Surviving TIMSS: Or, Everything You Blissfully Forgot About International Comparisons.

Mr. Baker answers a number of frequently asked questions about U.S. performance on past international studies, about the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of studies, and about what the Third Mathematics and Science Study will ultimately be able to tell us when the dust has settled. Just when you thought that you would never have to endure yet another reference to substandard performance by U.S. students on some international study of achievement, just when you thought you could safely throw out those descriptions of schooling in Japan and other Asian countries, the Third Mathematics and Science Study has begun to roll out its results. Commonly referred to as TIMSS, this immense study of math and science achievement, which sampled thousands of fourth-, eighth-, and 12th-graders in some 41 countries, made its debut with the eighth-grade results in November 1996. With the national elections just over, the media - hungry for new national news - fell on the early data voraciously. The fourth-grade results were released last summer, with the 12th-grade findings to follow early in 1998. The U.S. government spent some $30 million on our participation and on the international infrastructure for the study, without which TIMSS never would have happened. Because of the size, scope, and cost of TIMSS, the U.S. Department of Education and the National Science Foundation (who were the U.S. co-funders) have vowed to disseminate the basic TIMSS findings widely, along with mountains of information from several innovative and exotic supporting studies, such as case studies of individual countries and extensive videotaping of instruction in scores of classrooms in the U.S., Japan, and Germany. As each successive wave of results becomes available, the media cover it intensively. Indeed, in the coming year, it will be downright hard for anyone with even a passing interest in education to escape news stories about TIMSS results. So far the results indicate that American students are a good way away from achieving our national goal number 5 - to be first in the world in math and science achievement by the year 2000. Although our fourth-grade results (particularly in science) were surprisingly stronger than our eighth-grade results, our overall performance does not put us in contention for the top spot. American eighth-graders in 1996 placed about where they did in the early 1980s in the Second Math and Science Studies (SIMS and SISS respectively), with national means in math and science locating us within the second tier of the more than two dozen countries that took part in those earlier assessments. You can count on this lackluster showing in the TIMSS results to renew the old debate - you know, the one about a of in American education. As a way to ease back into that sometimes arcane debate and help us through the inevitable media hype that awaits us, I have briefly answered a number of frequently asked questions about U.S. performance on past international studies, about the strengths and weaknesses of these kinds of studies, and about what TIMSS will ultimately be able to tell us when the dust has settled. 1. What was that famous sound bite that got the whole debate started, and was it really true? A Nation at Risk, the defining document that sounded the alarm about a national crisis of education, used technical analyses of existing international achievement studies to make its case? You will recall that that 1983 report begins with the words: Our nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur - other [nations] are matching and surpassing our educational attainments.(2) Several pages later, the statement that became the main cross-national sound bite for the next 10 years regarding the crisis in education quality rears its head: International comparisons of student achievement . …