In a Phys-L posting of 2/26/98 titled =93topics=94, Barlow Newbolt writes=
:
=93I know the physics establishment is aging, but the latest=20
topics on this list are just plain boring......Yeah, I know American
students didn't do very well on these tests...(TIMSS 12th Grade).... Two
responses are possible--I think the most productive would be to try to
interact with our local school divisions to try to improve things. You
also need to realize that in many countries the college/university
preparatory schools are not attended by many all of the population of
youngsters. The schools are used much more for the selection of the
members of a very small group of students who will go to the
university..... I think we should stop talking about our favorite slide
rules and concentrate on some physics.=94
Regarding Newbolt=92s second response, Pascal D. Forgione of the National
Center for Educational Statistics [see the =93Commissioner=92s Report=94 =
under
=93What were the results of U.S. TIMSS at the twelfth-grade level?=94
at <http://nces.ed.gov/timss/>] has this to say:
=93TIMSS is not an assessment of other country's best students against ou=
r
average students, but of the entire range of students in each country.
While the percentage of young adults who complete secondary school in
the U.S. once was significantly larger than the percentage in other
countries, this is no longer the case. Today, similar proportions of
young people are enrolled at the end of secondary schooling in most of
these countries. Since some nations group their students into different
types of schools with different graduation requirements, TIMSS assessed
students in their last year in all types of schools and programs in all
countries. This last grade ranged from the ninth grade in some
vocational programs through the 14th grade in other programs......
Contrary to myths about U.S. education, our poor performance is not
because our student body is more diverse or because we have a lot of low
scores pulling down the overall U.S. average. Most countries have
students from diverse language and cultural groups. It is
also true that the other countries in this study have a similar range of
performance as the U.S., covering 300 points from the 5th to 95th
percentile. However, the entire distribution of U.S. scores both starts
and ends lower than in most other nations. This means that the average
level of general knowledge in mathematics among students in a majority
of these countries matched that of the top quarter of U.S. students.
Similarly, a student scoring at the 50th percentile in mathematics in
the U.S. would be at about the 25th percentile (or below) in 12 nations.
Therefore, we cannot blame our overall low performance on our bottom
students; the problem is across the board.....
U.S. student performance on the assessments in Advanced Mathematics and
Physics was among the lowest of participating countries and, in both
cases, below the international average. On the Advanced Mathematics
assessment, the U.S. was outperformed by 11 countries, was similar to
four countries, and did not outperform any country. On the Physics
assessment, the U.S. was outperformed by 14 countries, was the same as
one country, and did not outperform any country. On all five content
areas that make up Physics and all three content areas comprising
Advanced Mathematics, the U.S. was below the international average and
was outperformed by a majority of the other countries.=94
So perhaps we should not regard discussion of the latest TIMSS results
as =93boring=94 and having little to do with physics.
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University
24245 Hatteras Street, Woodland Hills, CA 91367
<hake@ix.netcom.com>
<http://carini.physics.indiana.edu/SDI/>