NZ’s worst ever Pisa results, global falls

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

A steady decline in maths, reading and science ability among New Zealand 15-year-olds since 2009 continues in the latest three-yearly report by the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), including a 15-point fall in maths — where each 20 points is regarded as equivalent to a year of learning.
Pisa 2022 is based on assessing and surveying 690,000 students in 81 countries, measuring their ability to use reading, maths and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges. In New Zealand that included 4700 students across 169 schools in term three of last year. The programme also examines gender differences, how performance relates to students’ socio-economic status and immigrant background, and describes how the quality and equity of learning outcomes have evolved since previous Pisa assessments.
The latest report shows a large “learning loss” in maths and reading globally which is being put down in part to the impacts of Covid-19 (the pandemic also delayed assessments by a year), alongside trends of decline in a number of countries which “indicates that long-term issues in education systems are also to blame”. For maths the average fall was 17 points (and 15 in the OECD, the same as for NZ students), for reading it was 11 points and for science it was 4 points since the previous round of exams in 2018.
Scores for New Zealand students in science and reading fell 4-5 points, to 504 in science (OECD average 485) and 501 for reading (OECD average 476).
Our results are still above average for the 37 OECD countries across the three subjects. It has been determined, though, that high-achieving students were over-represented in last year’s cohort — equivalent to up to a 10-point bias in the scores. This potentially means the average score of 479 in maths could equate to 469 across all Kiwi 15-year-olds, which would be below the OECD average of 472 points.
Across the 81 countries, New Zealand students ranked 10th in reading, 11th in science and 23rd in maths; the likely bias in our results means our rankings could be lower (although eight other OECD countries, including the UK, Scotland and Ireland, also had evidence of bias due to lower participation than normal).
Pisa 2022 showed the gap between students from rich and poor families has widened here, and that Māori and Pacific student performance in maths and science is falling faster than the New Zealand average; 47 percent of Māori students performed below the baseline Pisa level in maths, up from 37 percent in 2018.
Another concern across our Pisa maths results since 2003 is that the percentage of high performers has halved, while that of low performers has doubled.