The focus of this research was to shed light on factors contributing to global international rankings in mathematics released by the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. This study focused on factors contributing to the global ranking of international scores in mathematics. Although students in the United States performed below students in the other sample countries (Singapore, Japan, and the Republic of Korea), American students scored within one standard deviation of the top performer, the Republic of Korea. The study also revealed that although other countries had their brightest and most advantaged students participate in the assessment, participating students in the United States were disproportionately disadvantaged to the proportion of United States' citizens. Another contributing factor of student success revealed in this study was the size and form of government and financing of the participating countries. While Singapore, the Republic of Korea, and Japan have education systems governed and financed by national governments, the United States education system is primarily governed and financed by 50 state governments.

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This paper treats changes of the literacy concept. It presents five most important conceptual frameworks, such as literacy rate, functional literacy, Freirean framework, New literacy studies and literacies of information. Literacy can be defined as the ability to read and write, as a set of basic skills or as competencies. Because of OECD's influence, the functional literacy concept is the most powerful one. Literacy involves a continuum and is oriented mostly towards economical outputs. Influence of OECD is supported by the international surveys IALS, ALL, PIAAC, PISA and LAMP. The surveys TIMSS and PIRLS organized by IEA are influential as well. This paper summarizes the most important critical reviews to the OECD's methodology and to the interpretation of the results. It also comments current activities of OECD, UNESCO and European union. Based on the socio- cultural framework, it brings in several recommendations how states and organizations could approach literacy and its assessment. The paper relies on the documents of UNESCO, OECD, IEA, the World Bank, the European union and on the published works of foreign and local experts.

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There is an ongoing debate about what teaching practices are the most effective ones in order to improve student performance. However, little is known about the impact across countries and literature is highly inconclusive. In this work, we extend the portfolio of countries and provide evidence about the role of modern and traditional teaching practices on students' test scores in 43 countries. Our analysis is performed in two steps and is a typical example of hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). In the first step, we perform student fixed effect method to account for majority of selection issues. We identify a positive, negative or no effect of modern or traditional teaching methods on student performance. These results are priceless for policy makers suggesting that there is no one-fits-all-approach towards modern or traditional teaching methods to order to improve students' test scores. As a great variation is observed, we continue further and investigate what country characteristics could explain these differences across countries. Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method supports us in a model uncertainty and a particular variable selection. Our findings indicate that cultural dimension uncertainty avoidance, which describes country's rigidity in behaviour and institutions, assists in explaining...

Pupils' difficulties in solving selected word problems from TIMSS research. (Diploma Thesis.) Abstract The theoretical part of the diploma thesis describes international comparative surveys, namely PISA and TIMSS, and analyses results of Czech pupils. Some areas are distinguished in which our pupils were unsuccessful and from them, the area of word problems and their mathematisation was selected for further work. Next, a solving strategy is characterised and some relevant research from this area is given. The core of the work lies in the experimental part whose goal was to find out what strategies pupils use when solving selected problems from TIMSS research and why they fail in them, via the analysis of pupils' written solutions complemented by interviews with them. Causes of failure of our pupils in these problems in TIMSS 2007 are looked for in mistakes pupils make, while it is also followed in what phase of the solving process they appear. The participants of research were pupils of Grade 9 of a primary school who solved three selected word problems from TIMSS research. Their written solutions were complemented by interviews with the experimenter focused on their mistakes and lack of clarity of the solutions. Four pupils participated in a pilot study. The atomic analysis of their solutions confirmed...

CONTRIBUTION OF SOME FACTORS TO EIGHTH GRADE STUDENTS&rsquo / SCIENCE ACHIEVEMENT IN TURKEY: TIMSS 2007 KORKMAZ, Fettah M. S., Department of Secondary Science and Mathematics Education Supervisor: Prof. Dr. &Ouml / mer GEBAN September 2012, 120 pages The purpose of this study is to determine some of the factors that affect science achievement of eighth grade students in Turkey based on data results of Trends in International Science and Mathematics Study (TIMSS 2007). The present study investigated the relationship between the students&rsquo / achievement in science and certain factors such as student centered activities perceived by students, teacher centered activities perceived by students, students

Science education becomes more important for future national development globally in high-technology-based society. In reaction to the trend, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has conducted achievement tests in science along with mathematics, called TIMSS every four years. In TIMSS 2003, while Korea was a higher-performing country, South Africa was ranked in the lower-performing countries. Korea features homogenous demography, centralized curriculum, and competitive educational zeal while South Africa is characterized by multicultural demography with various languages, and previously segregated schools based on races. The current research, which is a secondary analysis of TIMSS 2003 data, aimed at explaining the differences and similarities by identifying factors most likely to influence science achievement in the two countries. A conceptual research framework was built on the comprehensive literature review which involved mainly school effectiveness research and factors related to science achievement. The conceptual framework consists of multi-levels, viz., student, classroom, school, and context, and three key concepts, namely time on task, opportunity to learn, and quality. Two research questions were formulated to reach the goal of the research and the first question is: To what extent does TIMSS 2003 reflect factors related to effective science education? Data from the student, teacher and school questionnaires were included in conjunction with the achievement data and analysed by means of factor, reliability and correlation analyses. The factors found to influence science achievement in three levels are as follows: at the student level, books at home, attitudes towards science, time on task; at the classroom level, time scheduled for science and teacher interaction; at the school level, school size, community size, and student background. The second research question is: To what extent do the factors derived from the analysis explain the differences in the achievement of Korean and South African students? To answer this question, the current research used multilevel modeling techniques to deconstruct the total variance in achievement into within- and between-classroom/school level. The strongest predictor is attitudes towards science in both countries at the student level. Student background in Korea and safety in school in South Africa is the strongest predictor of science achievement at the classroom/school level. Furthermore, educational resources such as books at home and educational level of father are significant in Korea while language, teacher qualification, physical resources, and educational leadership are significant in South Africa. For Korea, 93% of total variance in science achievement occurred at the student level while only 7% was attributable to the classroom/school level. For South Africa, 41% of the total variance was assigned at the student level and 59% at the class/school level. From this comparative study, it was recommended that development of student-centred teaching practices to address negative attitudes to science in Korea be considered as opposed to basic issues such as improving teachers’ subject knowledge, developing language skills, and fostering a culture of learning to improve science performance in South Africa. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Science, Mathematics and Technology Education / unrestricted

Syfte med denna fallstudie är att undersöka kemiundervisning på en svensk grundskola ur ett flerspråkigt perspektiv. Undersökningen har genomförts på skolor där majoriteten har svenska som andraspråk, det vill säga eleverna eller en av deras föräldrar har ett annat nationellt språk än svenska som sitt starkaste språk. På dessa skolor har datainsamling genomförts med hjälp två provfrågor från Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) till elever och semistrukturerade intervjuer med lärare och elever. Resultatet av provfrågorna visar att eleverna lyckades bättre med en fråga som hade visuellt stöd än en fråga på som krävde större läsförståelse. Resultatet av intervjuerna visar på svårigheter hos eleverna i lärandet av kemi. Anledningen är att läroböckerna består av många svåra begrepp och har ett språk som ligger långtifrån flerspråkiga elevers vardagliga språk, vilket gör att eleverna har svårighet med läsförståelse. Lärarna strävar efter att använda en lämplig metod som utgår från flerspråkiga elevers vardagsspråk och förkunskaper för att kommunicera kemiämnet. Flerspråkiga elever har mindre ordförråd i svenska, vilket gör det svårt att förstå innehållet i de naturvetenskapliga ämnena i jämförelse med eleverna som har svenska som förstaspråk. Det betyder att flerspråkiga elever behöver mer tid att parallellt utveckla sitt talspråk och skolspråk. Sammanfattningsvis kan sägas att skolspråket är ett problem för elevernas lärande i ämnet och att lärarna bör fokusera på både ämnesspråket och vardagsspråket i sin undervisning.

本論文應用以範例為基礎的機器翻譯技術，應用英漢雙語對應的結構輔助英漢單句語料的翻譯。翻譯範例是運用一種特殊的結構，此結構包含來源句的剖析樹、目標句的字串、以及目標句和來源句詞彙對應關係。將翻譯範例建立資料庫，以提供來源句作詞序交換的依據，接著透過字典翻譯，以及利用統計式中英詞彙對列和語言模型來選詞，最後填補缺少的量詞，產生建議的翻譯。我們是以2003年國際數學與科學教育成就趨勢調查測驗詴題為主要翻譯的對象，以期提升翻譯的一致性和效率。以NIST 和BLEU 的評比方式，來評估和比較Google Translate 和Yahoo!線上翻譯系統及本系統所達成的翻譯品質。我們的系統經過詞序調動以及填補量詞後，翻譯品質比我們前一代系統要佳，但整體效果沒有比Google Translate 和Yahoo!線上翻譯的品質要佳。 / This paper presents an example-based machine translation based on bilingual structured string tree correspondence (BSSTC). The BSSTC structure includes a parse tree in source language, a string in target language and the correspondence between the source language tree and the target language string. / We designed an English to Chinese computer assisted translation system for Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), through the BSSTC structure reordering, directory translation, choosing translation statistics model and measure word generation. / We evaluated our system by the BLEU and NIST score and compared with Google Translate and Yahoo! Translate. By reordering selected word sequences and inserting measure words in the default translations, the current system achieved a higher quality of default translations than the previous implementation of our research group, but the overall effects still lag behind that achieved by Google and Yahoo!.