American Students’ Performance from a Global Perspective

Posted by Isra Anwar

June 15, 2014

To examine the performance of American schoolchildren in the international context, we use scores from the 2006 administration of PISA, in which 57 countries participated, and the 2007 administration of the 4th grade TIMSS, which involved 36 countries (Gonzales et al. 2009; OECD 2007). In comparing countries’ educational outcomes, it is useful to consider test scores in the context of each country’s level of economic development (e.g., based on per capita GDP in the same year). If the United States is performing at mediocre levels despite considerable economic resources, the implication is that the government is either investing less than other countries’ governments in math and science education (at least as measured by these tests) or using its resources less effectively.

Figure 1

To measure economic resources across countries in comparable terms, we use Penn World Table Version 6.3, which adjusts for differences across countries in the goods and services that can be bought with one unit of currency (Heston et al. 2009). The results for 4th graders’ TIMSS scores in math and science are shown in Figure 1. Each dot represents a country or place, with the United States and several other notable countries identified. In addition to Hong Kong and Singapore, other, unlabelled countries with higher scores than those of the United States (i.e., with dots above the line) are Japan, England, and the Russian Federation. In each figure, we present a flexible but smooth regression line that best describes the relationship between the TIMSS scores and GDP. For both math and science, the line of best fit shows that, at lower levels of per capita GDP, increasing financial resources are associated with sharp increases in test scores, but the subsequent flattening out of the line shows that further increases in resources lead to little additional gain in scores.

The United States falls just below the line in math and just above it in science, performing about as expected given its economic prosperity. But Hong Kong and Singapore, whose GDP per capita is similar to that of the United States, are above the line in both subjects, exceeding the performance of American youth. The TIMSS results for 8th graders indicate that students in the United States perform slightly worse than expected, given their financial resources, although the difference is larger in math.

Figure 2
Results from PISA in 2006, shown in Figure 2, are somewhat less favorable for US students: they fall below the line of best fit in both math and science, although the disparity is greater in math. The top spots went to Taiwan (designated Chinese Taipei in the PISA data) in math and Finland in science. Other countries whose students outperformed their US peers on this test are Japan, Australia, and Hungary.

Thus the pattern that emerges from these figures is one of comparatively mediocre performance by American students despite access to considerable economic resources.

American Science Education from a Historical Perspective

Concern about US students’ rather poor performance in math and science relative to that of youth in selected other countries must be distinguished from the concern that American youth may not be performing as well as in the past. In this section, we change the comparison group for contemporary American schoolchildren to previous cohorts of Americans. We find little evidence that US math and science education is worse today than in past decades. If anything, it may be better, especially in math.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has tracked trends in US students’ knowledge of various academic subjects since the 1970s. From 1973 to 2008, the average math scores of both 9- and 13-year-old students increased significantly, while those of 17-year-olds remained flat. Furthermore, gains have been larger for African American and Hispanic students than for white students during this period, reducing the racial gap in math achievement (NCES 2009).

No assessment of the trend in US students’ average achievement in math is, however, fully informative about trends in the potential pool of scientists, who are disproportionately drawn from the top part of the academic distribution. Has there been a decrease in the performance of American students with the highest levels of academic achievement in science-related subjects? Again, this does not appear to be the case. The math scores of students at the 90th percentile rose significantly between 1978 and 2008 for 9- and 13-year-olds, while remaining flat for 17-year-olds (NCES 2009).

Furthermore, among 17-year-olds, in 2008 19 percent had taken precalculus or calculus, compared with only 6 percent in 1978 (NCES 2009). And the number of students both taking and passing Advanced Placement (AP) exams in math and science subjects rose rapidly between 1997 and 2008 (NSB 2010, Chapter 1, p. 1-37).

In summary, the data show that today’s American schoolchildren are better prepared than their counterparts of three decades ago to enter advanced training in scientific fields.

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