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Percentage of 4th-grade students reaching the TIMSS international benchmarks in mathematics, by education system: 2011


TIMSS Results 2003

Table 4. Differences in average science scale scores of fourth-grade students, by country: 1995 and 2003


Country
1995 2003 Difference1
Singapore
523
565
42^
Japan
553
543
-10~
Hong Kong SAR2.3
508
542
35^
England3
528
540
13^
United States3
542
536
-6
(Hungary)
508
530
22^
(Latvia-LSS)4
486
530
43^
(Netherlands)3
530
525
-5
New Zealand5
505
523
18^
(Australia)3
521
521
-1
Scotland2
514
502
-12~
(Slovenia)
464
490
26^
Cyprus
450
480
30^
Norway
504
466
-38~
Iran, Islamic Republic of
380
414
34^
^p<.05, denotes a significant increase.
~p<.05, denotes a significant decrease.
1 Difference calculated by subtracting 1995 from 2003 estimate using unrounded numbers.
2 Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People's Republic of China.
3 Met international guidelines for participation rates only after replacement schools were included.
4 Designated LSS because only Latvian-speaking schools were included in 1995. For this analysis, only Latvian-speaking schools are included in the 2003 average.
5 In 1995, Maori-speaking students did not participate. Estimates in this table are computed for students taught in English only, which represents between 98-99 percent of the student population in both years.
NOTE: Countries are ordered based on the 2003 average scores. Parentheses indicate countries that did not meet international sampling or other guidelines in 1995. All countries met international sampling and other guidelines in 2003, except as noted. See NCES (1997) for details regarding 1995 data. The tests for significance take into account the standard error for the reported difference. Thus, a small difference between averages for one country may be significant while a large difference for another country may not be significant. Countries were required to sample students in the upper of the two grades that contained the largest number of 9-year-olds. In the United States and most countries, this corresponds to grade 4. See table A1 in appendix A for details. Detail may not sum to totals because of rounding.
SOURCE: International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 1995 and 2003.

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