Adults In Germany Are Good At Solving Problems

The results show that adults in Germany have skills that are significantly better than the average for the participating OECD countries. At the same time, there are significant differences within the population, especially between people with different levels of education, social backgrounds and countries of birth. Adults with low educational attainment have only limited adaptive problem-solving skills. Employed people have higher skills than those who are not employed.

Adults whose parents have a low level of education have, on average, lower adaptive problem-solving skills than those whose parents have a high level of education. This correlation between skills and social background is particularly strong in Germany in international comparison.

There are also differences depending on whether people were born in Germany or abroad. People who were not born in Germany have lower problem-solving skills on average than those born in Germany, when tested in German. This difference is also high in international comparison.

"Most adults in Germany are well equipped to face the challenges of a complex, changing social and working life. However, it is not a good sign for a society if it fails to decouple opportunities for acquiring skills from social background. We regularly see that this dependency is stronger in Germany than in other countries in the PISA studies, too, in which we examine the skills of 15-year-old students. To solve the problem, we need to start at an early age," says Samuel Greiff , one of the study's authors and professor of educational monitoring and effectiveness at TUM. He led the international group of experts that developed the concept of adaptive problem solving for the PIAAC study.

The PIAAC study , coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), was conducted for the second time in 2023. Participants worked independently on everyday tasks in their respective national languages on a tablet. This skills assessment was supplemented by a comprehensive background questionnaire that collected information on, for example, sociodemographic factors, formal education, continuing education, employment and occupational status as well as the use of skills at work and in everyday life.

In Germany, PIAAC was led by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. The study was funded in Germany by the Federal Ministry of Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMBFSFJ) with the participation of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS).