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2: TIMSS in Perspective: Lessons Learned from IEA's Four Decades of International Mathematics Assessments
- Brookings Institution Press
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International comparative studies of educational achievement had their origins in what is now known as the First International Mathematics Study (FIMS). FIMS was the first venture of the fledgling International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), the organization that pioneered international assessments of student achievement. Although FIMS was conducted principally between 1961 and 1965, its origins may be traced to a plan for a large-scale cross-national study of mathematics presented by Professor Benjamin S. Bloom in 1958 to colleagues in England and Germany.1 The 1950s were a time of great educational development and expansion in many countries, with excellent descriptive studies of countries’ education systems conducted under the auspices of, for example, UNESCO and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. However, the absence of any way of comparing the productivity or outputs of education systems was keenly felt by educational policymakers. Although the methodology for measuring student achievement through national surveys was established in many countries, it had not been implemented in a cross-national study. In FIMS, this methodology was applied for the first time in an international study of student achievement—mathematics in this case. TIMSS in Perspective: Lessons Learned from IEA’s Four Decades of International Mathematics Assessments ina v. s. mullis and michael o. martin 2 9 10 ina v. s. mullis and michael o. martin The First International Mathematics Assessments The overall aim of the FIMS researchers was to use psychometric techniques to compare outcomes of different education systems. An underlying idea was that the world could be considered as an education laboratory, with each national education system an instance of a natural experiment in which national education policies and practices are treated as inputs and student attitudes and achievement are treated as outputs. Education was considered as part of a larger sociopolitical-philosophical system in which rapid change was taking place, and the most fruitful comparisons were considered to be those that took account of how education responded to changes in the society. One aim, therefore, was to study how such changes influenced mathematics teaching and learning. The project created hypotheses and systematically addressed questions in three major areas: school organization, selection, and differentiation; the curriculum and methods of instruction; and the sociological, technological, and economic characteristics of families, schools, and societies. Mathematics was chosen as the subject of the first international study of student achievement for several reasons. First was the importance of the subject itself. Countries were concerned with improving science and technology, and these are based in a fundamental way on the learning of mathematics. Second, was the question of feasibility. Evidence from studies of the mathematics curriculum and the teaching of mathematics suggested that countries had similar curricula and approaches to teaching, and so there was a good chance that a mathematics test could be constructed that would be an acceptable match to countries’ curricula. Furthermore, translation into the languages of instruction of participating countries was expected to be less problematic for mathematics than for other subjects because of the widespread acceptance of mathematical symbols and notation. FIMS was conducted in twelve countries, with the results published in two volumes in 1967.2 These volumes summarize a wide range of findings related to the structure and organization of the educational systems; the mathematics curriculum and how it is taught; the mathematics teaching force and how it is educated and trained; and the attitudes, home background, and, most important , the mathematics achievement of students in the target populations. The target populations for the study were the grade in each country with most 13-year-old students and those students at the end of secondary education who had taken advanced courses in mathematics. FIMS was important not only for the immense contribution it made in its own right to the comparative study of mathematics achievement, but also because of its pioneering role in establishing without doubt the feasibility of comparative study of student achievement [18.191.5.239] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 15:05 GMT) across different countries with different languages and cultures. FIMS showed for the first time that international studies could produce data on educational contexts and student achievement (at least in mathematics) that could form the basis of policy research aimed at improving education around the world. The Second International Mathematics Study By the middle of the 1970s, IEA researchers had begun to think that the time had come for a second international study of mathematics (SIMS), one that would build on...