Lessons from abroad: plan better and delve deeper

For educators, the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study were the equivalent of the shot heard 'round the world. While for some countries - particularly top-scoring Singapore, Korea, and Japan - the test results released in 1997 were an affirmation. To the US, the scores were an alarming reminder that much was wrong.

And yet TIMSS didn't tell those monitoring math instruction in the US anything they didn't already know. The previous two rounds of international testing (done in the 1960s and the 1980s) also showed US math achievement to be in a precarious position.

"All three studies have consistently shown that children in this country are not achieving on a par with children in other countries," says Glenda Lappan, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

But the jolt that accompanied the TIMSS results of this decade has clearly had some salutary effects. One has been to turn the US to the outside world to ask, "What can we learn from what others do?"

There are no easy answers. In fact, if anything, the TIMSS research has served to debunk a number of facile assumptions about where the US may be stumbling in comparison with others.

For instance, TIMSS-sponsored studies show that US math teachers on the average have considerably higher levels of education and work longer hours in the classroom than those in many countries that outperform us.

Math teachers in Japan and Germany generally assign less homework than US math teachers. And Japanese eighth-graders - whose scores soar above those of US eighth-graders - watch on the average about the same amount of TV as do their American peers.

So if toughening teacher requirements, assigning more homework, and turning off the TV are not the main lessons the US needs to learn from abroad, what are they? The US can learn from others in many areas, say math educators, but most point to some key aspects:

*Curriculum and lesson development. Compared with those of most other TIMSS nations, US math curricula are often described as "a mile wide and an inch deep." Seventy-five percent of the countries involved in the study cram fewer topics into math curricula than the US does.

A typical US eighth-grade math class serves up 35 topics. Pressure to get through them all within the school year forces some teachers to rush, critics charge, which can leave many students baffled.

Japanese students, by contrast, will study only five to 10 concepts in eighth grade, but will learn them in much greater depth. Then they move on, building on those ideas. American schools tend to repeat concepts in many grade levels.

"Our teachers always think more is better," says Jerry Becker, a math-education professor at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. "But Asians think the opposite. They believe less is more."

Another weak point of US curricula appears to be too much focus on arithmetic over too long a period of time. Most US students don't tackle algebraic concepts until ninth grade, at which point they are a year to a year and a half behind many of their peers in other countries.

In another comparative math-education study, dozens of randomly selected eighth-grade math classrooms in the US, Japan, and Germany were videotaped, and professors James Stigler and James Hiebert wrote "The Teaching Gap" (Free Press) based on their observations.

Not only did the tapes allow them to examine how extensively Japanese and German eighth-graders grappled with more challenging material, but they also provided a glimpse of the more carefully crafted lessons particularly evident in Japanese classrooms, where lessons are polished over years.

Page: 1 | 2