Australian students strong collaborative problem solvers: PISA

Students in Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand and the United States perform better in collaborative problem solving than would be expected, based on their scores in the science, reading and mathematics components of the OECD’s 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

A total of 125,000 15-year-old students in 52 countries and economies took part in the PISA 2015 computer-based assessment of collaborative problem solving. The assessment analyses how well students work together as a group, their attitudes towards collaboration and the influence of factors such as gender, after-school activities and social background.

The PISA 2015 Results: Collaborative problem solving report reveals that girls do better than boys in all participating countries and economies, by the equivalent of half a year’s schooling on average (29 points). On average across OECD countries, girls are 1.6 times more likely than boys to be top performers in collaborative problem solving, while boys are 1.6 times more likely than girls to be low achievers. This is in sharp contrast to the findings of the 2012 individual problem-solving test which found that boys performed better than girls.

Read the OECD PISA 2015 Results: Collaborative problem solving report.