Most students enjoy orderly classrooms for their language-of-instruction lessons. Socio-economically disadvantaged students are less likely to enjoy orderly classrooms than advantaged students. Orderly classrooms – regardless of the school’s overall socio-economic profile – are related to...

In most countries and economies, students who attend schools in urban areas tend to perform at higher levels than other students. Socio-economic status explains only part of the performance difference between students who attend urban schools and other students. Schools in urban settings are...

Even when all students, including the most disadvantaged, have easy access to the Internet,a digital divide, based on socio-economic status, still persists in how students use technology. In the five Nordic countries, as well as in Hong Kong-China, the Netherlands and Switzerland, over 98% of...

One in eight students across OECD countries has repeated a grade at least once before the age of 15. Many countries reduced the rate of grade repetition between 2003 and 2012. One in five disadvantaged 15-year-olds has repeated a grade. Even among students with similar academic performance, the...

Successful education systems are able to guarantee that all students succeed at high levels. Across OECD countries, around 60% of the overall, country-level variation in student performance can be traced to differences in how well students who attend the same school can be expected to perform....

For the first time, the 2015 round of PISA collected data on students’ exposure to bullying. These data show that bullying is widespread. On average across OECD countries, around 11% of students reported that they are frequently (at least a few times per month) made fun of, 8% reported that...

The percentage of students who expect to complete university is highest in Korea (80%) and lowest in Latvia (25%). Many high-performing students do not expect to go to university, representing potentially lost talent to an economy and society while many low-performing students think they will...

While most 15-year-old students spend part of their after-school time doing homework, the amount of time they spend on it shrank between 2003 and 2012. Socio-economically advantaged students and students who attend socio-economically advantaged schools tend to spend more time doing homework....

Every three years, when PISA results are published, the world’s media focuses on countries’ rankings in mathematics, reading and science performance. Often, what is lost in the subsequent national-level soulsearching about how to improve student performance is the fact that many countries...

While PISA reveals large gender differences in reading, in favour of 15-year-old girls, the gap is narrower when digital reading skills are tested. Indeed, the Survey of Adult Skills suggests that there are no significant gender differences in digital literacy proficiency among 16-29 year-olds....