Classroom Compass
Volume 3 Number 3
Spring 1997

The TIMSS: Looking at Classrooms around the World

U.S. Students and TIMSS What Are We Teaching? How Are We Teaching? Other Influences More to Come

The TIMSS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study) report, released November 1996, presented the first results from an ambitious cross-national assessment of achievement in mathematics and science education. Students in 41 countries took part in the achievement test. This first report of the lower secondary level population (13-year-old students) will be followed in 1997 by findings on student achievement at fourth grade, and at the end of high school.

TIMSS has many parts. The research design includes assessments, questionnaires, curriculum analyses, videotapes of classroom instruction, and case studies of policy topics. The variety of different and complementary research methods accumulate data, stories, pictures, and analyses that have never been assembled together before. All countries in the study are included in the student assessments, questionnaires, and curriculum analyses. Approximately half of the countries also participated in an additional series of hands-on mathematics and science tasks.

To understand the context that contributes to achievement, TIMSS researchers in Germany, Japan, and the United States collaborated to complete videotapes of instruction in eighth-grade mathematics classrooms. Teams of bilingual researchers observed classrooms and interviewed education authorities, principals, teachers, students, and parents for three months in each of the three countries. Topics studied included education standards, methods of dealing with individual differences, the lives and working conditions of teachers, and the role of school in adolescents' lives. Finally, individual states and districts in the United States were offered the opportunity to participate in TIMSS so they could see how their students compare to those of countries throughout the world.

Despite efforts by TIMSS designers to avoid an international horse race, comparisons of country rankings have been widely discussed in the press, among policy makers, and among researchers. Simply finding out that the students of one nation perform highest on a set of items is not meaningful if performance cannot be systematically linked to some characteristic of a particular educational system. How we interpret and use the results of TIMSS is our challenge. Educators who support educational reform in mathematics and science may glimpse some especially relevant teaching strategies, policies that support curriculum, professional support systems, and student habits that should influence our thinking about effective education. While it may be early to draw conclusions from the information, effective instruction and a coherent curriculum appear to be the strongest contributors to student performance.

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U.S. Students and TIMSS

A half million students in 41 countries were examined at three different stages of schooling: midway through elementary school, midway through lower secondary school, and at the end of upper secondary school. Eighth-grade students from the United States placed at about the midway point in mathematics rankings (20 countries ranked significantly higher) and somewhat above midway in science (nine countries ranked significantly higher). The 15,000 participating schools, their curricula, and the educational policies of the countries in the study varied widely. The First in the World Consortium, a group of 20 school districts from Chicago's North Shore, took the TIMSS assessment test with results that placed their students among the highest achieving nations in the world. The Consortium schools credit their success to four areas: the content and rigor of their curriculum, the quality of their instruction, the preparation of their teaching staff, and high performance expectations for their students. If some U. S. schools are performing at the high end of the ranking, however, we can conclude that other schools are faring poorly in their attempts to teach mathematics and science. Several parts of the TIMSS survey examined factors that contribute to students' performance.

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What Are We Teaching?

A major component of TIMSS was an extensive, multinational curriculum analysis that yielded data on the mathematics and science curricula of approximately 50 nations. The researchers analyzed mathematics and science textbooks and curriculum guides and used expert data on how topics are introduced, to what extent a topic is covered, and individual content focus in each country. Curricula vary extensively across the world at any given grade level, and caution is needed when interpreting international rankings. The United States is one of nine countries in the study that does not have a centrally coordinated curriculum. (Australia, Denmark, Hungary, Iceland, Latvia, Netherlands, Russian Federation, and Scotland are the others.) Most local school districts in the United States design their own curriculum or standards, usually within broad guidelines issued by each state. Attempting to cover the variety of topics in these diverse curricula, textbooks usually contain much more material than a teacher can effectively teach in a year.

Splintered Vision, a companion study to the TIMSS, bluntly critiques science and mathematics curricula in the United States. The authors note that there is "no single coherent vision of how to educate today's children...nor is there a single, commonly accepted place to turn for such visions."In their analysis of 491 curriculum guides and 628 textbooks, the authors report that U. S. mathematics curricula cover more topics than those in other countries. Topics that are added in grades one and two are repeated until grade seven, and, on the average, topics remain in the U. S. curriculum longer than they do in other countries. As for the reformed classroom, the authors note, "Many reform recommendations simply add to the existing topics (or are implemented by adding to existing content), thereby exacerbating the existing lack of curricular focus."

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How Are We Teaching?

The TIMSS videos of eighth-grade mathematics classrooms in Germany (100 classrooms), Japan (50 classrooms), and the United States (81 classrooms) provided glimpses of cultural differences in lesson goals and teaching strategies. A preliminary analysis of the tapes revealed that Japanese teachers, on average, came closer to implementing the spirit of ideas advanced by U. S. reformers than did U. S. teachers.

In the United States and Germany, mathematics teachers tended to present instruction followed by application; the students observed a solution method, then practiced similar examples on their own. The lesson's goal was to solve problems. In Japanese classrooms, the problems were presented and the students spent some time reflecting on them and sharing solutions they generated. Developing an explicit understanding of the underlying mathematical concepts was the goal in those lessons. The videotapes illustrated other differences. The U. S. lessons were more frequently interrupted (both from outside the classroom and from within) than were the Japanese. Within the same lesson the U. S. lessons contained significantly more topics than did the Japanese. Japanese teachers were more likely to explicitly link different parts of the lesson.

Viewing the lessons by international curriculum standards, the average eighth-grade U. S. lesson dealt with mathematics at a seventh-grade level, the Japanese presented ninth-grade level content, and the German classroom presented content at an eighth-grade level. An independent group of U. S. college mathematics teachers examined the quality of the videotaped lessons' content, basing their evaluations on detailed written summaries that disguised countries of origin. The teachers rated 30 percent of the Japanese lessons as having high content quality, as compared to 23 percent of the German lessons and none of the U. S. lessons. On the other hand, they rated 87 percent of the U. S. lessons as having low content quality.

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Other Influences

Surely other factors beyond the curriculum and teaching strategies influence student learning. The TIMSS case studies and questionnaires also examined such variables as time spent in class, levels of teacher preparation, student recreational habits, levels of homework, and the diversity of the student populations. The preliminary findings seem to indicate that in many areas the U. S. culture, schools, teachers, students are not appreciably different from the German and Japanese. For example,

• In Germany, Japan, and the United States 13-year old students seem to spend similar amounts of time with friends engaged in recreational activities, including time spent watching television.
• Severe discipline problems or threats to personal safety are not widespread in or unique to the United States. An approximately equal, and small, number of U. S. and German teachers reported feeling that threats to themselves or their students' safety limited their teaching effectiveness. The Japanese chose not to include any questions relating to problems of discipline or morale.
• U. S. and German teachers assign more homework and spend more time discussing it than do teachers in Japan. When asked about the amount of homework they assign, the most common response of U. S. and German mathematics teachers was that they gave about thirty minutes or less, three or more times a week. The Japanese teachers typically assigned the same amount, but once or twice a week.
• Small class size does not seem to correlate with high achievement in an international context.
• Teachers in the United States and Germany teach more classes a week than do Japanese teachers. In addition, Japanese teachers have more opportunities to learn from each other and share questions about teaching-related issues in formal and informal settings.

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More to Come

Analysis of the TIMSS data will continue to emerge. The achievement results of fourth-grade students will be released in the summer of 1997 and that for secondary school students in winter 1997-98. Additional reports will include state-by-state and international comparisons, case studies examining U. S., German, and Japanese educational standards; adolescent life and teachers' working lives; and the complete results of the videotape analysis of eighth-grade mathematics classrooms. These additional studies should sharpen the focus of the emerging picture of mathematics and science learning around the world.