Many Visions, Many Aims, One Test.

By the time this column appears, the eighth-grade results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) will have been released. As this is written (mid-November), most people do not expect American students to show lot of progress toward attaining the national education of making America first in the world in math and science by the year 2000. (I outlined semi-serious four-step procedure for reaching this goal in the Sixth Bracey Report in the October Kappan.) For the moment, what we have are analyses of the curricula used in the more than 40 countries that participated in TIMSS. These analyses are titled Many Visions, Many Aims, and there is one volume for math and one for science. They show, in part, that different countries emphasize different topics in both math and science. Different countries also spend different amounts of time on the areas they emphasize. One can seriously wonder, then, how well single test can map onto the curricula of all the countries involved. This poses particular problems in this round of international assessments because those who conducted TIMSS rejected the lowest-common-denominator approach to the assessment. According to the investigators, such an approach would have resulted in assessing only the simplest aspects of subject, especially in mathematics. One can hope that the lack of match between curriculum and test will help down-play the horse race character of TIMSS. In meetings held before the release of the data, the researchers in charge of the study stated their intention to downplay the competitive aspects of the results as much as possible. By the time this column appears, we should know how much success they have had. The U.S. curricula analyzed in these mathematics and science studies have been characterized as a mile wide and an inch deep. This is not unlike what I wrote about U.S. curricula in the April 1993 column, in which I characterized U.S. curricula as overstuffed and undernourished. Compared to the textbooks of most other countries, those of the U.S. offer many more topics per year. Part of this stems, no doubt, from the inclusive strategy adopted by U.S. textbook publishers: the more topics included, the better the chances of selling to wide market. The inclusiveness of textbooks often leaves them without any internal coherence, and so teachers must provide what coherence they can. For their part, many teachers confronted with comprehensive textbooks simply try to teach everything. Although American teachers are faced with more topics each year than are their counterparts in other nations, teachers in other nations are more likely to drop topic sooner than American teachers. Thus, over the full length of schooling, the curricula of America and other nations cover about the same number of topics, but the focus is very different. The overall picture in other nations, as shown by the TIMSS data, is that their curricula introduce topic, stay focused on it for much longer than in the U.S., and then go on to something else. In the U.S., topic is introduced, taught for just short time (often resulting in shallow coverage), and then dropped. But it tends to reappear in another year - often in several other years. Such repeated presentation might be intended to develop the expanding spiral approach to coverage, but, in practice, it often means that students are revisiting the same material many times. Analyses of teaching in the various countries will be forthcoming. One analysis has been conducted already, comparing instruction in the U.S., Germany, and Japan. One of the findings: American teachers teach about 30 hours per week, German teachers teach about 20 hours, and Japanese teachers teach even fewer hours. The time saved from teaching can be used for planning and staff development. The contextual data released by TIMSS leave us with something of an irony: American children might be scoring low on international comparisons of mathematics and science precisely because their teachers are trying to teach them too much! …