With mathematics, reading and science scores at record lows in a decline going back to 2012, educators need to radically revamp their approach
3-MIN READ3-MINAlice WuAlice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA. Published: 5:30am, 14 Sep 2026The latest Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) results are out and unfortunately for the Education Bureau, Hong Kong’s performance looks bad. Is this the outcome of not learning from the last assessment?In the 2022 Pisa assessment, a metric for creative thinking was introduced to measure the ability to generate, evaluate, improve and communicate ideas, as well as social and scientific problem-solving. Hong Kong scored below the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average, prompting an education expert to warn that it was “a wake-up call” revealing “our students are really not good at … thinking outside the box”.That is not to say that this was our students’ fault, because what needs changing is what happens inside classrooms. Have our education authorities been thinking outside the box to address this?
While the Education Bureau chose to highlight the “outstanding performance” in digital learning and that mathematical, scientific and mother-tongue reading literacy remained above average, we must be alarmed that scores for the three core subjects of mathematics, reading and science are “the lowest ever measured”, according to Pisa, and “reinforce a negative trend that began after 2012”.
As much as the authorities and experts would like to chalk this up to being Covid-19-related, pointing to a global decline in domain subject scores, the steepness of the decline since the last Pisa exercise warrants deeper consideration. For the first time, Hong Kong has fallen out of the top 10 in science, sliding to 17th from 7th place in just three years.
