EdDaily: Many international students fail to reach NAEP proficiency

Many international students fail to reach NAEP proficiency
By Stephen Sawchuk
Staff Writer
Eighth graders in many foreign nations do not perform at the proficiency benchmark set by the United States’ national science and mathematics
exams, according to a new report.
Although U.S. policymakers’ concerns about students’ generally low performance on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress have characterized
many of the recent debates about global competitiveness, the study shows that widespread achievement at NAEP’s proficient level is limited to students in just a few Asian countries.
The findings, part of a new report released by the American Institutes for Research, could raise additional questions about how to set appropriate proficiency expectations for students on achievement exams. That issue has emerged at the forefront of No Child Left Behind reauthorization
discussions and also in dialogues about national content standards and assessments.
The study’s authors used a statistical methodology
to link the NAEP scale score to that of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study — an international assessment taken by many nations’ students.
The process allowed the researchers to estimate
how other countries that participated in TIMSS would perform on NAEP, although those estimations do not consider the different content and compositions of the tests.
The study found that only in Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan did the average eighth grade student perform at the NAEP proficient
level in math. In all other countries, including the U.S., the average student performed at either the NAEP basic or below basic levels.
In science, only eighth-graders in Singapore and Taiwan on average performed at the NAEP proficient level.
The results are hardly reassuring for U.S. policymakers. On the math exam, the five Asian countries had more than double the percentage of U.S. students performing at the proficient level and more than five times the percentage of U.S. students performing at the NAEP advanced level.
Still, the results could support arguments by many testing experts that the NAEP proficiency expectation
is too high to expect all students to reach. So far, that argument has not gained much traction.
Lawmakers continue to turn to NAEP as a benchmark against which to measure state NCLB exams. Meanwhile, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., recently introduced legislation that would give incentive grants to states that choose to implement national standards rooted in NAEP proficiency levels.
The report did not contain information on the performance of Indian or Chinese students. Neither India nor China participated in TIMSS 2003. Debates about global economic competition have focused on both nations.