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New Pisa shock: German students worse than ever

Berlin (dpa) – German students performed worse than ever before in the international performance study Pisa in 2022. In reading as well as in mathematics and natural sciences, these are the lowest values ​​ever measured for Germany as part of Pisa. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Berlin announced that average performance has also fallen drastically internationally. It is the first Pisa report card since the corona pandemic.

German students suffered particularly badly in mathematics. They achieved a score of 475, compared to 500 in the previous study published in 2019. They achieved 480 in reading (2019: 498) and 492 in science (2019: 503).

Pisa stands for “Program for International Student Assessment” and is the largest international school performance comparison study. The skills of 15-year-old young people in reading, mathematics and natural sciences are recorded. Since 2000 it has been carried out every three years.

Unprecedented drop in performance

The first comparative study caused the “Pisa shock”: German 15-year-olds performed extremely poorly, and there was also a close connection between social background and educational opportunities in the Pisa certificate. The result was a heated debate about education. Afterwards, the results improved significantly, but in the last rounds of Pisa there was a downward trend.

In the current survey, Germany is still close to the OECD average in international comparison in the areas of mathematics and reading skills and above the OECD average in natural sciences, but that is no reason to breathe a sigh of relief. According to the experts, it is not just the situation in Germany that is worrying: there has been an unprecedented drop in performance in this cycle, the report said. “Compared to 2018, average performance in OECD countries fell by 10 points in reading and almost 15 points in mathematics.” The latter is almost three times as many as all successive changes.

According to the OECD, this decline is particularly pronounced in a handful of countries – including Germany. For example, Poland, Norway, Iceland and Germany recorded a decline of 25 or more points in mathematics between 2018 and 2022. “The dramatic decline in math and reading scores suggests a negative shock affecting many countries simultaneously,” the paper says.

Negative corona effect

The authors of the study see the reasons for the poor performance of German students as being, among other things, the corona pandemic. The results show that school closures had a negative effect on skill acquisition. In Germany, distance learning was done less with digital media and more with materials sent to young people than the OECD average.

“Compared internationally, Germany was not well prepared for distance learning in terms of the equipment with digital devices – but then caught up,” said study leader Doris Lewalter, educational researcher at TUM and chairwoman of the ZIB. However, the evaluation of the international data shows that there is no systematic connection between the duration of school closures and declines in performance between 2018 and 2022.

Lack of language skills is also responsible

Another possible factor for the results is a lack of language skills. “A central reason is certainly that we have still not managed to consistently ensure early language support for everyone who needs it,” said Lewalter. “If we have students with an immigrant background, we cannot assume that they will already have mastered the German educational language when they come to Germany.”

It just takes a long time to have such a solid linguistic training that children and young people can not only communicate but also follow lessons. This is also important for mathematics, for example, in order to understand a task at all.

However, this finding only partially explains the overall results, the scientist emphasized. “The mathematical skills of young people without an immigrant background have also decreased compared to 2012 – even more significantly than among young people whose parents immigrated but who were themselves born in Germany.”

The makers of the study also pointed out that very few OECD countries were able to improve parts of their results between 2018 and 2022, for example Japan in reading and science and Italy, Ireland and Latvia in science. On average, young people in Singapore, Japan and Korea have the highest skills in mathematics. Singapore, Ireland, Japan, Korea and Estonia are at the top in reading. In the natural sciences, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Estonia and Canada achieved the best results.

© dpa-infocom, dpa:231205-99-186458/9

2023-12-05 17:52:43
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