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August 08, 2005

We cared about taking our international standardized tests.

Alexandra Starr, over at Slate Magazine, has addressed the issue of why American teens seem to perform so poorly in certain subject areas (science, math, problem-solving) when compared to students from other nations:

"When high-school seniors were last ranked internationally, in 1995, American students placed at the bottom, trounced by kids from countries like Slovenia and Cyprus. U.S. high-school sophomores have continued to sit international exams every three years, and their performance hasn't been much better. On the 2003 global exam that evaluates the reading, math, science, and problem-solving skills of 15-year-olds, for example, the Americans scored below average in every category except reading literacy."

Standardized tests are not foolproof, and Starr notes American teens have little to gain from benchmark exams (many of which are given in spring of the senior year):

"In 2002 nearly half of the 17-year-olds tapped to take the national NAEP exam didn't bother to show up. Students who did show up left more essay questions than multiple-choice questions blank, an indication that they weren't going to be bothered to venture an answer if it required effort."

Concerning the attitudes of the international competitors:

"Granted, kids in Japan and the United Kingdom don't pay a personal price for how they do on global tests, either. But cultural pressures can be very different in other countries. Korean schools have staged rallies to rev their children up before they take international assessments. And Germany created a national "PISA Day" to mark the date when 15-year-olds take the exam that will rank them against students in other countries. The U.S. Department of Education, meanwhile, has a hard time convincing principals to administer voluntary international tests at all."

She also notes that progress has certainly been made, notably in the form of increased national average SAT and ACT test scores (she disregards test prep centers), and Starr briefly mentions the high performances of younger students in the latest round of math and reading exams (could NCLB be working?).

Posted by Michael Drazer at August 8, 2005 10:37 PM

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Posted by: Zach Wendling at August 9, 2005 09:57 AM | permalink

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