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...

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...

Countries where 15-year-old students perform at high standards internationally tend to be the same countries where these young adults tend to perform well at the age of 26 to 28. School systems need to ensure that their students perform at a high level by the time they complete compulsory...

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...

Over the past decade, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, has become the world’s premier yardstick for evaluating the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems. This special issue of the PISA in Focus series highlights the results of the first two volumes of...

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...

On average across OECD countries, students’ belief that they can solve mathematics problems (mathematics self-efficacy) is associated with a difference of 49 score points in mathematics – the equivalent of one year of school. There is a strong connection between how confident students feel...

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...