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The Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education

PISA Results for Massachusetts

To:
Members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education
From:
Mitchell D. Chester, Ed.D., Commissioner
Date:
December 6, 2013

At the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting on December 17, 2013, I will present the statewide results from the 2012 administration of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). PISA is a triennial international survey designed to assess how well 15-year-old students can apply the knowledge and skills they have learned in school to real-life situations in Reading, Mathematics, and Science Literacy. PISA is coordinated worldwide by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, and conducted in the United States by the National Center for Education Statistics.

For the first time in 2012, Massachusetts and two other U.S. states participated as international benchmarking systems to receive state-level results that can be compared to other participating systems. According to the 2012 PISA results, Massachusetts students performed best in reading literacy and tied for fourth worldwide, trailing only students from Shanghai-China, Hong Kong-China, and Singapore. In mathematics and science literacy, Massachusetts students tied for tenth and seventh, respectively, among the 65 participating countries and education systems. Students from Massachusetts outscored students from the other two participating states, Connecticut and Florida, as well as the national average in all three subjects.

Senior Associate Commissioner Robert Bickerton will be at the Board meeting to share the results and some samples of released PISA test items, and respond to your questions.

Attachments:

Press Release
2012 PISA Average Scores for Participating Education Systems