- The results come from the PISA survey, OECD's triennial study of 15 year-old students across the world.
- Compared to other OECD member nations, American students performed especially poorly in math.
- Alarmingly, only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.
Chinese students far outperformed their international peers in a test of reading, math, and science skills, according to the 2018 results of the Program for International Student Assessment.
The test, administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was given to 600,000 15-year-olds across 79 countries. It's intended to serve as a global measuring stick for education systems in different parts of the world, and within varying socioeconomic conditions.
The results showed that students from four provinces of China — Beijing, Shanghai, and the eastern provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang — earned the highest level 4 rating across all three categories. Students in the U.S. ranked level 3 in reading and science, and level 2 in math.
OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said the current performance of a nation's students predicts future economic potential.
"The quality of their schools today will feed into the strength of their economies tomorrow."
PISA
However, many developed nations haven't been able to improve education quality over the past two decades, even though "expenditure on schooling rose by more than 15% over the past decade alone," the report states.
"It is disappointing that most OECD countries saw virtually no improvement in the performance of their students since PISA was first conducted in 2000," Gurria said.
Socio-economic background did play a role in the test scores, accounting for 12 percent of the variation in reading performance in each country, on average. But the results also showed that the poorest 10 percent of students in China still outperformed the OECD average. That's perhaps surprising for a country with an average household net adjusted disposable income per capita that's about three times less than the OECD average of about $30,500.
A reading problem in the U.S.
The PISA results showed that 20 percent of American 15-year-olds don't read as well as they should by age 10. Also, the results showed American performance in reading and math has been flat since 2000. That suggests that federal initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Common Core — which have cost billions of federal and private dollars — haven't improved education quality in the U.S.
One of the most surprising findings was that only 14 percent of American students were able to reliably distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests. For example, one exercise asked students to read two pieces of writing: a news article covering scientific research on milk, and a report from the International Dairy Foods Association. The students were then presented various statements about milk, and asked to judge whether they're reading fact or opinion. For example:
"Drinking milk is the best way to lose weight."
Most American students were unable to tell that statements like this represent opinion, not fact. Why? One major factor is technology, the report said.
"In the past, students could find clear and singular answers to their questions in carefully curated and government-approved textbooks, and they could trust those answers to be true. Today, they will find hundreds of thousands of answers to their questions online, and it is up to them to figure out what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong," the report said. "Reading is no longer mainly about extracting information; it is about constructing knowledge, thinking critically and making well-founded judgements."
A former teacher, Elizabeth, from Portland, Maine, told the New York Times that she believed new technologies had shortened students' attention spans over the past couple of decades.
"My conclusion: technology is not always our friend," she wrote. "The newly arrived laptops in our schools were as much a distraction from learning as a tool for learning."
50 different American education systems
Of course, there are many factors that play into American students' relatively poor academic performance: socio-economic conditions, cultural differences, an overemphasis on standardized testing.
One of the reason it's difficult to tell why American students are falling behind is because, unlike many other nations, the U.S. no centralized education authority, meaning there are basically 50 different education systems. Inequalities among those systems will inevitably emerge, especially in underfunded areas, as Henry Braun, an education policy professor at Boston College, told Politifact.
"The reason we don't perform well overall is that we have more students in the lower strata that typically perform more poorly," Braun said. "That's more an indictment of the inequity in our social system than in our educational system."
An artist's depiction of Lola.
Five thousand and seven hundred years ago, "Lola" — a blue-eyed woman with dark skin and hair — was chewing on a piece of pitch derived from heating birch bark. Then, this women spit her chewing gum out into the mud on an island in Denmark that we call Syltholm today, where it was unearthed by archaeologists thousands of years later. A genetic analysis of the chewing gum has provided us with a wealth of information on this nearly six-thousand-year-old Violet Beauregarde.
This represents the first time that the human genome has been extracted from material such as this. "It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone," said lead researcher Hannes Schroeder in a statement.
"What is more," he added, "we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains."
In the pitch, researchers identified the DNA of the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects about 90 percent of adults. They also found DNA belonging to hazelnuts and mallards, which were likely the most recent meal that Lola had eaten before spitting out her chewing gum.
Insights into ancient peoples
The birch pitch was found on the island of Lolland (the inspiration for Lola's name) at a site called Syltholm. "Syltholm is completely unique," said Theis Jensen, who worked on the study for his PhD. "Almost everything is sealed in mud, which means that the preservation of organic remains is absolutely phenomenal.
"It is the biggest Stone Age site in Denmark and the archaeological finds suggest that the people who occupied the site were heavily exploiting wild resources well into the Neolithic, which is the period when farming and domesticated animals were first introduced into southern Scandinavia."
Since Lola's genome doesn't show any of the markers associated with the agricultural populations that had begun to appear in this region around her time, she provides evidence for a growing idea that hunter-gatherers persisted alongside agricultural communities in northern Europe longer than previously thought.
Her genome supports additional theories on northern European peoples. For example, her dark skin bolsters the idea that northern populations only recently acquired their light-skinned adaptation to the low sunlight in the winter months. She was also lactose intolerant, which researchers believe was the norm for most humans prior to the agricultural revolution. Most mammals lose their tolerance for lactose once they've weaned off of their mother's milk, but once humans began keeping cows, goats, and other dairy animals, their tolerance for lactose persisted into adulthood. As a descendent of hunter-gatherers, Lola wouldn't have needed this adaptation.
A hardworking piece of gum
A photo of the birch pitch used as chewing gum.
Theis Jensen
These findings are encouraging for researchers focusing on ancient peoples from this part of the world. Before this study, ancient genomes were really only ever recovered from human remains, but now, scientists have another tool in their kit. Birch pitch is commonly found in archaeological sites, often with tooth imprints.
Ancient peoples used and chewed on birch pitch for a variety of reasons. It was commonly heated up to make it pliable, enabling it to be molded as an adhesive or hafting agent before it settled. Chewing the pitch may have kept it pliable as it cooled down. It also contains a natural antiseptic, and so chewing birch pitch may have been a folk medicine for dental issues. And, considering that we chew gum today for no other reason than to pass the time, it may be that ancient peoples chewed pitch for fun.
Whatever their reasons, chewed and discarded pieces of birch pitch offer us the mind-boggling option of learning what someone several thousands of years ago ate for lunch, or what the color of their hair was, their health, where their ancestors came from, and more. It's an unlikely treasure trove of information to be found in a mere piece of gum.
Dumpster-diving trash parrots
In a study about these smart birds just published in Science, researchers define animal culture as "population-specific behaviors acquired via social learning from knowledgeable individuals."
Co-lead author of the study Barbara Klump of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany says, "[C]ompared to humans, there are few known examples of animals learning from each other. Demonstrating that food scavenging behavior is not due to genetics is a challenge."
An opportunity presented itself in a video that co-author Richard Major of the Australian Museum shared with Klump and the other co-authors. In the video, a sulphur-crested cockatoo used its beak to pull up the handle of a closed garbage bin — using its foot as a wedge — and then walked back the lid sufficiently to flip it open, exposing the bin's edible contents.
Major has been studying Cacatua galerita for 20 years and says, "Like many Australian birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos are loud and aggressive." The study describes them as a "large-brained, long-lived, and highly social parrot." Says Major, "They are also incredibly smart, persistent, and have adapted brilliantly to living with humans."
(Research regarding some of the ways in which wild animals adapt to the presence of humans has already produced some fascinating results and is ongoing.)Clever cockie opens bin - 01 youtu.be
The researchers became curious about how widespread this behavior might be and saw a research opportunity. After all, says John Martin, a researcher at Taronga Conservation Society, "Australian garbage bins have a uniform design across the country, and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common across the entire east coast."
Martin continues, "In 2018, we launched an online survey in various areas across Sydney and Australia with questions such as, 'What area are you from, have you seen this behavior before, and if so, when?'"
Word gets around
Credit: magspace/Adobe Stock
Although the cockatoos' maneuver was reported in only three suburbs before 2018, by the end of 2019, people in 44 areas reported observing the behavior. Clearly, more and more cockatoos were learning how to successfully dumpster dive.
As further proof, says Klump, "We observed that the birds do not open the garbage bins in the same way, but rather used different opening techniques in different suburbs, suggesting that the behavior is learned by observing others." One individual bird in north Sydney invented its own method, and the scientists saw it grow in popularity throughout the local population.
To track individual birds, the researchers marked 500 cockatoos with small red dots. Subsequent observations revealed that not all cockatoos are bin-openers. Only about 10 percent of them are, and they are mostly males. The other cockatoos apparently restrict their education to a different lesson: hang around with a bin-opener, and you will get supper.
Thanks to the surveys, the researchers consider the entire project to be a valuable citizen-science experiment. "By studying this behavior with the help of local residents, we are uncovering the unique and complex cultures of their neighborhood birds."
