Sixty-six percent of Turkish students scored “mediocre” or below in reading comprehension in a nationwide survey conducted by Turkey’s Ministry of Education, Deutsche Welle Turkish service reported.
The poor reading scores were revealed by the results of the Monitoring and Evaluating Academic Skills (ABİDE) project, carried out on some 116,000 pupils across the country.
The project also demonstrated that Turkish students proved to be inadequate in performing the most basic operations in mathematics.
It was also shown that 1.6 percent of students lack basic skills in Turkish, 16.4 percent in mathematics, 9.4 percent in the physical sciences and 4.4 percent in the social sciences.
The findings were in line with those of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) which in 2017 reported that Turkey ranked 49th in mathematics, 52nd in sciences and 50th in reading among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
A comparison of Turkey’s scores in PISA in 2017, 2015 and 2012 point to a downward trend in almost all of the fields.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has been in power since 2002, is widely criticized for frequently changing the education system in the country.