The Canary Islands are one of the communities with scores below the Spanish average in mathematics and science knowledge at the beginning of Secondary Education, according to an international study that in turn places Spain at the bottom in this knowledge at the beginning of ESO among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
According to the International Study of Trends in Mathematics and Science TIMMS 2023, in which 59 countries participate with students in the fourth year of Primary school and 44 countries with students in the second year of ESO, in a Spanish classroom of 24 students, between 8 and 9 have low levels of mathematical performance and between 7 and 8 in science performance.
Low levels, which in the case of mathematics means -according to the methodology of the report- that students have a basic understanding, that is, they can add and subtract natural numbers of up to three digits, multiply and divide and solve simple problems, know the basic geometric figures and simple graphs.
In that classroom of 24 students, only 6 would reach the high levels, a figure well below the 9 or 10 students indicated by the OECD average.
According to the report, 37.8% of students in the indicated school years have low and very low levels on the mathematics scale, 9.8% are in the very low, and 28% in the low.
Castilla y León, Asturias, Madrid and Navarra at the head
In the study, nine Spanish autonomous communities have participated and among them Castilla y León, Principado de Asturias, Comunidad de Madrid and Navarra are the regions with the best scores (between 522 and 517 points) in mathematical knowledge, all of them above the EU average (514 points).
At the opposite extreme are Catalonia, the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands with average scores lower than the Spanish average.
In Sciences; Asturias, Galicia, Castilla y León and Comunidad de Madrid have average scores above 520 points.
And at the other extreme, the Canary Islands, Andalusia and the Balearic Islands do not reach 500 points. In this last case, the average is close to the score limit that separates the intermediate and low performance levels.
In this eighth edition of the study in which Spain has participated, the sense of belonging of students to the educational center and coexistence in it has been evaluated.
In these areas, Spain is in the upper part of the classification, especially in terms of the sense of belonging to the school, so that students feel more accepted and valued than most of the students in the countries included in this comparison.
Korea at the head
Korea leads the average performance in mathematics and science with 594 points and 583 points, respectively, Spain obtains 498 points in mathematics and 504 points in science; similar to France, Belgium or Italy.
In mathematics, the OECD average is 525 points and the EU average is 514 and in science, it is 526 and 513 points, respectively.
Curiously, Spain's result in mathematics is similar to that of Canada (504) and New Zealand (490), but it is very far from countries such as Korea or Japan (591), while there is also a high performance in Lithuania (561), Turkey (553) and the United Kingdom (552).
Within the European Union, in addition to Lithuania, the best performances correspond to Poland and Ireland (both with 546) and Romania (542 points).
Spain has stagnated in the last eight years
In this study -which is carried out every four years- more than 500 Spanish educational centers and more than 10,000 students in the fourth year of Primary school have participated. Since Spain joined the report in 2011, the evolution from 2015 has not been good.
The document released by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement points out that in 2015 Spain reduced by half the 40-point difference it had with the international average, but from that year "in the last two editions the distance with respect to the OECD average has stabilized at around 25 points of difference".
In fact, in this edition, the performance of mathematics and science of fourth-year primary school students drops again by four points.
Low level in the domain of numbers
The mathematics study analyzes several domains of students, such as numbers, measurements, geometry and data, but also the cognitive dimension, knowledge or reasoning.
In the domain of numbers is where Spain has the worst position, with an average of 497 points. In measurements and geometry Spain is the same as the United States and France, while the best score is found in the domain of data (502 points).
Boys perform better than girls
Boys obtain better estimated average performance than girls in all countries and in Spain the gap widens since in 2011 the difference was 11 points and in 2023 it is close to 20 points.
"Between 2011 and 2023 the gender gap in mathematics has increased in Spain by more than 63%", he emphasizes.
Low data also in science
Following the levels of mathematics, Spanish students arrive at ESO with low levels in science. A third have basic levels on plants, animals and the environment.
They know some properties of matter and the characteristics of the Earth, but 8% of them are at the "very low" level.
Korea (583 points) continues to lead the highest score, followed by Turkey (570 points), while the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and Poland have an average of 550 points or more.
