US students lag peers in East Asia, Russia in math, science
The average mathematics score for a Year 4 student who reported having many books in the home was 548 points, a score that would earn them a place in the global top eight countries.
As expected Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Chinese Taipei, and Japan feature prominently in the latest results.
Although boys and girls also performed nearly equally in the science tests, Northern Ireland dropped from 21st in 2011 to 27th in 2015.
For both primary and secondary levels in maths and science the top places are taken by Asian countries.
This places Israel 110 points below Singapore, the top performer, and 30 points above the worldwide average of 481.
The National Center for Education Statistics released results on Tuesday from tests administered this past year.
In science, meanwhile, the 5,000 French children who took the test scored 487 compared to the European Union average of 525. They were among over 582,000 students from 64 education systems tested. California’s 8th grade math score in 2011 was 493.
For those who see a quadrennial worldwide assessment of how well students perform in mathematics and science as a global horse race, the latest news is that the heavy favorites have won again. TIMSS Advanced has previously been administered in 1995 and 2008, but the United States did not participate in 2008. The study also revealed a wide gender gap among high school seniors, with boys scoring 46 points higher in physics and 30 points higher in advanced math than girls in 2015.
“The story is much different for advanced twelfth-graders”, Carr said.
“We will continue our efforts to achieve better results”.
At Year 8 level the differences are not so clear.
Stanford University education professor Martin Carnoy warned against making comparisons among countries, as well as drawing conclusions about the reasons behind score changes.
The federal education minister, Simon Birmingham, said the results highlighted the need for “evidence-backed initiatives” to improve results and how funding is best distributed on the basis of need.
“I hope the Timss study of 2019 and those after show the choices made in this presidency were the right ones”, she said referring to the government’s move to restore thousands of teaching posts. The strongest subjects were number, data and chance, earth science and biology. The results showed that since 2011, Australian students have fallen behind in year 4 math by 10 places and have not progressed at all in year 4 science.
Maths teacher Jake Wills, from MathsNZ, said there was a cultural acceptance of not being good at maths.
Pupils from more than 50 countries participated in the latest round of examinations, which were administered previous year to 20,000 fourth-graders and 18,000 eighth-graders in public and private schools across the UAE.
The ACT had a mean score of 544 for year 4 maths, followed by Victoria on 525 and NSW on 519. That school students in Kazakhstan, a country with a per capita GDP one-fifth that of Australia’s, easily outperformed our children has added to the consternation.
In the United States, that amounted to about 10,000 students each in 4th and 8th grades, in roughly 250 schools at each grade.
“We must support this group of high performing learners to improve their achievement scores”, she said.
Kuwait’s low scores were an exception to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations regionally high scores.