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...

Some 65% of socio-economically advantaged students reported that they know well or have often heard of the concept of quadratic function, on average across OECD countries; but only 43% of disadvantaged students so reported. On average across OECD countries, the 20% of students who are most...

Immigrant students often have to overcome multiple barriers at once in order to succeed at school. Across most OECD countries, poor performance among immigrant students relative to other students is strongly related to social disadvantage at school, as reflected in the proportion of students...

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...

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...

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....

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...