[canadian students = above average]

The other day I wrote about international literacy rates: "The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international comparative study of the reading literacy of young students."

However, there is another study that seems to be more in depth (it actually includes the whole of Canada and not just a synecdoche, using Ontario and Quebec to stand for the whole), plus that earlier study included 40 countries while this one looked at 57 and works out to 400,000 15-year old students.

"Canadian 15-year-olds students placed third on the science test, behind Finland and Hong Kong-China. In the sub-categories of "identifying scientific issues" and "using scientific evidence," Canada placed second behind Finland.
In reading, Canadian teens came fourth, behind South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong-China. Taiwan, Finland and Hong Kong-China led the top scores in math, with Canada placing seventh.
Overall, Canada was among the top performers, scoring well above average, along with Finland, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong-China, Taiwan and Estonia. The United States fell in the middle of the pack in science and reading, and slightly lower in math. The lowest-scoring countries for all subjects were Brazil, Mexico and Luxembourg."

Other findings of the OECD study include:

In science, there is little variation in performance according to gender, but there remains a gender gap in reading and math, with girls significantly outperforming boys in the former, and boys doing slightly better than girls in the latter.

Students in minority-language school systems do not do as well in science and reading as pupils in majority-language schools. The gap is less pronounced with math.

In the 30 OECD countries, an average 25 per cent of students reported that they expect to have a science-related career by
age 30.

Between 35 and 40 per cent of students in Canada, the U.S. and Portugal said they expected a science-related career.

A minority of students reported that they engaged regularly in science-related activities, with television programs and articles leading the way as the most popular activities, with 21 and 20 per cent.

Most students were pessimistic about environmental problems being resolved in the future, with fewer than one in six saying that problems such as air pollution and nuclear waste disposal would improve in the next 20 years.

93 per cent of students agreed that science is important for understanding the natural world