U.S. Students Behind Foreign Peers in Math
Officials cite a lack of training for teachers and a failing to engage children at an early age.
By BEN FELLER
AP Education Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Compared with their peers in Europe, Asia and elsewhere, U.S. 15-year-olds are below average when it comes to applying math skills to real-life tasks, new test scores show.

The U.S. students were behind most other countries in overall math literacy and in every specific area tested in 2003, from geometry and algebra to statistics and computation.

The latest scores from the Program for International Student Assessment also show that white U.S. students scored above average, while blacks and Hispanics scored below it. That achievement gap has become the focus of federal education policy.

Education Secretary Rod Paige called the new scores a "blinking warning light" as the Bush administration seeks to raise expectations and expand testing in high school.

The international test is not a measure of grade-level curriculum, but rather a gauge of the skills of 15-year-olds and how well students can apply them to problems they may face in life. It also aims to give the United States an external reality check about how it is doing.

One expert who reviewed the scores, Jack Jennings of the independent Center on Education Policy, said the test is more a measure of how math is taught than what students know. Many U.S. math classes teach analytical or theoretical thinking, not everyday math application.

"You could have American kids knowing more math, it's just that they may test lower than other countries because their learning is not geared toward practical application," he said.

By comparison, scale scores on the United States' own math test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have risen sharply for fourth-graders and eighth-graders since 1990. That test, however, differs in its content and in that it is geared by grade, not by age.

The international assessment measures math, reading and science literacy among 15-year-olds every three years. This time, the main focus was math.

Among 29 industrialized countries, the United States scored below 20 nations and above five in math. The U.S. performance was about the same as Poland, Hungary and Spain.

When compared with all 39 nations that produced scores, the United States was below 23 countries, above 11 and about the same as four others, with Latvia joining the middle group.

"We cannot afford to let the skills of our students fall behind the skills of students in other nations," said Joseph Tucci, chairman of the education task force of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers from major U.S. corporations. The business group is calling for a renewed national commitment to science and math education.

The test is run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based intergovernmental group of industrialized countries. The top math performers included Finland, Korea, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland and New Zealand.

Compared with peers from the OECD countries, even the highest U.S. achievers - those in the top percent of U.S. students - were outperformed.

U.S. scores held steady from 2000 to 2003 in the two math subject areas tested in both years. But both times, about two-thirds of the major industrialized countries did better.

Less clear is why, officials acknowledged.

Deputy Education Secretary Eugene Hickok said at a news conference Monday that contributing factors included too few qualified math teachers and not enough effort to engage students in math at an early age.

Private researchers and the federal government will help reveal some underlying lessons for the United States by doing more analysis of the numbers, said Robert Lerner, commissioner of the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics.

Compared to 2000, there was no measurable change in the reading performance of U.S. students, or in the nation's average standing when compared to other OECD countries.

There was no change in science, either, in terms of the performance of U.S. students. But the U.S. score in science has now fallen below the international average.

On the Net:

Program for International Student Assessment:

The New York Times
National
December 7, 2004

U.S. Students Fare Badly in International Survey of Math Skills
By FLOYD NORRIS

PARIS, Dec. 6 - High school students in Hong Kong, Finland and South Korea do best in mathematics among those in 40 surveyed countries while students in the United States finished in the bottom half,
according to a new international comparison of mathematical skills shown by 15-year-olds.

The United States was also cited as having the poorest outcomes per dollar spent on education. It ranked 28th of 40 countries in math and 18th in reading.

The study, released Monday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group based in Paris representing 30 nations, used tests given to students in 2003 and was intended to
assess relative performance and to try to determine reasons for it.

"The gap between the best and worst performing countries has widened," said Andreas Schleicher, the official who directed the study and wrote the report.

The study compared student performance in 29 of the 30 countries in the organization, which includes all major industrialized nations, and in 11 other countries that chose to participate. Because of insufficient participation in the study, figures for Britain were not reported.

The study devoted less attention to reading than did a previous one in 2000, but it provided rankings that showed relatively little change.

Over all in reading, the top countries were Finland, South Korea, Canada and Australia. The United States finished 18th, higher than nations like Denmark, Germany and Hungary, all of which had students
who performed better in math than American students did.

The study looked not only at the average performance of students, but also at how many from each country were top performers. It separated students into seven groups, ranging from Level 6, the best, to Level 1, which the authors viewed as a minimal level of competence. The remaining students were below the first level, a category that included more than half the students in Brazil, Indonesia and Tunisia.

In the United States, 10 percent of the students were in one of the top two groups, less than half as many as in Canada and a third the total of the leader, Hong Kong, which had 30.7 percent of its students in the top two categories.

Finland had the smallest percentage of underperforming students, with 6.8 percent.

The evaluation asked questions that were intended to test the ability of students to recognize what mathematical calculations were needed, and then to perform them, and to deal with questions that they would confront as citizens. Mr. Schleicher said that students in countries that emphasized theorems and rote learning tended not to do as well as those that emphasized the more practical aspects of mathematics.

The survey also questioned students about their own views of themselves and their work, and found that while good students were more likely to think they were good, countries that did well often had a large number of students who did not feel they were doing well.

In the United States, 36 percent of the students agreed with the statement, "I am just not good at mathematics," while in Hong Kong, 57 percent agreed. In South Korea the figure was 62 percent.

Of the United States students, 72 percent said they got good grades in mathematics, more than in any other country. In Hong Kong, only 25 percent of the students said they got good marks, the lowest of any
country.

The study said that while girls typically did only a little worse than boys on the test, "they consistently report much lower interest in and enjoyment of mathematics" and "much higher levels of helplessness and stress in mathematics classes."

Regarding spending, the study concluded that "while spending on educational institutions is a necessary prerequisite for the provision of high-quality education, spending alone is not sufficient to achieve high levels of outcomes."

It noted that while the Czech Republic spent only one third as much per student as the United States did, it was one of the top 10 performing nations in the study, while the United States performed below the average of the nations surveyed.