More countries are edging ahead of the United States in math and science achievement, according to the latest results from an international test of 4th and 8th graders in the subjects.
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, reports results from 4th graders across 63 education systems, and 8th graders across 45 education systems, every four years. It also collects information about curriculum, school technology use, teacher preparation, and other measures of school context.
The 2023 administration, the first since the COVID pandemic, shows mixed outcomes across the world. While some countries experienced growth in student achievement or held steady, others saw a decline—including the United States.
American students still score above the international average on TIMSS, but they rank below children in the highest-performing nations, including Japan, Singapore, and Korea.
Now, other countries that previously lagged behind the United States—such as Poland, Sweden, and Australia—have leapfrogged the country in some subjects and grade levels.
In math, American 4th graders’ scores fell 18 points after 2019, while 8th graders’ scores fell by 27 points—the biggest drop since the United States began participating in the test in 1995.
Students’ science scores in 2023 are not measurably different from those of 2019, though 4th graders’ scores are lower now than they were during the first TIMSS administration.
In both subjects, gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students are widening.
These are “sharp, steep declines,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which manages TIMSS in the United States, in a call with reporters on Tuesday. (The study is a project of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in the Netherlands.)
“Progress in prior years has been erased,” Carr said.
The 2023 TIMSS administration is the latest in a series of national and international tests that have shown widespread declines in student achievement in the years following the pandemic.
But drops across subjects, along with a widening chasm between stronger and weaker students in the United States, are trends that predate the last few years, said Carr.
“This is a particularly troubling way that the U.S. is an outlier compared to other countries,” Carr said, referencing the growing gaps. Between 2011 and 2019, the United States was the only country where score gaps between these two poles grew across the board, in both grade levels and subjects, she said.
U.S. scores show widening achievement gaps
TIMSS covers a wide swath of math and science content across the two grades.
In math, 4th graders are assessed on their number skills—knowledge of whole numbers, expressions and simple equations, and fractions and decimals—as well as measurement, geometry, and reading and interpreting data. The 8th grade test covers similar subjects at more advanced levels, and incorporates algebra—a subject many U.S. students don’t take until high school.
Eighth grade science covers biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science. Fourth graders are tested on earth science, life science, and physical science.
The TIMSS scale runs from 0 to 1,000 points, with cutoffs at 400 for a “low” score, 475 for “intermediate,” 550 for “high,” and 625 for “advanced.”
Countries that historically do well on the test are “different from the U.S. on a number of dimensions,” said Carr. They’re smaller, with more centralized education systems, and some have aligned their curriculum with TIMSS frameworks.
While that doesn’t “excuse” U.S. results, Carr said, understanding these differences can provide context.
American 4th graders with the lowest achievement scores, those at the 10th percentile of test-takers, saw their scores drop dramatically between 2019 and 2023: 37 points in math and 22 points in science.
But 4th graders at the 90th percentile didn’t show any statistically significant difference in their scores in either subject.
The pattern was different for 8th graders: Both high- and low-performing students lost ground in math. Scores at neither end of the distribution changed measurably in science.
The test also shows more American students failing to meet even the lowest level of achievement in math.
These results are in line with other large-scale evaluations of U.S. students’ math ability. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that, post-pandemic, 38 percent of 8th graders couldn’t meet the test’s lowest benchmark. In practice, that means that many of these students have trouble using division, for example, or plotting a point on a number line.
The sobering results on that test showed that gains U.S. students made in math since the 1990s were all but wiped out by the pandemic, though they had begun to decline before 2020.
Experts have debated why, and though there’s little consensus on the reasons, some of the commonly cited ones include the rise of smartphones, changes in standards in the mid-2010s, and pandemic-related school closures that typically lasted longer in the United States than in Asia or Europe.
The 2023 TIMSS data also show the return of an old trend—a gender gap in 8th grade achievement.
Since the first test administration in 1995, 8th grade boys outperformed girls in both subjects. That disparity disappeared in 2007 for math, and for the first time in 2019 in science. Now, though, it’s back.
American 8th grade boys scored 14 points higher in math than girls and 11 points higher in science.
These shifts are consistent with changes in 8th graders’ math scores on NAEP, in which boys outperformed girls by two points in 2022 after the test reported no significant difference between girls and boys in 2019.
