The results of Polish 15-year-olds in the creative thinking test are higher than the OECD average and similar to the results of students from Belgium, Latvia and Portugal. The best results were achieved by students from Singapore (41 points), South Korea and Canada (38 points each). The next places were taken by Australia and New Zealand. Among students from the European Union, only 15-year-olds from Estonia, Finland and Denmark achieved better results. The creativity of Hungarian students is moderately good.
Announcement of the results of the PISA 2022 Program for International Student Assessment at the Educational Research Institute in Warsaw. Photo by PAP/Piotr Nowak
PISA tests skills in three areas: reading comprehension, mathematical thinking and scientific thinking. Poland was represented in the survey by 6,011 students from 240 schools who were born in 2006. The maximum score of the creativity test was 60 points. The average score of Polish students was 34 points, which is higher than the OECD average (33 points). The results showed a significant difference in terms of creativity by gender: the average score of girls in Poland was 36 points, and that of boys was 33 points. Among European students, the best results were from Estonia (35.9), Finland (35.8) and Denmark ( 35.5) were achieved by teenagers. The Slovaks performed the weakest with 29 points.
One of these is always the main area. In PISA 2022, this domain was mathematical thinking. On Thursday, June 27, 2024, the results of the additional part of the PISA 2022 study regarding financial skills were also announced. The study measured the financial literacy of 15-year-old students in 20 countries, including 14 OECD member states, assessing how well students have the basic knowledge and skills needed to make financial decisions.
The top performing countries included Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland. These countries all performed above the OECD average. Although the average result of Polish students was lower compared to 2018, Polish fifteen-year-olds declared using banking services much more often than in previous editions, and in terms of the frequency of making payments via smartphone or online shopping, they stand out from their peers from other countries. Poland was among the countries with the highest percentages of students declaring that in the year preceding the survey they had shopped online, made payments using a smartphone and transferred money to others using a smartphone. Every fourth Polish fifteen-year-old claimed that they pay by card every day or almost every day, while 22% of students indicated that they make payments using a smartphone every day or almost every day.
It is worth noting that the PISA report shows that in Poland the average level of skills of boys and girls is similar, but the results of boys are more diverse than those of girls: there is a higher percentage of boys with the lowest and highest skills. In Hungary, boys performed better than girls in terms of financial literacy.
The latest report also showed that there are large differences in the level of skills of students from various types of post-primary schools: the best results were achieved by fifteen-year-olds from general secondary schools, slightly weaker - by students of technical secondary schools, and the weakest - by students of first-cycle vocational schools.
The study also showed that, both in Poland and in other OECD countries, the financial skills of 15-year-olds are strongly correlated with the skills in mathematics and reading comprehension measured in the PISA study. Of the 20 countries that took part in the survey, an average of 18 percent of teenagers in 14 OECD countries have difficulty using mathematical operations such as division when managing their finances. These low-achieving students have difficulty making everyday spending decisions. For example, whether it is better to buy fruit in pre-packaged boxes or measured in kilograms.
The financial literacy of teenagers was measured for the first time in Hungary. Hungarian students scored 492 points in the field of financial literacy, which is below the OECD average. According to the results of the PISA survey, 18 percent of Hungarian students perform at the lowest level. This means that they only have basic financial knowledge and can only make simple financial decisions. In contrast, 10.3 percent of students were able to perform at the highest level, where they can analyze complex financial products and solve non-routine financial problems.
Around 690 000 students took the PISA assessment, representing about 29 million 15-year-olds from schools in 81 participating countries.
(J)