I-03b: Average Score on International Reading Assessment, by OECD Member Country, 2022
* Proficiency as measured by the Programme for International Student Assessment. See “About the Data” for details.
** In the case of nations with measurably larger and smaller shares than the United States, the difference is statistically significant at the 5% level. Certain jurisdictions in gray had smaller or larger shares, but whether these differences were attributable not to a sampling error but to actual differences in the levels of performance between those nations and the United States could not be determined with a sufficient level of confidence.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, Institute for Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, “Reading Literacy: Proficiency Levels,” https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2022/docs/DescriptionsOf2022ProficiencyLevels-TableI33.pdf (accessed 10/14/2024). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
“The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students’ reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years except for a 1-year delay in the current cycle (from 2021 to 2022) due to the pandemic. After the 2025 data collection, PISA will change to a 4-year data collection cycle. First conducted in 2000, the major domain of study rotates between mathematics, science, and reading in each cycle. PISA also includes measures of general or cross-curricular competencies, such as collaborative problem solving. By design, PISA emphasizes functional skills that students have acquired as they near the end of compulsory schooling. PISA is coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, and is conducted in the United States by NCES.” (Excerpted from the National Center for Education Statistics’ online PISA overview). The scoring scale for reading literacy (and also math and science literacy) ranges from 0 to 1,000.
