Based on the text below, answer question
American Students Test Well ∈Problem Solving, but Trail Foreign Counterparts
Fifteen-year-olds ∈ the United States scored above the average of those ∈ the developed world on exams assessing problem-solving skills, but they trailed several countries ∈Asia and Europe as well as Canada, according to international standardized tests results released on Tuesday.
The American students who took the problem-solving tests ∈2012, the first time they were administered, did better on these exams than on reading, math and science tests, suggesting that students ∈ the United States are better able to apply knowledge to real-life situations than perform straightforward academic tasks.
Still, students who took the problem-solving tests ∈ countries including Singapore, South Korea, Japan, several provinces of China, Canada, Australia, Finland and Britain all outperformed American students.
“The good news is that problem solving still remains a relatively strong suit for American students,” said Bob Wise, former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy group focused on improving high schools. “The challenge is that a lot of other nations are now developing this and even moving ahead. So where we used to, ∈ an earlier era, dominate ∈ what we called the deeper learning skilis - creative thinking, critical thinking and the ability to solve problems −∈ terms of producing the workers that are increasingly needed ∈ this area, other nations are coming on strong and ∈ some cases surpassing us.
The new problem-solving exams were administered to a⊂ of 15-vear-olds ∈28 countries who sat for the Program for International Student Assessment, a set of tests every three years commonly known as PISA and given by the Organization for Economic (Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based group whose members include the world”s wealthiest nations. Almost 1,275 American students took the exams.
Critics of the rankings on international tests have tended to characterize the high performance of Asian countries ∈ particular as demonstrating the rote learning of facts and formulas. But the problem-solving results showed that students ∈ the highest-performing nations were also able to think flexibly. Even on interactive tasks, the American students' strength, all the Asian countries that participated ∈ this round of exams outperformed the United States.
“To understand how to navigate a complex problem and exercise abstract reasoning is actually a very strong point for the Asian countries,” said Francesco Avvisati, an analyst on the PISA team at the O.E.C.D.
(Adapted from http://www.nytimes.com)
In the extracts: “[...] but they trailed several countries [...]” (1st paragraph) and “[...] the first time they were administered.” (2nd paragraph), the underlined pronouns refer respectively to:
