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

Chapter 6

Conclusions

The education system of every country is embedded within the culture of that country. As a result of this close relationship one cannot hope to learn how education systems can be improved or academic achievement can be increased without understanding the actions, beliefs, and attitudes related to education that exist within the culture. We have tried to do this in the Case Study Project.

In this project we sought to gain, through intensive study of four major topics within three cultures, information about the cultural and social contexts for achievement which may help to explain why students in the United States should fare better or worse in international comparisons of achievement in mathematics and science than students in countries such as Japan and Germany. We approached this goal by obtaining information about the daily lives of students, parents, teachers, and policymakers and by exploring their beliefs and attitudes about learning and development. We believe that the findings may be sufficiently convincing to be considered as explanations; others may serve primarily as a fruitful source of hypotheses and suggestions for future exploration.

After analyzing the transcriptions of the interviews, conversations, and observations and reading the extensive field notes of the researchers, we believe that there are sufficient commonalities among the reports of the various researchers to constitute reliable descriptions of the conditions that exist within the three countries. They also serve to dispel stereotypes whose existence interferes with more appropriate understanding of the conditions within various countries.

We believe that we have avoided the concern that descriptive studies may lead to idiosyncratic conclusions by having a large team of researchers, all familiar with the culture in which they worked, spend a total of over 1,600 hours interacting with the respondents in interviews and conversations and in observing classrooms.

We have attempted in this volume to report our main findings about the education systems and the practices, attitudes, and beliefs of the participants in the education of primary and secondary students in the three countries. From the discussions and observations that were conducted, it is obvious that there are both remarkable commonalities and striking differences among the three countries in many aspects of education. Our purpose has been to summarize the most salient features of the results presented in three country volumes which have resulted from this study (Ashwill & Nerison-Low 1998; Hofer 1998; LeTendre 1998).

This summary may offer tentative suggestions about ways in which we may gain a better understanding of the process of education in the United States, and of topics that merit further exploration and research. The study of countries that were high scorers on the TIMSS mathematics and science tests would be especially informative, as would case studies of schools within the United States that received the highest scores on the TIMSS tests.

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[Chapter 5 - The Training and Daily Lives of Teachers (Part 2 of 2)]

[References]