Japanese students continue to be strong performers in PISA. With an average score of 538 points in science in PISA 2015, students in Japan are outperformed only by students in Singapore (556 points), and they perform similarly to students in Estonia and Chinese Taipei. Japanese students’ average reading score (516 points) is comparable with that of students in Estonia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, New Zealand and Norway; but students in Canada, Finland, Hong Kong (China) and Singapore outperform Japanese students in reading by 10 score points or more. Japanese students attain the same mathematics score (532 points, on average) as students in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China) and Korea, but they are outperformed by students in Hong Kong (China), Macao (China), Singapore and Chinese Taipei. Across current OECD countries (including Chile, Estonia, Israel, Latvia and Slovenia), the average science score in 2015 (493 points) is not significantly different from the score in 2006 (498 points), when science was the main domain assessed. During the same period, Japan’s mean science score remained unchanged (531 points in 2006 and 538 points in 2015).
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