Students from Korea and Japan came out on top in the PISA problem-solving test. Students who pass the first OECD PISA Creative Problem Solving exam are quick learners, highly curious and able to solve unstructured problems in unfamiliar environments.

A total of 85,000 students from 44 countries and economies took the computer-based test, which used real-life situations to assess the skills young people use when faced with everyday challenges such as finding a shortcut to a destination or setting a thermostat.

Chinese Taipei, Shanghai-China, Hong Kong-China, Macao-China and Japan were also among the top performers, while students from Belgium, USA, Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Netherlands, France, Estonia, England, Finland, Australia and Canada scored higher than the OECD (Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation) average.

Solving problems compared with academic tests

While some countries performed well in school subjects such as science or mathematics, their students struggled to do well in problem-solving tests. Conversely, children in Japan, the USA and the UK did much better in problem solving than in key school subjects .
Andreas Schleicher, acting director of education and skills at the OECD, said:

"Today's 15-year-olds with poor problem-solving skills will become tomorrow's adults struggling to find or keep good jobs. Policymakers and educators need to change their school systems and curricula to help students develop the problem-solving skills increasingly needed in today's economy."

While 11.4% of 15-year-olds in OECD countries could solve the most difficult problems, in Japan, Korea and Singapore the figure exceeded 20%.

However, in OECD countries, around 20% of students could only solve the simplest problems, suggesting they lack the skills needed in the modern workplace. Young people actually spend a lot of time on computers playing games. But the most popular activity noticed that games at online casinos , but tell you even more detail not just at online casinos but at crypto-casinos . They started trading cryptocurrency and gambling in parallel , and this is frankly a very big growth in the future . If you would also like to try or learn more about it, the website https://cryptocasinos360.com/ko/ can help you.

The gender gap in the PISA problem-solving test

According to the report, the gender gaps in problem solving were small among low achievers. With the exception of Norway, Finland and Australia, the highest-performing 15-year-olds were boys. In OECD countries, for every three best-performing boys, there were two best-performing girls.

According to an OECD communiqué, 'The influence of socio-economic status on problem solving is much weaker than for other PISA subjects, such as maths, reading and science: in France and Spain, for example, the relationship between socio-economic status and performance is half as strong as in maths. But students from disadvantaged backgrounds are on average twice as likely to score the lowest as their more affluent peers.
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