Mathematics, reading skills in unprecedented decline in teenagers – OECD survey

https://www.reuters.com/world/mathematics-reading-skills-unprecedented-decline-teenagers-oecd-survey-2023-12-05/

by pseudolus • 3 years ago

21 14 3 years ago

reuters.com

pseudolus• 3 years ago

Full OECD report: https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results#pisa2022r...

kr0bat• 3 years ago

Thank for for linking. This confirms that yes...

    The OECD said the decline was not inevitable, pointing to Singapore, where students scored the highest in maths, reading and science, with results that suggested they were on average three to five years ahead of their OECD peers.

    After Singapore, Macau, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea also outperformed in maths and science, where Estonia and Canada also scored well.

Reuters DID conflate "doing better" with "not doing worse". I believe OECD pointed to Singapore because their scores were high AND INCREASING.

A quick scan of I.5.1 shows Macau, Canada, Hong Kong, and Estonia with worse scores compared to 2018. Singapore and Japan's scores went up. A less lazy reader can use the OECD database to find numbers for the other listed countries.

jruohonen• 3 years ago

Sad reading indeed. With this pace, kids in many countries are soon no longer capable of reading, writing, and calculating. But oh well, maybe they'll just push buttons in AI?

dorchadas3• 3 years ago

We're getting there already. I taught for years in a poorer, rural district in a southern State. It was quite bad about many couldn't perform outside a very basic level in those skills.

petervlb• 3 years ago

What has been rolling out on phones in 2018? TikTok?

nairboon2• 3 years ago

And Instagram in 2011...

dorchadas3• 3 years ago

Notice on the graph that the drop pretty much starts around 2012. Quite interesting, and it definitely probably needs to be investigated more. They also mention the correlation between lower scores and higher leisure phone use.

karmakaze• 3 years ago

I hate this graphic. There's lots of colors, use something other than blues. Also the 'damned lies' range of the chart is 480-505.

gus_massa• 3 years ago

Can it be caused by the virtual classes during the pandemic? As a teacher, we made a big effort for the virtual classes in 2020, but everyone know that they were not as useful as the real clases.

dorchadas3• 3 years ago

That's part of it, but it's not the entirety of it. Which, as a former secondary teacher and now university teacher, I would agree with. They found, for instance, that higher leisure phone use correlated with lower scores.

I also noticed that scores generally seemed to peak in 2012, right as smartphones started becoming super accessible for everyone and right around the time Instagram started to take off too.

cubefox• 3 years ago

IQ is negatively correlated with fertility [1], which makes declining IQ a plausible explanation for this development.

1. https://georgefrancis.substack.com/p/dysgenics-by-the-number...

simne2• 3 years ago

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

Looks like smartphone era start.

On 4.0 Android become mature enough to dominate market and to become world wide.

First usable version was around 1.6..2.2, around 2009..2010 after them begin mass production and 4.0 become world wide phenomenon.

Even, considering, Android copied many traits of iPhone, but iPhone was that time limited joy of rich and geeks. With Android 4 everybody enter smartphone era.

Mathematics, reading skills in unprecedented decline in teenagers – OECD survey

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