remote education, and limited social interaction) had an impact on students’ basic skill proficiency, the decline in their mastery of basic skills was already evident beforehand. Figure 1.1: PISA results. Note. This figure presents the PISA results for reading (left) and mathematics (right) for the Netherlands (green), the OECD (dark gray) and the EU14 countries (light gray). Source: translated from Meelissen et al. (2023), pages 21 and 52. Taking a closer look at the Netherlands, the results show an amplification of the OECD and EU14 trends. Dutch 15-years-olds demonstrate a significant decline in their reading performance since 2012, where the decline exceeds the OECD average by more than 2.5 times. Dutch students’ math performance declines continuously starting from 2003, where this drop is over 1.5 times larger than the average decline in the OECD countries. While Dutch students still score well above the OECD average for math, their reading proficiency has dropped below this OECD average since 2018. Although these PISA results demonstrate the deficiencies in the basic skill proficiency of students over the past decade, the meaning and consequences of these results for students’ daily life, also in the long run, remain abstract. Therefore, studies often report the proportion 5
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