It’s a bit of a disaster. France is experiencing a “historic” drop in the level of its 15-year-old students in mathematics in the 2022 edition of the Pisa survey published this Tuesday by the OECD. “In mathematics, the sharp drop observed in France between 2018 and 2022 is the largest observed since the first Pisa study” in 2000, notes the OECD, which specifies that this drop is “21 points, compared to a drop of 15 points for the OECD average.
The Pisa investigation, its real name International Student Assessment Program, measures the performance of fifteen-year-old students in 81 OECD member countries in the areas of reading, science and maths. Main highlight of this 2022 edition: the international results “show an unprecedented decline in student performance”, underlines the OECD.
France is located, as in 2018 in the average of the countries studied, “at a level comparable to that of Spain, Hungary and Lithuania in the three subjects”, notes Irène Hu, OECD analyst .
A decline in math that is not new
It is in the area of mathematics that students in the 81 countries studied experience the most difficulties. “France is not experiencing its first drop in level in maths,” explains Eric Charbonnier, education specialist at the OECD. In previous Pisa editions, “a decline had already been observed between 2003 and 2006 then the results remained stable between 2006 and 2018,” he specifies.
On the other hand, French students, who were among the most anxious in OECD countries regarding mathematics until now, now have “a level of anxiety at the level of the OCD average”, a change which is explained by a drop in the level of anxiety of students in France between 2012 and 2022 combined at the same time with an increase in the level of anxiety in many OECD countries.
These poor results in 2022 “are to be seen in the particular context of the global Covid-19 pandemic but Covid is not the only explanation”, according to Eric Charbonnier. “The problem of attractiveness (of the teaching profession) also has an impact on results, like the Covid crisis,” he assures.