And The World's Best Problem-Solvers Are...
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American students are barely above the average of 44 countries and economies in problem-solving skills, far behind teens in Asia, according to the first international test of that attribute in 15-year-olds.
U.S. teens on average earned a score of 508 on the Programme for International Student Assessment -- Creative Problem Solving test, between top-ranked Singapore's 562 and bottom-ranked Colombia's 399. The PISA results, released Tuesday, put U.S. students in the middle of the pack, hardly supporting the American workforce reputation for creativity.
PISA is an international test for 15-year-olds that has been administered in reading, math, and science since 2000. The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development -- the Paris-based group behind the test -- administered the computer-based problem-solving test for the first time in 2012 in response to a job market that increasingly demands what the group called "non-routine analytic" and "non-routine personal tasks."
"This is the reason why the countries that participated in PISA decided this was an important area," said Pablo Zoido, an OECD analyst.
The U.S. performed higher than 28 countries. The U.S. ranked from 12th to 21st place -- the rank is imprecise because of the lack of statistical significance separating mid-pack performers -- with results close to Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy. Singapore, Korea and Japan came out on
