Abstract
In 1963-64, the International Evaluation Association undertook the first international study of school mathematics performance. The mean score of United States students at grades 8 and 12 was at or near the bottom of all participating nations. On the second and third international studies undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. students seem to have fared relatively better than before, a trend that seems to have continued into the TIMSS and PISA assessments over the past decade. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, at each announcement of results it is typical to point out how poorly U.S. students fare. In all these eras, results have been used by some to encourage reform in mathematics classrooms and by others to push back reform. This chapter displays and examines summary results from the IEA, TIMSS, and PISA studies to glean conclusions about performance of students in the United States over time and about the operation and interpretation of international comparisons in mathematics education in general.
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Notes
- 1.
Let x be the amount of content in country A. Then .75x is taught in country B and .80(.75)x, or .60x is taught in both countries A and B.
- 2.
When the Department of Education under President George W. Bush initiated the What Works Clearinghouse that required a particular kind of comparison study of any curriculum in order to certify that it was promising, nothing unique to a new curriculum could be tested and be fair to both groups, so essentially nothing new could be tested.
- 3.
In Canada, the curriculum of Ontario was considered so different from the curriculum of British Columbia, and other provinces did not participate, so it was decided that it would be better to analyze the two provinces as if they were separate countries.
- 4.
England and Germany did not meet sampling criteria.
- 5.
From the countries that met the sampling guidelines, the mean scores were: France (557), Switzerland (533), Greece (513), Sweden (512), Canada (509), and Czech Republic (469). For the countries that did not meat the guidelines, the mean scores were: Russian Federation (542), Australia (525), Denmark (522), Cyprus (518), Lithuania (516), Slovenia (475), Italy (474), Germany (465), United States (442), and Austria (436).
- 6.
A reviewer of this paper pointed out that some of the released TIMSS items classified as geometry and calculus would normally be taught in algebra or precalculus courses in the U.S., so that the match between topic and course is not as strong as I have indicated. Since not all items were released and we do not know the performance of students on them, the public cannot further test the claim that the distribution of items does not reflect the U.S. curriculum.
- 7.
For the 2012 administration of PISA, the definition of mathematical literacy was modified to “an individual’s capacity to formulate, employ, and interpret mathematics in a variety of contexts. It includes reasoning mathematically and using mathematical concepts, procedures, facts, and tools to describe, explain, and predict phenomena. It assists individuals to recognise the role that mathematics plays in the world and to make the well-founded judgments and decisions needed by constructive, engaged and reflective citizens.” (OECD 2010a, p. 4).
- 8.
For an independent supporting argument, see Keith Devlin, Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Medium for Learning (A.K. Peters/CRC Press, 2011).
- 9.
In 2010, over a third of the labor force in Singapore was foreign (Yeoh and Lin 2012).
- 10.
At a meeting of about 200 mathematics educators of Chinese ancestry at the International Congress of Mathematical Education in Seoul Korea in August, 2012, one speaker attributed the high performance of Chinese students on international tests to a cultural tradition dating back to Confucius in which individuals are expected to work hard to perform well on tests.
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Usiskin, Z. (2014). Forty-Eight Years of International Comparisons in Mathematics Education from a United States Perspective: What Have We Learned?. In: Li, Y., Lappan, G. (eds) Mathematics Curriculum in School Education. Advances in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7560-2_27
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