Two announcements:
- We'll be holding office hours tomorrow (Thursday, September 10th), on Zoom. Office hours are open to all paid Bamboo Weekly subscribers, including members of my LernerPython+data subscription program. I'll send full Zoom info later today. Come with any and all Pandas questions, comments, and thoughts! LernerPython members can see it, including the Zoom link, at the list of upcoming live events, at https://lernerpython.com/live-sessions/.
- It's time for another round of Claude Code workshops! If you want to learn to use Claude Code (or any agentic coding system, for that matter), then you'll enjoy these workshops, which focus on solving real problems in an interactive environment. Learn more, and sign up for Monday's session where I'll explain it all, at https://lernerpython.com/code-with-claude/ .
Earlier this week, initial results from the 2025 PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) exams were released. PISA is administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), what the Economist likes to call, "a club of mostly rich countries," and aims to compare schools and student achievement across dozens of countries. A country that gets high PISA scores is seen as having a good education system, and one that is rising is also seen in a good light.
The OECD itself said, in releasing its results, that these were the lowest-ever reading and math scores, with reading down sharply since 2015.
Several years ago, I read "The Smartest Kids in the World," by Amanda Ripley (https://www.amandaripley.com/the-smartest-kids-in-the-world), in which she travels to Finland, Poland, and South Korea, countries that scored high on PISA or were improving dramatically. It was quite interesting – and a bit depressing! – to see how much effort these countries were putting into schools and education. Ripley does spend time on the trade-offs that countries and students make.
I thought that it would be interesting to explore some of the PISA data this week. Among other things, I want to know which countries are doing best, and which are changing to the greatest degree.
Data and five questions
You can download all of the PISA data from the OECD's StatLink, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html . From there, click on "full report," which brings you to a download page. We'll be looking at just two of the files they provided, I.B1.1 and I.B1.2.
Paid subscribers, both to Bamboo Weekly and to my LernerPython+data membership program (https://LernerPython.com) get all of the questions and answers, as well as downloadable data files, downloadable versions of my notebooks, one-click access to my notebooks, and invitations to monthly office hours.
Learning goals for this week include working with Excel files, cleaning data, correlations, and plotting with Plotly.
Here are my five questions and tasks for this week. I'll be back tomorrow with my solutions and explanations.
- Read the first sheet (I.B1.1.1, "Learners' competencies") from the table I.B1.1 Excel file into a Pandas data frame. You'll want the country names to be in the index, the values to all be floats (treating the letter
masNaN), and only keep the columns with "%" in them. What 5 countries have the highest percentage in column A, the percentage of students at level 2 or above in science, reading, and mathematics? - The table includes the OECD average. Which countries are above the OECD average for column A, and how did they score?