When compared with both their peers internationally and fellow American college graduates, U.S. teachers have middling math and literacy skills, finds a group of international researchers.
The researchers found that in terms of literacy skills, American educators score just about as well as other American college graduates and outscore teachers in 13 of the 23 developed countries analyzed using data from the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, or PIAAC which tested the cognitive skills of more than 160,000 adults across 23 developed countries.
But when it came to numeracy skills, American teachers scored below the averages for both other college-educated Americans and teachers internationally.
The report also statistically links differences in teachers’ cognitive skills to international differences in student performance. For instance, teachers in Finland and Japan, which usually rank near the top on other international tests, performed best in both numeracy and literacy PIAAC measures.
