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Title: The Mediocre Performance of U.S. Students on International Education Tests: Are Schools to Blame?
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Merry, Joseph |
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The Mediocre Performance of U.S. Students on International Education Tests: Are Schools to Blame? M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 2012 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University Keyword(s): Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY); Cognitive Ability; Cross-national Analysis; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The majority of international test results indicate a disappointing performance for American students. Various educational reform efforts within the U.S. cite these results as evidence of failing schools and low-quality teachers. Yet scholars are beginning to acknowledge that international test score differences can be the result of factors beyond the control of schools, such as social conditions outside of school. An important challenge for social scientists, therefore, is to understand the degree to which international test scores reflect characteristics of the nation’s school system versus characteristics of the nation’s social conditions. Toward that end, I compare the reading skills of U.S. children with those in Canada, a country that performs substantially better on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which is administered to students 15-16 years old. My unique contribution is to compare the reading skills of this cohort of students eleven years earlier with results from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R) when the cohort was just 4-5 years old and had not yet entered school. I find that while the Canadian advantage at ages 15-16 is substantial (.26 standard deviation units), this advantage already existed at ages 4-5, before schools had a chance to matter. I discuss the implications of this finding for rethinking what comparisons on international tests mean for understanding the quality of school systems. |
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Bibliography Citation
Merry, Joseph. The Mediocre Performance of U.S. Students on International Education Tests: Are Schools to Blame? M.A. Thesis, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 2012. |