The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy. PISA has been conducted every few years since 2000. The most recent PISA results are from 2022. PISA is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, and is conducted in the US by National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Here’s how American students have been doing in the PISA reading, math and science assessments since 2000:
Per the above chart, American 15-year olds have been reading at roughly the same level (on average) as they were 20 years ago. Surprisingly, their reading performance held up rather well during the pandemic years, despite the challenge of extended school closures, remote learning and the high absenteeism. In fact, US students seemed to have weathered the pandemic better than students in other developed countries, many of whom returned to in-person learning sooner than our students in America:
Math performance is a different matter: test scores fell steeply in the US between 2018 - 2022 - though the decline was much worse elsewhere:
Three countries fared the worst in both reading and math: Sweden, Finland, and Germany. What’s going on over there?
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Reference:
OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume II): Learning During – and From – Disruption, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/a97db61c-en
Links:
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-i_53f23881-en.html