Potential of Global Tests Seen as Unrealized
Scholars urged to scour TIMSS, PISA for policy insights.
In 1958, a group of international scholars met in Hamburg, Germany, and hatched an idea for a huge study to measure student learning around the globe.
They saw the world as one big educational laboratory, with each country acting as its own naturally occurring experiment. If tests could gauge the effects of those experiments, the researchers reasoned, the results might yield a bonanza on how best to teach children.
Nearly 50 years later, the project they had in mind is called the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS—one of the biggest and most influential assessment programs in the world. Yet it still hasn’t delivered on its early promise, say experts who attended a conference here this month aimed at rekindling the original vision...
This article is available to subscribers only.
To keep reading this article and more, subscribe now or purchase this article.
Subscribe to Education Week and Save
Get a full year and save up to 45%!
Viewed
Emailed
Recommended
Commented
- Chief Academic Officer
- Adams 14, Commerce City, CO
- Superintendent
- Pinellas County Schools, Pinellas County, FL
- Project Manager- (Hawaii)
- Pearson Education, HI
- Program Coordinator
- Institute for Educational Advancement, South Pasadena, CA
- Elementary School Teacher
- Success Academy Charter Schools, New York, NY
