After the decline already recorded during the pandemic, the results of the new PISA study, conducted by the OECD, reveal a widespread deterioration of student skills worldwide, with special emphasis on Reading. This new decline has no historical parallel in the study's scale.
In Portugal, the data show a regression equivalent to about 20 years in both Math and Reading. The learning losses recorded correspond to a delay of approximately a year and a half of schooling for Portuguese students.
The study, considered the largest international ranking of student assessment, has been monitoring the evolution of student skills since the beginning of the millennium. The COVID-19 pandemic is pointed out as a contributing factor to this decline trend, although experts warn that the situation had already been deteriorating even before the health outbreak.
