Hilarious excuse why US students compare so poorly with foreigners

Parents Forum
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<p>I may be in the minority here, but I do think (1) that the overall point of the article is a good one and (2) that the question is very poorly worded.</p>

<p>The article tries to point out that the results of such a comparative test may not be as helpful in terms of assessment of strength of curriculum, teaching etc. as you may think. In other words, just because country X may have higher results than country Y on this test, it does not force one to conclude that country X has better math instruction, curriculum etc. than country Y. They try to give several reaons why the difference may not be due to curriculum etc. but to other factors, such as the sample etc. </p>

<p>I do not agree with all their arguments, but I suspect that not all biasing influences are controlled for, as the authors suggest. Therefore, I would agree with the authors that such a comparative test may not be as helpful as we would like it to be as an assessment of math instruction in country X. </p>

<p>With regards to the question itself, note that we don’t know what the students were doing wrong. Were they not able to approach the problem at all? Could they not add? </p>

<p>I am curious as to how many students answered (B) 52–the answer without the additional 25 added for the bow. It does take some math knowledge and reasoning here to get to at least this answer. If most students got this answer, it would tell me more than simply that most students got the answer wrong. I would then want to know why they didn’t add the additional 25.</p>

<p>If you look at the question, when you get to “…and have 25 cm left to tie a bow” you could interpret that part as “so that there is 25 cm left to tie a bow.” At least, that it what my initial read was. In this case, you may think that the point is to find out how much is needed simply to cover the box so you have enough left over for the ribbon. Here, the thinking process may be (1) get the least amount to cover the box so (2) there is enough left over for the bow, which requires 25cm. You may then simply find enough to cover the box.</p>

<p>Of course, I then asked myself why did they state 25cm, since that number didn’t seem to be involved in the calculation. Perhaps this was distractor information? I did then reread the question. But I had the luxury of not being involved in a test etc., so I was able to reason it out in a different way. </p>

<p>The question could be made a bit clearer, as in 'How much ribbon is needed for both the box and the bow?" I am curious if it was worded this way, would scores improve?</p>

<p>Now here is a valid point that could be made here to explain the differences between US and other countries. Suppose that the type of interpretation with ‘and’ as noted above is not available in other languages, or that the question was worded in such a way in that language that the interpretation that I first got was simply not available. It may be that this question is more difficult for US students because it leads to more than one interpretation, with some students (like me) first reading it one way, then trying to figure out the point of the 25cm, then wondering if there was something they were missing etc. Students in other countries may not have been faced with such a distractor interpretation, leading to more accurate scores. </p>

<p>In fact, this very point is made in the article itself, though not with regards to this question. </p>

<p>You may find my reasoning here ‘a stretch’ or ‘hilarious’ etc. But I did interpret the question as I did, and I did run into trouble because of this initial interpretation. I wonder how many of the US students taking the test did run into this problem. I also wonder how many foreign students had this problem of interpretation. I guess this is the overall point of the article.</p>

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<p>The wording seems pretty clear to me. The ribbon needs to go around the box as stated AND there needs to be 25 cm left for a bow. I am not sure what’s confusing about that.</p>

<p>The idea that cm would confuse kids is the point in the article that bugs the heck out of me. I guess that explains why some kids don’t do well in chem, eh? They aren’t familiar with the measurements. Blah.</p>

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<p>From the second link in Jiffsmom’s post, here is Kramer’s conclusion:</p>

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<p>Unfortunately, the movement is still very much about dismissing the validity of international comparisons and finding more excuses about the abysmal performance of the United States in both the higher quartiles and the lowest ones.</p>

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<p>Obviously, while one is entitled to a favorable opinion about the overall contents of the article, I don’t see how the question could be seen as poorly worded. The (corrected) question was: </p>

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<p>The problem is simple: Stu needs a ribbon to wrap a box **AND ** have 25 centimeters left to tie a bow. How long a piece of ribbon does he need?</p>

<p>This is absolutely the same as a question stating: “'How much ribbon is needed for both the box and the bow?”</p>

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<p>The problem is that you can massively differ in how the box is tied. I could even tie the bow across the diagonal of the base.</p>

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<p>The diagram showed how the box was tied. Unfortunately, xiggi couldn’t post the diagram here, but he verbally described it in a way that was unambiguous to me. </p>

<p>International subject matter assessments such as these involve a process of each participating country submitting proposed questions to an international question-selecting committee. If there was anything SERIOUSLY wrong with the question, it would be rejected by the representatives of several countries. (I am told that many questions submitted by the United States to such committees are considered laughably easy.) A whole test battery consisting of many questions like this ends up being a pretty good gauge of how much a student knows about what is indisputably general and important about mathematics, science, or whatever. If students in Singapore (for example) </p>

<p><a href=“Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) - Percentage of 4th-grade students reaching the TIMSS international benchmarks in mathematics, by education system: 2011”>Average mathematics scale scores of fourth-grade students, by country: 2003; </p>

<p>outscore students in the United States on such a test, it is a sign that students in Singapore have learned more math by the age at which the students in both countries take the test. </p>

<p>I use the Singapore Primary Mathematics series materials </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.singaporemath.com/Pri_Mathematics_3rd_Ed_s/42.htm[/url]”>http://www.singaporemath.com/Pri_Mathematics_3rd_Ed_s/42.htm&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>and have had opportunity to review most of the major brands of mathematics textbooks used in the United States, and I have no doubt at all that the countries that are scoring higher on such international tests are scoring higher because they provide better instruction, on average, in the subjects in which they score high. The United States has the resources but so far not the will to do as well.</p>

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<p>Shouldn’t the question always contain all the verbal information required to solve the problem? What if you’re blind and you’re taking the test under accommodations (e.g. having the test read out to you, or you’re taking it in Braille), etc.?</p>

<p>To me, the diagram should merely help to visualise the problem better.</p>

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<p>The problem is actually the old conflict between Federalism and States’ Rights and where the optimum lies, at least for education. (More autonomy can be a good thing for education, but it can also be a bad thing.)</p>

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<p>My point is that when I read the question the first time, I had an interpretation something along the lines of ‘How much ribbon is needed to cover that box so that there is 25cm left over for the bow’. I would not have initially considered the 25cm to be part of the total. It is as though I interpreted the question as asking the least amount of ribbon Stu needs to cut to cover the box to ensure that there is enough for the bow, which happens to be 25cm.</p>

<p>This (incorrect) interpretation made the problem more difficult for me, because then I realized that the question seemed to make no sense, especially given that I didn’t see how the 25cm was to be used. So I had to relook and reconsider.</p>

<p>You may not see how I got there, or you may think that I shouldn’t have been able to interpret it that way. But the point is that I did. And if I made this mistake, how many others did? Perhaps this is particular to me. Perhaps not. </p>

<p>But let us entertain, for a minute, that there is a significant amount of students taking the test who had the kind of trouble that I did. And this additional trouble with interpretation could lead to fewer correct responses.</p>

<p>Also, as I stated, suppose that in other languages, the question didn’t lead to the problem that I encountered. Thus, these students would do better.
This is one of the points of the article.</p>

<p>I am not making an ‘excuse’ (and I don’t think that the article is making ‘excuses’). What I am trying to show is that there are several reasons why students may have had trouble with the question. We don’t really know why US students overall had trouble compared to students in other countries. </p>

<p>To simply say that the results of this test show that there is a decline in the type of instruction in the US compared to other countries, or lower academic standards in the US, is too quick and too simplistic. </p>

<p>Yes, there could be a lower academic standards in the US, which cause poorer performance compared to other countries. Or there could be other reasons. Do the results show the cause? I don’t think so.</p>

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<p>That’s not a strict requirement for math tests anywhere in the world. Mathematical texts for blind people can include diagrams with raised lines that are perceived by touch.</p>

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<p>Hi, skrlvr, </p>

<p>What evidence WOULD convince you that one student has more math ability than another?</p>

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<p>If you realise why braille was invented (the predecessor was raised letters) you’d realise that’s not really a good solution because you can miss a lot of lines and they can be cumbersome. There’s a limited resolution, and if you have dozens of problems all with raised lines, the paper will get fragile and it will tear very easily. Furthermore, there’s only a limited resolution you can portray.</p>

<p>Furthermore blind people would relate less to 2D->3D depth perception (a linear transformation in that sense). If I draw a 3D box with 2D lines, my eyes are doing the conversion for me. If you’re feeling the lines on 2D paper … well – it might not make any spatial sense, especially since blind people feel the world by the other four senses, including a heavy use of the sense of the touch of 3D objects. If you’re a seeing person who feels those lines and can picture the box, good for you – but that’s because you’re simply converting what you usually do with your eyes to your hands. For someone who has been born blind, things are different.</p>

<p>You really can’t convert the picture to a form of braille – it’s just not feasible. The reason why braille uses dots it’s because they’re easy to feel and it corresponds to a systematic pattern – e.g. you can be sure that O is not part of a larger P.</p>

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<p>Have you read about Pontryagin? He was a blind mathematician. </p>

<p><a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Semenovich_Pontryagin[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Semenovich_Pontryagin&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>He still appealed to visual intuition a lot in his writings about mathematics. </p>

<p>Anyway, this point is a distraction from the main point of the thread. If students from one country can figure out the question, as the question is written, and students from another country cannot, the students who can figure it out are still smarter as a practical matter.</p>

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<p>I always wondered about timms. Aren’t most of the kids in Europ/Japan who don’t have the academic skills steered into internships/job training and off the college bound track and they never take this test? While is the US we still test all students for the comparision.</p>

<p>I think our top students perform as well as the rest of the world. It is just the lower half in the US is either being left behind or should be counseled into more trade/skill training and out of a college prep track in HS earlier.</p>

<p>I always wondered if this has any merit.</p>

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<p>Tokenadult: That’s because his visual intuition relied on the 14 years when he did see.

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<p>I am a Singaporean, not an American citizen – many of my countrymen might have similar confusion.</p>

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<p>Nope. That is not the case at all. One of the tenets of the test is that samples are representative of ALL students. Don’t take my word for it … Here’s a report by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) of the United States.</p>

<p><a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/naep_timss_pisa_comp.pdf[/url]”>http://nces.ed.gov/timss/pdf/naep_timss_pisa_comp.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>The fact that our top students perform as well as the AVERAGE of rest of the world is not really relevant. Unfortunately, even the comparison with our top students with the top students of other countries is … not flattering. In addition to the mathematical evidence available at the OECD, one might remember John Stossel’s comparison between a top school in New Jersey and a school in Belgium. Voices were heard about it being an unfair comparison. I tend to agree … the belgian school was a school specializing in the education of student-athletes. That did not stop the Belgian kids to clean our clock.</p>

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<p>Galoisien, did you click on the link provided in the OP? You need to “see” the question to evaluate it properly. </p>

<p>Regarding other tests such as the PISA test or the SAT tests in the US, one needs to look at the entire body of a test to evaluate how different questions contribute to the overall score.</p>

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<p>Not by fourth grade. Not by eighth grade either in the countries most conspicuously successful on these tests. There has actually been criticism </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.wgquirk.com/timss.html[/url]”>http://www.wgquirk.com/timss.html&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>of United States participation in the test suggesting that the United States has “cherry picked” students more for such tests than other countries.</p>

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<p>Actually the top quartile of students in the United States performs at about the median level of several countries in east or southeast Asia. </p>

<p><a href=“http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/t03cdrpt_chapter2.pdf[/url]”>http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/t03cdrpt_chapter2.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>(exhibit 2.1) </p>

<p>The tiny minority of tip-top students in the United States do very well indeed, and that tiny minority includes a lot of children of first-generation immigrants whose parents learned math in countries outside the United States, and at least students who themselves were first-generation immigrants who received school instruction abroad before arriving in the United States.</p>

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<p>This is for the 2003 PISA that tests 15 years old. </p>

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Domain: Mathematics<br>
Pisa 2003   5th Percentile  Mean    95th Percentile</p>

<p>Belgium (Flemish)   360.15  553.39  706.76
Hong Kong - China   373.83  550.38  699.52
Korea                    387.83 542.23  690.23
Japan                    360.91 534.14  690.19
Netherlands        385.18   537.82  683.49
Finland                  406.43 544.29  680.17</p>

<p>OECD Average           331.72   500.00  660.20</p>

<p>USA                  322.96 482.89  637.97

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