Wealthy Asian nations lead in education, studies find
ranked 12th in fourth-grade reading. The nation did not participate in the science and math rankings, although the provinces of Quebec, Ontario and Alberta did and all three ranked above average in each subject.
LITERACY CHALLENGE
The poorest reading performances came in Morocco, Oman and Qatar. Yemen, Morocco and Kuwait trailed in math, with Yemen, Morocco and Tunisia occupying the bottom spots in science.
Their struggles reflect the difficulty of establishing new school systems, said Boston College professor Michael Martin, another study author.
"Education is a multi-generational enterprise, so if you go back 30 or 40 years, many of these countries really did not have an education system, with only a small group of people getting a decent education," Martin said. "When parents haven't been to school and are not literate. This is a big problem to overcome."
While well-funded, well-organized school systems produced the most able students, the studies found performance was not purely dependent on schools. The top performing students were those children raised in homes where books were present and they regularly were read to and saw others reading or engaged in math-related activities like games.
The math and science studies found many countries did better in teaching the basic rules of those subjects than in teaching their application, with students struggling to think of ways to use their knowledge to analyze a problem.
The rankings are based on 900,000 tests of students in their fourth year of formal schooling, typically aged 10 or 11, in countries that opt into the studies. The math
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