Scroll over 17 countries in this map to view the proportion of students with high-level reading skills in each country.
The authors of a report on Canada’s results on the PISA test articulate the importance of student reading, math, science, and problem-solving skills:
The skills and knowledge that individuals bring to their jobs, to further studies, and to our society, play an important role in determining our economic success and our overall quality of life. The importance of skills and knowledge is expected to continue to grow. The shift from manufacturing to knowledge and information intensive service industries, advances in communication and production technologies, the wide diffusion of information technologies, falling trade barriers, and the globalization of financial markets and markets for products and services have precipitated changes in the skills the present and future economy requires. These include a rising demand for a strong set of foundation skills upon which further learning builds.1
PISA is an international assessment of the skills and knowledge of 15 year olds, coordinated by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that assesses whether students approaching the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society.
Since comparatively few young adults in OECD countries have not acquired technical reading skills, PISA does not seek to measure such things as the extent to which 15-year-old students are fluent readers or how well they spell or recognize words. In line with most contemporary views about reading literacy, PISA focuses on measuring the extent to which individuals are able to construct, expand and reflect on the meaning of what they have read in a wide range of texts common both within and beyond school.2
Students that are proficient at the two highest levels on the reading literacy scale are capable of difficult reading tasks. The percentage of students with high-level reading skills is of interest because "today’s proportion of students performing at these levels may influence the contribution which that country will make towards the pool of tomorrow’s world-class knowledge workers in the global economy."3
Canadian students are among the best in the world when it comes to reading skills; nearly 42 per cent of Canadian students scored at level 4 or 5 on the PISA assessment in 2006. This performance puts Canada in second place overall, achieving a "B" grade. Only Finland performed significantly better than Canada.
The OECD has conducted three PISA reading tests—in 2000, 2003, and 2006. Canada’s performance has dropped off slightly since the initial test, when 44.5 per cent of Canadian participants scored high in reading. In 2003, that number slipped to 41.2 per cent. Canada’s performance improved slightly in 2006, with 41.7 per cent of Canadian students scoring high in the reading category. Despite this marginal increase, Canada moved up one spot in the Conference Board’s rankings, overtaking Australia for second place. Australia dropped to 5th place in the same time period, with only 35.5 per cent of its students scoring high-level reading skills in 2006, compared to 41.5 per cent in 2003.
Finland has maintained its first-place ranking since testing began in 2000. Since 2003, Finland has been the only country to score an “A” among the peer countries in our comparison.
Canada will have a difficult time catching up to Finland. Finland has widened the gap with Canada by about 1 percentage point over the three testing cycles. With nearly 49 per cent of Finnish students scoring high on the PISA reading literacy assessment, the gap now stands at 7 percentage points.
In the latest PISA report, the OECD concludes that PISA performance in reading is closely related to subsequent outcomes such as completion of high school and participation in post-secondary education.4 To reach this conclusion, the OECD used studies conducted in two countries: Canada and Denmark.
Statistics Canada followed up with the students who participated in the 2000 PISA study four years later.5 The analysis revealed that students’ performance on the PISA reading test at the age of 15 was highly predictive of high school completion and their successful transition into post-secondary education by the age of 19. Twenty-eight per cent of the students that tested at the lowest reading level (level 1 and below) had pursued some form of post-secondary education. The participation rates increased to 45 per cent for those at level 2, 62 per cent for those at level 3, 76 per cent for those at level 4 and 88 per cent for those at level 5. Students in the lowest two levels of reading literacy (level 1 and below, and level 2) were more likely to drop out of high school.
The Denmark study had similar results; the percentage of students who had completed post-compulsory, general or vocational upper secondary education by age 19 was closely related to their PISA reading performance at age 15.
1 Patrick Bussière, Fernando Cartwright, and Tamara Knighton, Measuring Up: Canadian Results of the OECD PISA Study (Ottawa: Human Resources and Skills Development Canada and Statistics Canada, 2004), p. 10.
2 OECD, Learning for Tomorrow’s World: First Results from PISA 2003 (Paris: Author, 2004), p. 279.
3 OECD, Learning for Tomorrow’s World: First Results from PISA 2003 (Paris: Author, 2004), pp. 276-77.
4 OECD, PISA 2006: Science Competencies for Tomorrow’s World, Volume 1: Analysis (Paris: Author, 2007), p. 300.
5 Tamara Knighton and Patrick Bussière, Educational Outcomes at Age 19 Associated with Reading Ability at Age 15, Catalogue no. 81-595-MIE2006043 (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, June 2006).