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Regarding the Timms studies, Barry mentioned:
"the accusation is that only the top students are tested. That leaves open the question about 4th grade.But I would appreciate any light you could shed on that."
Here's some info on validity from the TIMSS website:
Just a note that I heard echoed from several of the summer math program attendees. The Japanese mathematics curriculum is just as strong as Singapore's. Singapore syllabus wins because it's already in English.How can we be sure the data is comparable?
The International Study Center at Boston College works to ensure that data collection procedures across countries are comparable. To this end, the International Study Center institutes the following procedures for quality assurance:
- Coordinated by the TIMSS Sampling Referee, national school and student samples are rigorously reviewed for bias and international comparability.
- Utilizing two independent translations within each country, the TIMSS materials are translated into the national languages of the participating countries. Once these translations are reconciled, the International Study Center verifies these results through the use of a professional translation agency.
- National Research Coordinators (NRCs) and their staff are thoroughly trained in data collection and scoring procedures at international conferences designed specifically for this purpose. The TIMSS International Study Center then continues to monitor the work of the NRCs and their staff for scoring reliability.
- Site visits by quality control staff are conducted during the testing period to further ensure the international data collection procedures are being followed at the national level.
- Finally, an extensive review of data is conducted for internal and cross-country consistency.
2 comments:
And PSLE data is left out? That is at sixth grade (or 6 and a half, to be precise).
P4 is the streaming age, where people get streamed into EM1/EM2 (and EM3, before it was abolished).
If you see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Singapore, there are 290,000 primary students versus 213,000 secondary students, for a ratio of 0.73
Whereas the US has 37.9 million primary students versus 16.4 secondry students, for a ratio of 0.43
16.4 million secondary students, pardon.
Singapore's post-secondary statistic is puzzling, since most secondary students graduate mostly to poly and JC. Poly is an alternative to university education, since about only 10% of the cohort enters university. Heck, I think most of the teachers have degrees from a polytechnic, rather than the universities.
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