Taiwan and Japan tied for fourth place in a global math and science education ranking administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with Asian nations taking the top five spots, the BBC reported yesterday.
Singapore ranked best in the world, followed by Hong Kong, the BBC reported.
South Korea took third in the OECD’s biggest global school rankings to date. Taiwan and Japan tied in fourth place, the report said.
Vietnam was the next-highest Asian nation — in 12th place — ahead of Germany and Australia. The UK ranked 20th, while the US placed 28th — below less-weathy nations, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, the report said.
At No. 6, Finland was the first non-Asian nation to be in the top six rankings, while Ghana came in last place.
The other nations in the top 10 were Estonia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada, in that order.
The findings, based on math and science scores of 15-year-old students, are to be formally presented at the World Education Forum in South Korea next week.
The OECD examined 76 countries of varying economic status for the study, 11 more than the previous Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test it conducted in 2012. The PISA test traditionally focuses on affluent nations.
“This is the first time we have a truly global scale of the quality of education,” the BBC quoted OECD education director Andreas Schleicher as saying.
Schleicher added that Singapore had high levels of illiteracy into the 1960s.
He said that the findings could help “give more countries, rich and poor, access to comparing themselves against the world’s education leaders, to discover their relative strengths and weaknesses, and to see what the long-term economic gains from improved quality in schooling could be for them.”
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