The Perils and Promises of International Surveys of School Achievement

tional research community well, has again made a valuable contribution to the discourse by sharing some of his observations on the perils, as well as some of the promise, of surveying school achievement around the world. In the incubative stages of the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS) in the mid 1970s, Howard Russell made it clear that an emphasis on analyzing student performance at the item level should be an essential component of such a project. Concurrently, James Wilson, University of Georgia, had written a paper commissioned by the U.S. National Institute of Education (unpublished, 1975) on the topic, If There Is to Be a Second IEA Study of Mathematics, What Should It Be Like? A major thesis of the Wilson paper, whose recommendations went far in providing the conceptual basis for SIMS, was that a major thrust of such a study should be curricular, and that in order to be of maximal value to curriculum and instructional specialists, the study must be fine-grained, offering detailed data at the item level, with relatively little attention and/or importance ascribed to subscores (and no interest accorded a total test score). To be sure, for a topic like geometry, where the curricular content and, hence, the match with the test items, varies wildly from country to country (see Travers & Westbury, 1989), constructing a valid, informative subscore is extremely problematic

Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Social science · Sociology · Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills · Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques · Psychology · School Choice and Performance

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