US students still trail Asians in STEM subjects

Washington Post : Two tests, including Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), show that despite gains, US students “continue to lag behind many of their Asian counterparts in reading, math and science.” Though they outperformed “the international average,” they remained “far behind students in such places as Singapore and Hong Kong, especially in math and science.” Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that given the “large and diverse population of kids to educate” in the US, he thinks “these results show that we’re doing pretty well.” In fourth-grade math, US students trailed counterparts from Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Northern Ireland, and the Flemish region of Belgium. In eighth-grade science, they trailed Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Finland, Slovenia, Russia, and Hong Kong. The results are interpreted to show that “across countries and subjects . . . students who have teachers with at least a decade of experience performed better, as did students who had teachers with high levels of career satisfaction.”