Koretz Daniel
Harvard Graduate School of Educatio, USA.
Future Child. 2009 Spring;19(1):37-51. doi: 10.1353/foc.0.0023.
In response to frequent news media reports about how poorly American students fare compared with their peers abroad, Daniel Koretz takes a close look at what these comparisons say, and do not say, about the achievement of U.S. high school students. He stresses that the comparisons do not provide what many observers of education would like: unambiguous information about the effectiveness of American high schools compared with those in other nations. Koretz begins by describing the. two principal international student comparisons-the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Both assessments, he stresses, reflect the performance of students several years before they complete high school. PISA, which targets fifteen-year-old students, measures students' abilities to apply what they have learned in school to real-world problems. By contrast, TIMSS tests fourth and eighth graders. Unlike PISA, TIMSS follows the school curriculum closely. Because the findings of the two tests are sometimes inconsistent, Koretz stresses the importance of considering data from both sources. He cautions against comparing U.S. students with an "international average," which varies widely from survey to survey depending on which countries participate, and recommends instead comparing them with students in other nations that are similar to the United States or that are particularly high-achieving. Many observers, says Koretz, speculate that the lackluster average performance of American students in international comparisons arises because many, especially minority and low-income U.S. students, attend low-performing schools. But both TIMSS and PISA, he says, show that the performance of American students on the exams is not much more variable than that of students in countries that are socially more homogeneous or that have more equitable educational systems. Koretz emphasizes that the international comparisons provide valuable information and are a useful source of hypotheses about American secondary schooling to be tested by researchers. Studies designed to explain differences between U.S. students and those in very similar countries, he says, might provide especially useful suggestions for changes in policy and practice.
针对新闻媒体频繁报道美国学生与国外同龄人相比表现不佳的情况，丹尼尔·科雷茨仔细审视了这些比较对于美国高中生成绩而言说明了什么以及没说明什么。他强调，这些比较并未提供许多教育观察家所期望的内容：与其他国家的高中相比，关于美国高中教育成效的明确信息。科雷茨首先描述了两项主要的国际学生比较——国际数学和科学趋势研究（TIMSS）以及国际学生评估项目（PISA）。他强调，这两项评估都反映了学生在完成高中学业前几年的表现。针对15岁学生的PISA测试学生将在学校所学知识应用于实际问题的能力。相比之下，TIMSS测试四年级和八年级学生。与PISA不同，TIMSS紧密遵循学校课程。由于两项测试的结果有时不一致，科雷茨强调了考虑来自这两个来源数据的重要性。他告诫不要将美国学生与“国际平均水平”进行比较，因为“国际平均水平”在不同调查中差异很大，这取决于参与调查的国家，他建议将美国学生与其他与美国相似或成绩特别优异的国家的学生进行比较。科雷茨说，许多观察家推测，美国学生在国际比较中平均表现不佳是因为许多学生，尤其是少数族裔和低收入的美国学生就读于表现不佳的学校。但他表示，TIMSS和PISA都表明，美国学生在考试中的表现并不比社会更加同质化或教育体系更公平的国家的学生表现更具差异性。科雷茨强调，国际比较提供了有价值的信息，是研究人员用以检验关于美国中学教育假设的有用来源。他说，旨在解释美国学生与非常相似国家的学生之间差异的研究，可能会为政策和实践的改变提供特别有用的建议。
