In this issue:

• PISA identifies challenges for Australian education
• Getting all teachers doing what the best already do
• Disadvantage in Australian schools
• ACER’s international role in PISA
• ACER Update

The reading literacy of Australian 15-year-old students has fallen sharply over the past decade, results from the 2009 administration of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reveal. The Australian national report was released by ACER on 7 December. It shows that Australia’s results have also slipped in mathematics but held ground in science.

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In this opinion article, originally published in The Australian newspaper, ACER’s chief executive, Professor Geoff Masters, argues that Australia’s mixed results in PISA 2009 reveal a challenge to get all teachers doing what the best already do, and focused and aligned efforts on the part of school leaders and education systems are critical in achieving this.

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The 2009 OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Australian report: Challenges for Australian Education publishes PISA results broken down and analysed by school sector for the first time. In this opinion article, Dr Sue Thomson, Research Director of ACER’s National Surveys Research Program and lead author of the PISA national report, discusses the results and argues that a student’s socioeconomic background and the socioeconomic background of a school make a big difference to student achievement.

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ACER has a dual role in PISA. In addition to implementing PISA in Australia and writing the national report, ACER leads an international consortium of research organisations and educational institutions to deliver the International PISA project on behalf of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Before the 14,000 Australian students sat down to tackle the 2009 PISA assessments, each item had been through a rigorous process of development and trial to ensure it could be understood by students from a wide range of language and cultural backgrounds and was based on relevant, everyday situations. All items were then translated into nearly 50 languages to meet the language needs of the 65 participating OECD member countries and partner economies. Item development is just part of the work undertaken by the ACER-led consortium that conducts PISA around the world.

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Australian national 2009 PISA report released

Focusing on reading literacy as the major domain for the PISA 2009 assessment, the national report, PISA 2009: Challenges for Australian Education examines Australian students' achievement in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy.  Results are  reported for the states, by gender, for Indigenous students, by location, language background and by socioeconomic background. The full report, a summary report, PISA in Brief: Highlights from the PISA 2009 report, and detailed information about PISA in Australia can be found at the Australian PISA website.

Korea and Finland top OECD’s latest PISA survey of education performance

ACER released the Australian national PISA report on 7 December to coincide with the release of the International PISA report by the OECD in Paris. The OECD reported that Korea and Finland top the latest PISA survey of reading literacy among 15-year olds. Asia-Pacific economies made up six of the leading education systems, thanks to strong performances from Hong Kong-China, Singapore, New Zealand and Japan. Canada was the only other country outside Asia to score highly. Further international findings from PISA and the full international report can be downloaded from the OECD website