A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

A First Look at What We Can Learn From High Performing School Districts: An Analysis of TIMSS Data From the First in the World Consortium, August, 1999

Introduction

The efforts of a group of small school districts north of Chicago to become first in the world in math and science achievement have recently captured the interest of educators, researchers, and policymakers across the country.

Working collaboratively, rather than competitively, this unique consortium of districts has begun to benchmark its students against an international standard of achievement, identify and implement best practices for improving math and science achievement, and establish learning networks among the educators within its districts.

Interest in the First in the World (FiW) Consortium's activities has been particularly intense for a number of reasons. First, initial results show that the FiW Consortium is well on its way to meeting its goal, with the FiW performing at or near the top of the world on the international benchmark chosen by the Consortium-the Third International Math and Science Study (TIMSS).1

Given the disappointing performance of U.S. students on the same international math and science assessments, many believe that the approaches taken by the FiW towards math and science may offer some important lessons for other schools and districts in the U.S.

Second, the results obtained by the FiW Consortium on this international benchmark also provide the first U.S. multi-district level data available from TIMSS. As such, they may provide valuable insights into the contexts for learning math and science in high-performing districts, and how they might relate to world class standards, not only in achievement but also in instructional, curricular, and assessment standards. Finally, the Consortium's activities offer a rare opportunity to learn from this unique cross-district, multi-partner collaborative effort to obtain world-class standards.

This report provides a status report on the FiW's initial activities. It examines five key questions:

It should be noted that this report constitutes one of the first comprehensive examinations of how FiW students performed on TIMSS and an initial exploration of some of the reasons for their performance.

This paper is not based on an exhaustive review of the possible reasons for the FiW performance, but rather examines possible factors that might have had an important role. In addition, the paper does not investigate causal links between FiW achievement and the different topics discussed later.

The remainder of the report is organized into major sections, which roughly correspond to the key questions listed above.

The first section describes the districts that make up the FiW Consortium and outlines the Consortium's history, purpose, goals, and plan of action to become the first in the world in math and science.

The second section documents how the students from the FiW Consortium performed when benchmarked against an international comparison, the TIMSS assessment.

The next section discusses the impact that socio-economic variables could have on the performance of FiW students.

The fourth section presents data on the contexts for teaching and learning mathematics in the FiW, exploring differences between the FiW and the U.S. and, where data are readily available, differences between the contexts for teaching in the FiW and countries with high math achievement.

The fifth section describes some of the activities being undertaken by the FiW Consortium to improve math and science education, highlighting a recent project that is using data from TIMSS and other sources to improve science instruction.

The final section summarizes the report and offers some possible questions for future research.

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[ Acknowledgments ] 		[ Table of Contents ]
[ What is the FiW Consortium? ]

This page last modified on November 23, 1999. (dtm)