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US adults score below average on worldwide test

Svnla

Svnla

Lifer
Not just kids, but adults.


http://news.yahoo.com/us-adults-score-below-average-worldwide-test-090114407.html


More detail = http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/SkillsOutlook_2013_ebook.pdf


More about the company and other things = http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac/publications.htm



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Not surprising, we're a lot bigger than those top countries, and much of America is made up of simple country folk who just aren't as book smart.
 
Red Storm said:
Not surprising, we're a lot bigger than those top countries, and much of America is made up of simple country folk who just aren't as book smart.
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A lot of America is made up of people who cannot count the number of bastard children they have or figure out how to put on a condom...

Is it any wonder they would fail at math or problem solving? 😕
 
nehalem256 said:
A lot of America is made up of people who cannot count the number of bastard children they have or figure out how to put on a condom...

Is it any wonder they would fail at math or problem solving? 😕
Click to expand...

The quoted poster here is a perfect example of why the US scores so low.
 
I could care less what you're link says. Murica is still top irregardless of what some damn test says.
 
techs said:
The test is biased against faith based education.
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I don't think that's the root of the problem. I had one of those educations to an extent and I don't think it affected reading, math, or even problem solving education at all. There was some damage to biology education but even then I wouldn't call it anywhere close to a total loss, not for highschool level stuff anyway. And I think I at least have the standardized tests and advanced degree to back that up.

You might argue that it just overall teaches people to be idiots or accept things without critical analysis but you'd be surprised how capable people are at being smart about a lot of things and not so smart about one particular thing (and not necessarily because they're shutting off their brains but just because they're making evaluations based on a lot of bad information they've been given)

That's not to say that the push to move god into schools in place of some proper fields of science isn't a problem, but the state of bad education in this country is much worse than just that. My mother made a career in adult education, I've worked with her a little on that too, and it's really glaring how little a lot of people get math. And it's no secret that the overall state of public schools isn't great.
 
Red Storm said:
Not surprising, we're a lot bigger than those top countries, and much of America is made up of simple country folk who just aren't as book smart.
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Yeah, that or we're just a nation of morons because our educators spend more time worrying about lawsuits and funding than they do about education.

No, I'm sure it's just that these tests only measure "book smarts."
 
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I'd be curious in seeing medians, standard deviations, and stuff like that for the data. Or better yet, some actual distribution plots. My gut feeling is you'd find that the representation in the upper levels is decent, and the representation at the lower levels is exaggerated. In other words, our dumbest people are dumber than the dumbest people in other countries. Afterall, we do still have a lot of top universities and a fair amount of research is still done here, definitely both are well above world average by country.
 
We tend to lag behind any kind of world standard testing, and always have for decades.

whatever--different standards.

In that same time where we lagged the rest of the world in such tests, we built NASA and put some goddamn humans on the motherfucking moon, won a metric ass-load of Nobel Prizes, and created a higher education system that is the envy of the world.

again: meh.
 
Another thing to keep in mind, which I probably should have picked up on more quickly - they tested only 20 countries, and almost all of them would be considered first world. So calling this a "worldwide" placement is highly misleading.

I expect the gap for adult testing to be greater than the gap for child testing since several of these countries offer much cheaper college education.
 
nehalem256 said:
A lot of America is made up of people who cannot count the number of bastard children they have or figure out how to put on a condom...

Is it any wonder they would fail at math or problem solving? 😕
Click to expand...

Puhleeeze - It's just that that's unimportant. That DAMNED sure know exactly how many grams are in a kilo.
 
FreshCrabLegs said:
How'd China and India do?
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Don't know but they already took (are taking) the lower skilled jobs away from the US. Now we can lose the higher paying, higher education required jobs too.

Edit: I'm sorry, they didn't take the jobs, our investor class 'gave them away' to make a few more pennies....at least on the short term.
 
The full study is online and linked in the article. It goes quite in depth with explanations of research methods, sample questions etc.

Japan, Finland, and the Netherlands are pretty solidly at the top.

Canada is right around average.

The US is definitely below average.

This is just industrialized nations though, so being average isn't necessarily bad.
 
SKORPI0 said:
American+Public+School+800-640x1897.png

http://www.edudemic.com/schools-compare/
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Well, there goes the rest of the jobs to China too.

Once read that there are seven steps of every empire, including death. #6 was to rely on the slave labor of conquered lands for goods and services. I believe we are in decline as we enter stage #6. #7....well, that was the death of the empire.

The rest of the world is moving forward while we socialize on Facebook, Twitter and play games on our PS3. Too much time on the smartphones (oxymoron?) and not enough time in the books/labs/research department.
 
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How many of Japan's, Finland's and the other top countries' population are foreign born? Not much I would say. Japan's total population is less than half ours. Finland is not even close. Australia has a significant foreign population but many are there for education purposes so that might in fact help scores.

So just like most of these survey type tests, they don't have much meaning. Just another comparison that doesn't really matter much or mean much. Comparing countries is ridiculous in so many levels anyway. America can't be Japan and Japan can't be Finland. They are what they are. Let's stop the imitation and do what we have to do (we in terms of each person, not the country).

In fact, comparing scores of cities in the same country is not a good way to measure anything either let alone comparing countries. So many variances that it just makes the survey irrelevant. Too bad these things are taken seriously.
 
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