The Canary Islands is among the autonomous communities with the worst skills in mathematics, reading and science in the latest PISA report, which evaluates the academic performance of students aged 15-16 from 80 countries.
Students from the Canary Islands are among the Spaniards with the worst skills in mathematics, reading and science. This is revealed by the latest PISA report, which evaluates the academic performance of students between 15 and 16 years old from 80 countries.
The Archipelago only surpasses Ceuta and Melilla in mathematics and science, and in reading it presents better records than Catalonia and Andalusia.
It also occupies the bottom positions in the percentage of students who are frequently bullied, 10.2% of the total, and in the rate of exposure to bullying.
In general, Spain presents in the latest PISA report a drop in its knowledge of mathematics and reading, milder than in other places, and traces a clear downward trend over the last decade.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which in its 2022 edition focuses on mathematical competence, has been carried out by some 690,000 students, almost 31,000 of them Spanish fourth-year secondary school students (Educación Secundaria Obligatoria).
The data collection in the field was delayed by one year and the study was done in 2021, instead of 2020, due to the pandemic that has taken its toll on almost all countries in the form of a sharp loss of learning.
Eight points less in Mathematics and slight rebound in Science
According to the results of the report, Spain scores 473 points in mathematics, eight points less than in the previous edition of 2018; it rebounds slightly in science, going from 483 to 485; and in reading it reaches 474 points, a competence that registers a drop of fourteen points with respect to 2012.
In this way, the OECD summarizes, the average performance in Spain in the three subjects has been on this occasion "significantly" lower than the report of 2012 and 2015, the last evaluation whose results are "fully comparable" to those of 2022, at the national level.
The Canary Islands presents a performance index in mathematics of 447, only above Melilla (404) and Ceuta (395). It is together with Galicia and Melilla where there is greater uniformity in the qualifications among its students.
The percentage of students below the minimum level of competence in the Canary Islands is 37%.
In comparison with the previous PISA report, the Canary Islands suffers a significant decrease in mathematical skills, of -13%.
In reading, the Canary Islands is the fifth from the bottom, ahead of Catalonia, Andalusia, Melilla and Ceuta. 27% of students in the islands have low performance and high, barely 3%.
In science it is the third from the bottom, only ahead of Melilla and Ceuta. However, it has experienced an improvement of 3 points in comparison with the reports of 2018 and 2022.
The PISA report distinguishes between performance in public and private centers, and in all comparisons the latter fare better, whether in mathematical, reading and science skills, with 37, 44 and 37 points of difference, respectively. It is the fourth largest disproportion among autonomous communities.
At the national level, the report points out, in the period 2012-2022 the proportion of 15-year-old students with lower grades in the three subjects increased, while the percentage of high-performing students decreased in mathematics.
Precisely, in this last subject -area in which the so-called mathematical reasoning is introduced-, Spain, with 473 points, is very far from the 536 of Japan, but is in the average of the OECD (472) and the European Union (474), and is in the same group of countries as Lithuania, Germany, France, Hungary, Portugal, Italy, Norway and the United States.
With respect to 2012, the last PISA report in which mathematical competence was the main subject, there is an almost generalized decrease, although smaller in Spain (eleven points) than in the OECD average (22 points).
This fall is accentuated from 2018, the last study before the pandemic that forced schools to close: it drops eight points in Spain, 17 in the OECD and 20 in the EU.
Among the autonomies, Castilla y León is the one that obtains a better average performance (499 points), followed by Asturias (495) and Cantabria (495). At the other extreme are the Canary Islands (447), Melilla (404) and Ceuta (395).
Although in the period 2012-2018 there is a certain downward trend, there is a sharp drop between 2018 and 2022. Probably the first hypothesis to explain such a collapse, especially in the OECD and the EU, is to attribute the origin of the same to the pandemic, explains the Ministry of Education.
Only in two countries there is an increase in the average performance in mathematics, although this is not significant: Turkey (5 points) and Sweden (3). In Japan (-1), Hungary (-4), United Kingdom (-5) and Israel (-9) the drops are not large, but in the rest of the countries, including Spain (-11), they are. The most serious decreases occur in Iceland (-34), Finland (-35) and Germany (-39).
Reading: clear downward trend in the last decade
In the field of reading, a clear downward trend is observed during the last decade -with an accumulated loss of 14 points-.
In 2022, the country with the best performance is Ireland (516), followed by Japan (516) and Korea (515), while the 474 points of Spain do not differ much from the OECD (476) and the EU (475).
By communities, the highest scores correspond to Castilla y León (498), Asturias (497) and Madrid (496), and the lowest are those of Andalusia (461), Melilla (405) and Ceuta (404).
The countries with a higher proportion of students in the high levels in reading performance are the USA and Canada (both 14%) and Korea and New Zealand (13%).
This percentage in Spain is 5%, lower than the international averages (7%), something that is repeated practically the same in Sciences.
Science: Japan gets the highest score with 547 points compared to 485 in Spain
In the area of Science, Japan stands out with 547 points compared to 485 in Spain, two points more than in 2018. The OECD average is 485 and the European Union is 484.
With respect to 2012, the performance falls eleven points in the average of our country and in the OECD as a whole there are 21 points less.
The list of autonomies, in this case, is led by Castilla y León (506 points), Galicia (506) and Cantabria (504), and closed by Andalusia (473), Canary Islands (473), Melilla (414) and Ceuta (410).
