Taiwan students rank 4th globally in science, 3rd in reading: PISA 2025

Taipei, Sept. 8 (CNA) Taiwan's 15-year-old students ranked fourth in the world in science and mathematics and achieved a record-high third place in reading literacy in the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the Ministry of Education and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) announced Tuesday.

The results showed that Taiwan maintained its strong performance from the 2022 assessment despite a broader global decline in student achievement following the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the ministry and NTNU, which jointly released Taiwan's PISA 2025 report Tuesday evening to coincide with the global release of the results.

PISA, organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), evaluates the knowledge and skills of 15-year-old students needed to participate effectively in society.

The 2025 assessment focused primarily on science, with reading and mathematics as secondary domains.

More than 760,000 15-year-old students from 91 countries and economic entities participated in the PISA 2025 study.

According to the report, Taiwanese students scored 540 points in science, maintaining the country's fourth-place global ranking while matching its best-ever score in the subject, first achieved in 2022.

In reading literacy, Taiwan scored 508 points, improving from fifth place in 2022 to a record-high third.

Taiwan ranked fourth in mathematics with 546 points, slipping one place from third in the previous assessment.

In computational problem solving, which was included in the assessment for the first time, Taiwanese students ranked fifth, with a score of 551.

Tsai Chin-chung (蔡今中), chair professor of NTNU's Program of Learning Sciences and Taiwan's PISA project director, said he was surprised that student performance continued to decline globally after the pandemic, having expected scores to rebound from the previous assessment.

Among the 23 OECD countries that participated in both the 2022 and 2025 assessments, average science scores fell by five points, reading by 16 points and mathematics by 11 points, according to the report.

By comparison, Taiwan, Singapore and China showed greater resilience, with Taiwan's science score rising by two points from 2022, while its reading and mathematics scores fell by seven and one point, respectively, outperforming the average trend among the 23 OECD participants.

Tsai said Taiwan's ability to remain among the world's top-performing education systems despite global declines demonstrates the resilience of its education system in the face of various challenges.

PISA has historically been conducted every three years by the OECD to assess students' proficiency in science, reading and mathematics across participating countries and economies, but will transition to a four-year assessment cycle after the 2025 round.