Russian.


Collaborative problem-solving skills of Latvian pupils are slightly below the average among other member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD), according to the results of the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).


Andris Kangro, educator and researcher, told the press today that this is a unique study and a part of the 2015 PISA, while Lithuania’s results were lower than Latvia’s.


The given task was solved on a high level by 4% of Latvian pupils, while on average 8% of pupils solve the task on a high level.


The average competence of Latvian students of the age of 15 is 485 points, which is by 15 points below the average in the OECD.


Every three years, PISA measures students’ ability to apply their knowledge in three core subjects – science, reading and mathematics – to familiar settings. These competencies, however, are not sufficient to thrive in life. Hence, PISA 2015 – for the first time ever in any international assessment – measures students’ ability to solve problems collaboratively in 52 education systems around the world.

 

The OECD's PISA 2015 tested around 540,000 15-year-old students in 72 countries and economies on science, reading, maths and collaborative problem-solving. The main focus was on science, an increasingly important part of today's economy and society.






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