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Re: Are Top Students Getting Short Shrift?
Posted:
Oct 16, 2011 5:30 PM
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I bet our football teams are better!
On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 4:46 PM, jk@israeliteknight.com
<jk@israeliteknight.com> wrote:
> Paul quoted:
>
> "Additionally, the U.S. National TIMSS Report also presented the results of the comparison between the average performance of United States AP Calculus students and AP Physics students. The results in the United States National TIMSS Report showed the performance of AP Calculus students to be about mid-range among the 16 participating countries, and a little above the international average performance (513 vs. 505, see Figure 11, page 45)."
>
>
> Problems
> The US didn't even meet the TIMSS sampling requirements. If we had, our already low score of 450 might have been lower than Austria at 439 or the Czech Republic at 446.
>
> Comparing a small minority of US students who participate in AP programs to ALL students who majored in advanced math in other countries is not a valid comparison.
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> Our nonpublic (read: non-government) schools also participate in AP programs, and they could be the majority of those who scored over 611, leaving very few from government schools.
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> This comparison excludes 12th graders from the very high scoring countries at the 8th grade level (Korea, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now Shanghai, China) who undoubtedly would have scored MUCH higher than our best non-government school students.
>
> It's probable that the only reason Austria scored lower than us is that their TCI was more than double ours (33.3% vs. 13.7%). Had their TCI been more like Cyprus (8.8%) they might have scored higher than Cyprus at 561 (and perhaps higher than our AP students).
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> Ditto for Germany whose TCI was double ours (26.3%)
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> Now the BIG problem!
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> It would be interesting to know the process by which our AP calculus students (or how their teachers and principles) managed to increase their scores by 60 points, from 513 to 573, in only two years, as reported in the reference you cited. To American females, this is a huge increase of a standard deviation of 1.13, an increase which cannot possibly be based on anything other than crafty manipulation of the data.
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> OR: could it be that Beverly Hall was in charge?
>
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- --
Jim
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