The OECD's (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) latest PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) report was released on Wednesday, and it doesn’t make for great reading for Danish school pupils.
The report is a measure of 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.
Results of the report show that reading and mathematics standards for 15-year-olds in Denmark have dropped noticeably since the preceding report. The students matched previous performances in science subjects.
In maths, Danish students achieved an average of 489 points. That compares to 509 in the most recent previous PISA report in 2018.
The score for reading fell from 501 in 2018 to 489 in 2022.
Education Minister Mattias Tesfaye said that Covid-19 had impacted students but that the results should nevertheless be taken seriously.
“These aren’t just variations within statistical uncertainty. What we have here are significant results. 15-year-olds in 2022 are worse at reading and maths than 15-year-olds were in 2018,” he said.
“If I’m fortunate enough to still be minister here in three years, those numbers will look different,” he said.
Performance gaps within Denmark
The PISA report indexes of economic, social and cultural status within each of the countries it covers. As such, the results can be broken down into four groups of students of equal size, from the most disadvantaged to the most advantaged within each country and economy.
In Denmark, the top 25 percent of socio-economically advantaged students outperformed the bottom quartile of disadvantaged students by 74 points in mathematics, a smaller difference than the average (93 points) across OECD countries.
This gap has narrowed in Denmark since 2012, according to the report, while staying stable across OECD countries.
Some 10 percent of disadvantaged students in Denmark were able to score in the top quarter of mathematics performance, the same as the OECD average.
Comparing Denmark to other countries
PISA calculates the socioeconomic status of students in a way that allows comparison between students of similar socio-economic background in different countries.
In Denmark, 59 percent of students were in the top international 20 percent of the socio-economic scale, meaning that they were among the most advantaged students who took the PISA test in 2022.
Their average score in mathematics was 511 score points. In Estonia and Japan, students of similar socio-economic background tended to score significantly higher, however.
What are the performance trends for students with immigrant backgrounds?
Immigrant students are defined by PISA as students whose parents were born in a country other than that where the student took the PISA test. They can also be pigeon-holed as first- or second-generation immigrants, depending on whether they were born in the country where they took the test.
Immigrant students in Denmark tend to have a more disadvantaged socio-economic profile than non-immigrant students, PISA states. 56 percent fall into the overall lowest 25 percent of Danish students in terms of socioeconomic status.
Some 56 percent of immigrant students (compared to 3 percent of all remaining students) said they speak a different language at home to the one in which they took the PISA test (i.e. Danish).
In maths, the average difference in performance between immigrant and non-immigrant students was 54 score points in favour of non-immigrant students, a significant difference. For reading, the difference was greater at 63 percent.
What does PISA tell us about school life in Denmark?
Some 65 percent of Danish students said that their maths teacher shows “an interest in every student’s learning”, just above the OECD average of 63 percent. 72 percent said extra attention is given when needed, compared to 70 percent across the OECD. The corresponding figures in Denmark in 2012 were 66 percent and 74 percent, suggesting this metric is relatively stable.
However, 22 percent of Danish students said they don’t listen to what their teacher says (OECD: 30 percent). Around 32 percent are distracted by digital devices, compared to 30 percent for the OECD.
According to the PISA report, students in all of the countries in the report were less likely to say they were distracted by devices when the use of phones at school is banned.
READ ALSO: Could Denmark ban mobile phones at schools?
How involved are parents in education in Denmark?
PISA data collected from school principals show that the percentage of parents who actively communicate with schools about their child’s learning decreased substantially between 2018 and 2022 in many countries, including Denmark.
In 2022, 23 percent of students in Denmark were in schools whose principal reported that at least half of all families discussed their child’s progress with a teacher on their own initiative. In 2018, the corresponding number was 32 percent.
Some 690,000 students took the PISA assessment in 2022. There are around 29 million 15-year-olds in the schools of the 81 countries covered by the PISA report.
In Denmark, 6,200 students at 347 schools, completed the assessment in mathematics, reading or science.
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