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rhody
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I normally don't post here, and wanted to run this data by experts who can substantiate or refute the findings in this WSJ story:
If I understand this correctly all participating countries are given the SAME international math exam, and the US ranks 25th and Israel ranked 31st for average Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 math literacy scores among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The ranking for Israel strikes me oddly, leading me to question how it can rank six spots below the US.
From this link in April of 2007, it says Israel ranked 39th in the same assessment, four years earlier.
Note the text in blue above. Can the low scores be correlated with the secondary school teacher's strike ?
A general observation, I believed, perhaps naively, that Israel produced more great mathematician's and physicists per capita than any other country in the world. For this reason, it led me to question the rankings results. Where did the students make up the slack at higher education levels ?
Rhody...
U.S. elementary-school children have shown slow but steady progress on national math exams. However U.S. 15-year-olds were 25th among 34 developed countries on a 2009 international math exam, a ranking that has remained stagnant since 2000, when the exam was first given.
If I understand this correctly all participating countries are given the SAME international math exam, and the US ranks 25th and Israel ranked 31st for average Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 math literacy scores among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The ranking for Israel strikes me oddly, leading me to question how it can rank six spots below the US.
From this link in April of 2007, it says Israel ranked 39th in the same assessment, four years earlier.
Students in Israel rank 39th out of 57 countries in scholastic performace, according to the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international exam administered in 2006. The results were released on Tuesday, the 47th day of the secondary school teachers' strike.
Note the text in blue above. Can the low scores be correlated with the secondary school teacher's strike ?
A general observation, I believed, perhaps naively, that Israel produced more great mathematician's and physicists per capita than any other country in the world. For this reason, it led me to question the rankings results. Where did the students make up the slack at higher education levels ?
Rhody...