The need to review science education was highlighted after an international report showed that Maltese Form 3 students ranked 30th out of 49 countries.

Students performed much better in maths where they ranked in 16th place, according to results in a report called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2007, which looks into the performance of Grade 4 and 8 students in mathematics and science.

Malta participated for the first time in this study but only for the Grade 8 (Form 3) assessment. All secondary schools, 59 in all, took part and a total of 4,670 Form 3 students were involved.

"The results of this international study are timely, given that currently the curriculum review is underway," the Education Ministry's Directorate for Quality and Standards said.

"Currently all stakeholders are working on a national strategy for science education and the results on this international study confirm the need to review science education locally. When received, the detailed results for the local cohort will be used for two main reasons: for professional and curriculum development."

The report, released by the International Association for the Assessment of Educational Achievement, divides assessment along two dimensions: content that students are expected to learn and the cognitive skills students are expected to have developed. The report allocated results according to a scientific scale from one to 1,000 with the scale average marked at 500.

In the case of maths, Malta ranked 16th out of the 49 participating countries with 488 scale points. It was followed by Scotland (487), Serbia (486) and Italy (480).

Asian countries performed best with Chinese Taipei (598), Korea (597), and Singapore (593) ranking top three and Qatar (307), Ghana (309) and Saudi Arabia (329) achieving the lowest results.

As for contents for maths, locals performed the best in numbers (496), followed by geometry (495), data and chance (487) and algebra (473).

In the area of science, where Malta ranked 30th with a score of 457, again the top three were Asian: Singapore (567), Chinese Taipei (561) and Japan (554) and the bottom three Ghana (303), Qatar (319) and Botswana (355). Malta was followed by Turkey (454), Syria (452) and Cyprus (452).

From among the science content domains Maltese students performed better in physics (470) followed by chemistry (461), earth science (456) and biology (453).

In the cognitive domains - knowing, applying, and reasoning - Maltese students performed the best in "knowing" (492) for mathematics while in science they performed better in "reasoning" (473).

No statistically significant gender difference in the average achievement was observed for both mathematics and science.