The Education Policy Analysis Archives is a peer-reviewed
scholarly journal freely accessible on the internet at
http://epaa.asu.edu.

EPAA has just published Volume 9 Number 34 "Predicting
Variations in Math Performance in Four Countries Using TIMSS"
by Daniel Koretz, Daniel McCaffrey and Thomas Sullivan.

The article can be accessed directly at
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v9n34/

An abstract follows:

Predicting Variations in Mathematics Performance
in Four Countries Using TIMSS

Daniel Koretz
Harvard University

Daniel McCaffrey
RAND Education

Thomas Sullivan
RAND Education

Abstract
Although international comparisons of average student
performance are a staple of U.S. educational debate, little
attention has been paid to cross-national differences in the
variability of performance. It is often assumed that the
performance of U.S. students is unusually variable or that
the distribution of U.S. scores is left-skewed – that is,
that it has an unusually long ‘tail' of low-scoring students
– but data from international studies are rarely brought to
bear on these questions. This study used data from the Third
International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to
compare the variability of performance in the U.S.,
Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan;
investigate how this performance variation is distributed
within and between classrooms; and explore how well
background variables predict performance at both levels.
TIMSS shows that the U.S. is not anomalous in terms of the
amount, distribution, or prediction of performance variation.
Nonetheless, some striking differences appear between
countries that are potentially important for both research
and policy. In the U.S., Germany, Hong Kong, and Australia,
between 42 and 47 percent of score variance was between
classrooms. At the other extreme, Japan and Korea both had
less than 10 percent of score variance between classrooms.
Two-level models (student and classroom) were used to explore
the prediction of performance by social background variables
in four of these countries (the U.S., Hong Kong, France, and
Korea). The final models included only a few variables; TIMSS
lacked some important background variables, such as income,
and other variables were dropped either because of problems
revealed by exploratory data analysis or because of a lack of
significance in the models. In all four countries, these
sparse models predicted most of the between-classroom score
variance (from 59 to 94 percent) but very little of the
within-classroom variance. Korea was the only country in
which the models predicted more than 5 percent of the within-
classroom variance in scores. In the U.S. and Hong Kong, the
models predicted about one-third of the total score variance,
and almost all of this prediction was attributable to
between-classroom differences in background variables. In
Korea, only 19 percent of total score variance was predicted
by the model, and most of this most of this was attributable
to within-classroom variables. Thus, in some instances,
countries differ more in terms of the structure and
prediction of performance variance than in the simple amount
of variance. TIMSS does not provide a clear explanation of
these differences, but this paper suggests hypotheses that
warrant further investigation.
___________________________________________________
Gene V Glass, Editor
Education Policy Analysis Archives
College of Education,
Arizona State University
[log in to unmask]

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