PUTRAJAYA: Malaysia has shown significant improvement in the 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for three domains, namely Science, Mathematics and reading literacies.
For the Science literacy domain, Malaysia scored 443 points, an increase of 23 points compared to the PISA 2012 results.
The score obtained for the reading literacy domain stands at 431 points, a rise of 33 points compared to the previous edition.
Malaysia scored 446 points in the Mathematics literacy domain this year compared to PISA 2012, with 421 points.
Education deputy director-general Datuk Dr Amin Senin said over 60 percent of students acquired basic skills or knowledge which can be applied in real world settings, based on the three domain results.
“For scientific literacy, 66.4 percent of students in Malaysia reached the baseline.
“A total of 62.8 percent of students reached the baseline for reading literacy, while 37.3 percent of students are below the baseline.”
“For the Mathematics literacy, 62.5 percent of students reached the baseline and 37.5 percent are below the baseline,” he told a press conference today.
Amin said the Higher Order Thinking Skills initiative is the key factor to boost Malaysia's achievement in Science, Math and reading literacies.
Amin also revealed that the students showed a high interest in the science field based on a survey done during PISA.
“More than 80 percent said they had fun learning about science, like to gain knowledge about science and were interested in learning science.
"Almost 80 percent said they like to read about science and like to do assignments related to science.
"This is contrary to our assumptions that many Malaysian students are not interested in the science field."
However, based on the survey on the students' interest in science-related careers, 67 percent students chose careers that were unrelated to science.
"This is the first study which showed that Malaysian students have a high interest in science but are not interested in working in the science field.
“We have yet to determine the cause of this mismatch. We will conduct a thorough study," he said.