Adults in Slovakia achieve average mathematical literacy, but they lag significantly behind in reading literacy and problem-solving skills. This is according to the International Assessment of Key Competencies for Adults under the auspices of the OECD. Education Minister Tomáš Drucker (Hlas-SD) informed about this at a press conference Tueday.
"What I find very alarming is that almost a quarter of adults have reading literacy at the level of a ten-year-old child," said Drucker, adding that it is not surprising that the problems of the education system are also transferred to the level of skills of adult residents of Slovakia.
Zuzana Wirtz from the National Institute of Education and Youth (NIVaM) pointed out that the reading literacy score has dropped by up to 20 points since 2011, when the first cycle of the assessment was carried out. In mathematics, the score dropped by 15 points. "At the same time, an unfavorable trend was also shown, that the share of people at low levels increased and the share of people at high levels, where people can work with abstract information or with non-explicit meaning, this share decreased," she specified.
The survey showed that scores have decreased since 2011 in all age categories, but the biggest drop was among people with higher education, which was not expected according to Wirtz. Slovaks finished significantly worse than the average of higher education people from OECD countries. "These results indicate essentially the low added value of higher education and the need to increase the credits of higher education institutions," she added. University graduates who completed their studies in the last ten years also achieved worse results in mathematical literacy compared to graduates from earlier periods.
Wirtz stated that in mathematical literacy we achieved similar scores to, for example, Ireland or Latvia. "In reading literacy, we had a comparable result to Austria, France and Croatia, and in adaptive solutions, we had a comparable result to France, Ireland and Latvia," she explained. Within the V4, we overtook Hungary and Poland, but we achieved a significantly worse result than the Czechs.
Drucker pointed out that Slovakia needs fundamental reforms of the education system that will support lifelong learning and prepare people for the changing challenges of the labor market. He added that increasing spending on higher education must be conditioned by pressure on quality. "It is unacceptable that we finance a higher education system that produces graduates with worse skills than secondary school graduates in other countries," he noted.
The International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a research on the skills of adults aged 16-65. The assessment monitored the level of reading and mathematical literacy and adaptive problem solving. The first cycle was carried out from 2011 to 2017, the second from 2022 to 2023, with 31 countries participating in the second cycle.
NIVaM carried out the second cycle of PIAAC from August 2018 to July 2023. In Slovakia, 5,238 interviews were collected in the main PIAAC collection, which were included in the international data processing and evaluation.
Source: TASR
