The present research examines the influence of international surveys on science education in Israel, over the course of time (1996-2011).
The intervention was successful and in TIMSS 2011, Israel ranked 13 out of the 42 participating countries. Over the years, documents that contributed to the adoption of contents and skills from the international surveys were added to the science curriculum, until the publication of the new science curriculum. The Ministry of Education therefore acted to reduce the gap between the intended and the attained science curriculum by intervening on two curricular levels: the intended and the implemented. The Israeli Ministry of Education set a goal of raising Israel's ranking in international surveys so that Israel will be among the 10 leading countries in the Program for International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).
International surveys have served as agents of change for the introduction of reforms in curricula worldwide. This study also finds that Taiwan and Singapore belong to different clusters compared with the higher-achieving Western countries regarding their future teachers’ relative strengths and weaknesses in either mathematics or mathematics teaching competence. This distinction is primarily because of the thought-oriented category of mathematics competencies. Comparing these two countries, Taiwan shows relative strengths at upper-secondary and tertiary levels, and Singaporean strengths are at primary and lower-secondary levels. Taiwan and Singapore demonstrate relative strengths at primary, lower-, and upper-secondary levels in mathematics competencies but show relative weaknesses at the tertiary level than do other higher-achieving Western countries. This study shows that Singaporean future teachers are weaker in the competence of devising formal mathematical arguments and transforming heuristic ideas into valid proofs than Taiwanese future teachers. The relative strengths and weaknesses of these two countries, as compared to other TEDS-M higher-achieving Western countries, such as Germany, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the USA, are examined after reselecting and reclassifying the achievement items based on Niss’ (2003) mathematics competence and Hsieh’s (Secondary Education, 63(3), 2012) mathematics teaching competence structures. Taiwan and Singapore are identified as the only two Asian countries integrating the Chinese/Confucian tradition in their education regarding TEDS-M.
This study investigates the similarities and differences of mathematics-related teaching competencies between the future secondary school teachers of Taiwan and Singapore by using data from the international Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M), organized by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. There is strong evidence that differential performance between Western and Asian countries in PISA and TIMSS can be directly attributed to the types of items in the respective tests. These strengths and weaknesses are then linked back to the contents of the PISA and TIMSS tests. In this way, the relative strengths and weaknesses of Western and Asian countries are identified. Differential performances of six countries on each set of items are examined. In particular, many geometry and algebra items in TIMSS are “inner mathematics” (mathematics without a real-life context), and such items do not appear in the PISA test. In this paper, TIMSS released items are divided into two sets: one that fits the PISA framework and one that does not. It was found that Western countries generally performed better in PISA than in TIMSS, and Eastern European and Asian countries generally performed better in TIMSS than in PISA.
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