codyg1985’s Think Tank

Apparently, the United States, along with Finland, Germany, and Australia, has dropped out of an international study to be conducted next year that is designed to compare the math and science scores of high school students from around the world. When the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) was last conducted in 2003, the United States scored as follows:

• 12th place in average mathematics scale scores of fourth-grade students (first place - Singapore)
• 6th place in average science scale scores of fourth-grade students (first place - Singapore)
• 15th place in average mathematics scale scores of eighth-grade students (first place - Singapore)
• 9th place in average science scale scores of eighth-grade students (first place - Singapore)

Would it have been a good idea to withdraw from this study? The original article cites that without this study, there is no way to gauge how the students are doing:

‘It’s pennywise and pound foolish,” says Ewing. “It is crucial that we know what our most talented students can do and how we are serving them. I can’t think of anything more important that having data on how you are training your future mathematicians and scientists.”

ACT and SAT scores can provide enough data to develop trends which can be further studied. It is true that this data won’t provide an international comparison to go by, but the TIMSS study does not provide a complete comparison for all countries. Moreover, if more countries are withdrawing from the study, the study itself becomes less valuable as a tool to compare the United States to the rest of the world.

Even if this study could compare the math and science scores of American students with those of the rest of the developed world, the test that would be administered as part of the study would be a long one (emphasis added):

Patsy Wang-Iverson, who works for the Gabriella and Paul Rosenbaum Foundation in Stockton, N.J., a nonprofit organization that supports math advancement, has been approaching other foundations for money to sponsor the two-and-half-hour test.

This test would put students under a large amount of stress, and for no good reason. It is bad enough that students have to take standardized tests from the moment they enter the public school system, but what’s worse is that many of these tests do not count towards anything important. In the state of Alabama, for example, students in grades 3 through 8 must take the Stanford Achievement Test each year to measure each school’s achievement. In addition, students must also take the Alabama Direct Assessment of Writing in grades 5, 7, and 10. Even more, students must also take the Alabama High School Graduation Exam (AHSGE) in grade 10 in order to graduate high school. This list does not include the various college entrance exams and tests that a student must take in order to get into college.

This TIMSS test would be yet another standardized test that students would have to stress over and worry about. Teachers and administrators would have to modify their lesson plans to accommodate this test. Less time would be available for students to learn inside the classroom as more time would be needed to take all of these standardized tests. The lack of time available in the classroom to learn the skills that would be tested would show in not only the TIMSS test, but also other exams which are much more important to a student’s academic future.

With this added test, students may not perform as well. Since this test would not pose a real benefit to the students (unless schools implemented creative “bribes” such as final exam exemptions, parties, etc.), the students would not be motivated to perform to the best of their ability. With other tests looming later in the year, or this test coming off the heals of previous test, it is also likely that students would be too mentally taxed to perform 100% on this test anyway.

My solution: why not just use data that everyone already has access to? Testing kids until they are blue in the face will not help anything.