National Achievement Test

Ranking on the MEXT's national achievement test. The national achievement test is a test that has been conducted from 2007, on children in the 6th grade of elementary school to the 3rd grade of junior high school. Until 2009, the test was conducted on all public schools, and from 2010, it has been conducted on extracted schools. From 2007, private schools have been participating in the national achievement test on a voluntary basis.

The subjects that are tested are Japanese and arithmetic for elementary school students and Japanese and mathematic for junior high school students. Each subject is classified into section A which tests comprehension and section B which tests application skills. This ranking is based on the average rate of accuracy of public elementary and junior high schools on all subjects for the three year period from 2007 to 2009.

The national average is 65.7%. The rate of accuracy is highest in Akita with 72.3%. Other prefectures on the Japan Sea coast such as Fukui, Toyama and Ishikawa follow. The rate of accuracy is lowest in Okinawa with 58.3%. Kochi, Osaka and Hokkaido follow. Because private schools are not included in this ranking, the actual status may slightly differ in areas with many private schools.

It is positively correlated with the total site area of privately-owned houses, Homeownership, double-income households and Rice Production, and negatively correlated with the Rate of Single-parent Households, the rate of delinquency in payment for school lunches, the rate of nuclear families and Annual Rate of Unemployment.

From the above, it can be seen that the rate of accuracy is high in areas where rice production is the main industry, where large families live in large houses, and where mothers work. On the other hand, the rate of accuracy is low is areas with many nuclear families and single-parent households, high rate of unemployment and high rate of delinquency in payment for school lunches. In other words, the rate of accuracy seems to be high in traditional agricultural communities.