In some countries and economies, such as Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China), Qatar,Thailand, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates, students spend at least 54 hours per week learning at and outside of school combined, whereas in others, like Finland, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and...

High-performing countries use various mechanisms to select the best candidates to the teaching profession. In Finland, Hong-Kong (China), Macao (China) and Chinese Taipei, students who wish to enter teacher-training programmes must pass a competitive entry examination. In Japan, teaching...

The share of students with an immigrant background increased between 2003 and 2012, both in traditional and new destination countries. The performance difference in mathematics between immigrant and non-immigrant students decreased, on average, between 2003 and 2012. Differences in...

When you think of someone who is an engineer, do you imagine a man or a woman wearing a hardhat? How about when you imagine a teacher standing in front of a class of schoolchildren? If you answer “a man” to the first question, and “a woman” to the second, there’s probably a reason. And...

The persistence of social inequities in education – the fact that children of wealthy and highly educated parents tend to do better in school than children from less privileged families – is often seen as a difficult-to-reverse feature of education systems. Yet countries across the world...

Immigrant students who share a common country of origin, and therefore many cultural similarities, perform very differently across school systems. The difference in performance between immigrant students and non-immigrant students of similar socio-economic status is smaller in school systems...

In most OECD countries, newly arrived 15-year-old immigrant students show poorer reading performance than immigrant students who arrived in their new country when they were younger than five. Students who emigrated from less-developed countries where the home language differs from their new...

Today's students are growing up in a precarious natural environment. Climate change and the loss of biodiversity threaten the ecosystems that support life; a lack of clean water and sanitation imperils the health of hundreds of millions of people every day. While trained geoscientists, biologists...

The most recent round of the assessment, PISA 2015, focused on 15-year-olds’ science literacy, defined as “the ability to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen”. To succeed on the PISA science test, students had to display their mastery...

Students whose parents work in professional occupations generally outperform other students in mathematics, while students whose parents work in elementary occupations tend to underachieve compared to their peers. The strength of the relationship between parents’ occupations and student...