This policy paper examines teacher support for students in mathematics lessons, drawing on data from PISA 2022 and previous cycles. It highlights key trends and explores how school contexts, teacher practices, and student characteristics influence the level of support students receive. Over the past decade (2012–2022), teacher support has declined in most participating education systems. This paper addresses the critical question of how education systems can reverse this trend and strengthen teacher support. Understanding the conditions and practices that enable teachers to effectively meet students’ diverse learning needs is essential. Through this analysis, the paper provides insights and policy recommendations to help foster supportive learning environments, guide education reform, and mitigate the decline in teacher support observed since 2012.

How closely do the skills measured at age 15 predict the skills observed later in adulthood? This paper examines the relationship between the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), drawing on newly available PIAAC Cycle 2 data. A series of country-level comparisons are used to explore the extent to which performance in reading/literacy and mathematics/numeracy aligns across the two assessments when viewed from different analytical perspectives, such as contemporaneous comparisons of PISA and PIAAC results, comparisons of matched pseudo-cohorts and comparisons of performance trends over time. The paper considers possible reasons for the similarities and differences between the results of both assessments, such as variations in assessment frameworks, target populations, sampling methods, testing conditions, motivation of respondents, and opportunities for developing skills throughout life. While PISA and PIAAC provide broadly consistent signals about national skill levels, the paper argues that differences in what and whom they measure, as well as in the contexts in which assessments are administered, limit direct comparisons.

This paper applies the Collective Intelligence Model for Education (CIME) to Thailand’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 mathematics data and assessment materials to generate fine-grained diagnostic evidence for curriculum review and instructional support. The study combines AI-assisted scoring, expert review and psychometric scaling, using bilingual item-facet rubrics, with Thai serving as the operational scoring language. The resulting profiles examine student performance across 12 content topics and 17 cognitive operators. Findings indicate relative strengths in geometry-related content, measurement, estimation, chance and probability, and selected procedural tasks. More demanding areas include formulating situations mathematically, interpreting results in context, recognising functional relationships, and working with algebraic, functional and data-representation content. The analysis also identifies limited gender differences in most areas, alongside substantial variation by economic, social and cultural status. Overall, the paper shows how large-scale assessment data can be translated into competency-oriented evidence for Thailand’s ongoing education reform

This policy paper examines the distribution and relevance of students’ growth mindset beliefs, drawing on data from the 2022 cycle of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). It highlights a drop in the prevalence of a growth mindset —the belief that intelligence can develop through feedback, effort and effective strategies—between 2018 and 2022. Nevertheless, it shows that students with a growth mindset generally achieve higher scores in mathematics, reading and science, than their peers with a fixed mindset. This paper shows that a growth mindset is most common among high performers, yet the strongest performance differences linked with it appear among mid-performing students. Among low performers, the associations with achievement are weaker or inconsistent. A growth mindset also aligns positively with self-efficacy, curiosity, persistence and lower mathematics anxiety, though these associations vary by performance level. Moreover, at the classroom level, when teachers support students and cognitively challenging instruction is prevalent, the performance gap between growth- and fixed-mindset students is wider. But this pattern is not observed among struggling learners. At the school level, growth mindset clusters mirroring socio-economic disparities. These analyses highlight the importance of policies that pair mindset-supportive practices with equitable access to quality teaching and learning environments.

This country policy profile on education in Korea is part of the Education Policy Outlook series. Building on the first policy profile for Korea (2016), it offers a concise analysis of where the education system stands today and how this compares to other OECD systems. The profile analyses the evolution of ongoing and emerging related policy efforts in Korea. It also offers relevant international policy examples that may serve as possible inspiration as policy makers work to address Korea’s key challenges and priorities, particularly in the context of digitalisation, demographic change and the green transition. The report brings together over a decade's worth of policy analysis by the Education Policy Outlook, as well as recent OECD data, relevant thematic and country-specific work, and other international and national evidence. It also benefits from the Education Policy Outlook's ongoing comparative analysis of resilience and responsiveness in education policy.

This policy paper examines how much time 15-year-old students dedicate to digital leisure outside of school and explores the relationship between digital leisure and students’ learning outcomes and well-being at school. The paper finds that when digital leisure takes place outside school hours, it is only after 4 hours a day that the relationships between time spent on digital leisure and students’ mathematics scores and sense of belonging at school are negative. Students who balance a moderate use of digital devices for leisure with a moderate time spent on learning outside of school have both higher academic and well-being outcomes than their peers.