Many different views exist about the best way to teach children to read, yet little is known about which countries are the most successful in this aim, or what the most productive strategies are for doing so. This report addresses these issues by building on the pioneering work of Robert Thorndike in 1973. Data are presented on the relative achievement levels of comparable samples of students in each of 32 school systems in all continents of the globe - making it the largest IEA study to date. Attempts are made to elucidate the reasons for the differences that were found and implications are drawn about the likely effects of different policies. Many advances have been made since the previous IEA reading survey, students were asked to tackle a wider range of reading exercises, prodigious efforts are made to minimise any cultural or linguistic biases, and the statistical machinery of the Rasch model was systematically used, for the first time in IEA surveys, both to help identify troublesome items and to create defensible international scales. Greater efforts are made in this study to assess the volume and character of students' reading, to explore their beliefs about learning to read, and to compare the effects of teachers' beliefs and instructional emphases on student achievement. Within each country specific findings have emerged which will give policy makers pause for thought and prompts for action.
In November 2000, the Board on International Comparative Studies in Education (BICSE) held a symposium to draw on the wealth of experience gathered over a four-decade period, to evaluate improvement in the quality of the methodologies used in international studies, and to identify the most pressing methodological issues that remain to be solved. Since 1960, the United States has participated in 15 large-scale cross-national education surveys. The most assessed subjects have been science and mathematics through reading comprehension, geography, nonverbal reasoning, literature, French, English as a foreign language, civic education, history, computers in education, primary education, and second-language acquisition. The papers prepared for this symposium and discussions of those papers make up the volume, representing the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of methodological strengths and weaknesses of international comparative studies of student achievement. These papers answer the following questions: (1) What is the methodological quality of the most recent international surveys of student achievement? How authoritative are the results? (2) Has the methodological quality of international achievement studies improved over the past 40 years? and (3) What are promising opportunities for future improvement?
Hardbound. This volume presents results from a cross national study about the use of computers in 21 education systems. Using national representative samples of schools and teachers in elementary and secondary education, data were collected about issues such as hardware and software availability, the way computers are used by students and teachers, attitudes towards computers, staff development, administration and policy, and gender equity.This book provides descriptive information about the situation with regard to the introduction of computers, and also shows how different factors in this innovation are related to each other.
This book reports on the policies and practices regarding computers in education in 20 countries, representing Northern America, Asia, and both the Eastern and Western parts of Europe. Moreover, the editors have analysed and reflected from several perspectives on the richness of the national reports, resulting in chapters on curricular, (in)equity and education paradigmatic aspects of the introduction of computers in education.
TIMSS assesses achievement in countries around the world and collects a rich array of information about the educational contexts for learning in mathematics and science, with TIMSS 2003 involving more than 50 participants. This report contains the mathematics results for 46 countries and four benchmarking participants at the eighth grade and for 25 countries and three benchmarking participants at the fourth grade. Trend data are provided at the eighth and fourth grades for those countries that also participated in 1995 and 1999. [Executive summary, ed].
Gives the results of the 2nd IEA Science Study. This book contains comparisons which are made between countries in terms of the conditions under which science is taught, the organization of science teaching, the emphasis on different science areas and on the process of science, the focus of decision-making with respect to the science curriculum.
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