U.S. Students Math Knowledge
A Comparison to their Peers in Other Leading Industrialized Nations
nationalstandardizedtesting,NAEP,
In reviewing the literature on mathematics’ education today in the U.S., the results are disconcerting. In a study done by a group in Paris which ranks the performance of students in the world’s leading industrialized countries every three years, the group reported in December 2004 that U.S. high school students ranked 24 out of a total of 29 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) The Program for Student Assessment , known as the PISA study, as it is called, found that at the secondary school level the gap between U.S. students versus their peers in Europe and Asia is widening despite the fact that U.S. students are performing better at national standardized tests(NAEP). The PISA survey tests fifteen year olds in mathematics, science, and reading proficiency in the first half of 2000 and every three years thereafter.
PISA testing is conducted for the purpose of measuring the understanding of the material not just knowledge of material as well as the ability to apply that knowledge the student acquires in different situations as well. The scores have been standardized to make it easier to compare different students from different countries. 500 is the mean score with a standard deviation of 100. The scores are correlated to future chances of employment as well as earnings by adults in a book called Education at a Glance, OECD Indicators 2005 by the Brookings Institution. More variables and statistical discussions are also discussed on performance differences on the PISA survey among different countries.
The leading students in the surveyed group from twenty nine countries solving real-life world mathematics related problems were students from Finland and South Korea respectively. The PISA survey result is an indicator that measures how students who are finishing their secondary educations will be able to perform in meeting the challenges they will face in their economic future. In comparing the 2003 results to the previous report in 2000, that 2000 survey showed that U.S. students were relatively in the middle of the surveyed group sample, but were behind in mathematics.In the 2003 report, U.S. students performed significantly behind students from Poland, Hungary, and Spain at a much lower mathematics’ proficiency level.
In addition to the world’s wealthiest countries from the leading industrialized nations, there are ten other countries that are not part of the OECD that participated in the survey in 2003. U.S. students performed slightly ahead of Russian students, at about the same level as students from Latvia, but behind students from Latvia and Lichtenstein. A serendipitous discovery found in the survey is that high school male students outperformed almost all female students except in Iceland.
Another interesting opinion from the Collegian Online reports U.S. students show improvement on the National Assessment of Education Progress, NAEP, but that these students perform lower on other tests which shows there could be grade inflation, a poor correlation between NAEP scores and what students actually know, etc. And, this is where the danger and challenge lies for our U.S. students. It would seem the U.S. needs tougher curriculum standards with high quality teaching with a reduced emphasis on just teaching for national standardized tests. These standardized tests that our American system of education places so much emphasis on, for example in Florida, the FCAT. It is needed for graduation from a Florida public high school, yet the SAT is a much more reliable tool to measure future student college success. And, clearly, our U.S. students are not demonstrating that proficiency of knowledge and improvement when compared to their international peers as the PISA survey results have already shown.
References:
(1) Achievement and Affect in OECD Nations, by Trevor Williams, Kitty Williams, David Kastberg, Leslie Jocelyn, published in Oxford Review Of Education, Volume 31, Issue 4 December 2005 ,pages 517-545.
(2) Education at a Glance, OECD Indicators 2005 by the Brookings Institution.
(3) The Collegian Online, Skills test show bleak results, by Jordan Ruud
(4) What a Difference Immigration Policy Makes: A Comparison of PISA Scores in Europe and Traditional Countries of Immigration, by Entorf, Horst, Minoiu, Nicoleta in German Economic Review, Volume 6, Number 3, August 2005, pp. 355-376.
