American students might be better at math than you think

Libby Nelson · Monday, April 27, 2015, 8:34 pm
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American students aren't good at math compared to students around the world. But it's still possible to overstate just how bad they are - as Nicholas Kristof did this week in the New York Times.
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Kristof argues that American eighth-graders' math skills are humiliatingly bad, citing examples of problems that students in Ghana, Iran, Indonesia, Armenia, Turkey, and Palestine can solve and American eighth-graders can't.
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Kristof's basic point is correct: American students really are bad at math, particularly at applying what they've learned in the real world. Math teachers and elected officials from both parties are right to be concerned. But American kids aren't really worse than students in Ghana or Armenia. And Kristof's method - cherry-picking problems from a test where American students, on average, do pretty well in comparison - actually undermines what he's trying to argue.
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What Kristof gets wrong

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The problem, as Bob Somerby pointed out: the questions Kristof picked, from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey, a standardized test of eighth-graders, are terrible examples. American students didn't answer those questions well compared to their peers around the world. But they performed much worse on the questions he cites than on the test as a whole.
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When you look at the entire test, American eighth-graders aren't bad at all. They did better than average on many questions. And overall, American students scored slightly above average - worse than students in Korea, Singapore, and Japan, but on par with Finland's celebrated test-takers.
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This could make you wonder why there's a panic about math education at all. Different international tests measure different things, and some make the US look worse than others.
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Why some tests make American students look OK and others make them look terrible

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TIMSS, the test Kristof cites, is one where American students tend to do well. Many developed countries don't participate, including Canada and much of western Europe aside from Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Its problems often look more like the questions American students encounter in the classroom: the goal is to figure out whether students in the fourth and eighth grades can solve math problems.
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