Is the United States really losing the international horse race in academic achievement?

Phi Delta Kappan

Volumn 86, Issue 9, 2005, Pages 688-695

  Boe, Erling E ^a,b   Shin, Sujie ^c  

^a Graduate School of Education   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

^c NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 19944410514     PISSN: 00317217     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003172170508600913     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Edward A. Silver, Improving Mathematics in Middle School: Lessons from TIMSS and Related Research (Washington, D.C.: Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education, 1998), p. 1.
2. Effective Mathematics Education Research Grants: Request for Application Number NCER-03-05 (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Education Sciences, 15 January 2003).
3. Rita R. Colwell, "National Science Foundation Director's Statement," in Patrick Gonzales et al., eds., Pursuing Excellence: Comparisons of International Eighth-Grade Mathematics and Science Achievement from a U.S. Perspective, T 995 and 1999 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2000) pp. vii-viii.
4. Albert E. Beaton et al., Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA's Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston: Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy, Boston College, November 1996).
5. National Center for Education Statistics, Reading Literacy in the United States: Findings from the IEA Reading Literacy Study (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1996).
6. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, D.O. National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), p. 9.
7. Because most critiques of U.S. student performance on international assessments emphasize the comparison between their performance and that of students in other industrialized nations, we emphasize such comparisons in this article.
8. The six surveys analyzed included Reading Literacy Study (RLS 1991); Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS 2001); Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 1995); Third International Mathematics and Science Study -Repeat (TIMSS 1999); Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA 2000), a survey of reading, mathematics, and science; and Civic Education Study (CES 1999).
9. These 22 nations were classified as industrialized by the International Monetary Fund Statistics Department in 2002 and as "High Income OECD Members" by the World Bank in 2003 and included Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the U.S.
10. For detailed tables of results for each international survey and for an explanation of our methods of data aggregation across surveys, see Erling E. Boe and Sujie Shin, Is the United States Winning or Losing the International Horse Race in Academic Achievement? Neither - It Is Running with Other Western C7 Nations (Philadelphia: Center for Research and Evaluation in Social Policy, University of Pennsylvania, Research Report No. 2004TIMSS1, 2004).
11. James S. Braswell et al., The Nation's Report Card: Mathematics 2000 (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2001).
12. Eric A. Hanushek, "The Seeds of Growth," Education Next, Fall 2002, pp. 10-17.
13. Boe and Shin, op. cit.
14. Knowledge and Skills for Life: First Results from PISA 2000 (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001).
15. Albert E. Beaton et al., Science Achievement in the Middle School Years: IEA's Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Boston: Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation, and Educational Policy, Boston College, 1996);
16. and Beaton et al., Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years.
17. Colwell, op. cit.
18. The average performance of Japanese students on mathematics and science assessments can be compared with that of students from other C7 nations on TIMSS 1995, TIMSS 1999, and PISA. At the eighth- and 10th-grade levels, Japanese students scored significantly higher than did students from all other C7 nations, except for students from England, who scored at the same level as Japanese students in science on two of these surveys.
19. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2000).
20. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics: 7998 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1999).
21. Trevor Williams and Leslie Jocelyn, "The Distribution of Student Achievement," in Mathematics and Science in the Eighth Grade: Findings from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2000), pp. 49-84. Williams and Jocelyn reported that the TIMSS 1995 science scores of U.S. white students and Japanese students in the eighth grade were not significantly different.
22. Arthur Levine, "My Old Neighborhood," president's report, in Teachers College Annual Report (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, August 2003), available at www.tc.columbia.edu/news/article. htm?id=4459;
23. Gerald W. Bracey, "International Comparisons: An Excuse to Avoid Meaningful Educational Reform," Education Week, 23 January 2002, pp. 30, 32.
24. Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books, 1972);
25. Andrew C. Porter, "Prospects for School Reform and Closing the Achievement Gap," paper presented at the invitational conference of the Educational Testing Service, "Measurement and Research Issues in a New Accountability Era," New York, 3-4 October 2003.
26. Gerald W. Bracey, "The Media's Myth of School Failure," Educational Leadership, vol. 52, 1994, pp. 80-83.
27. The National Education Coals Report: Building a Nation of Learners (Washington, D.C.: National Education Goals Panel, 1991).
28. Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2004 (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc., 2004).
29. Carol H. Weiss, "The Many Meanings of Research Utilization," Public Administration Review, September/October 1979, pp, 426-31. Weiss referred to this practice as the political model of research utilization.
30. Richard M. Jaeger, "Evaluating Policy Inferences Drawn from International Comparisons of Students' Achievement Test Performances," Studies in Educational Evaluation, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 23-39.
31. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics: 1993 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 1993);
32. and National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics: 2001 (Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Education, 2002).
33. Paul Black and J. Myron Atkin, Changing the Subject: Innovations in Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education (London: Routledge, 1996).