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What happens in schools really does matter. That is the key message from the TIMSS studies of curriculum and instruction (Schmidt et al, 1996; Schmidt and Valverde, 1997). TIMSS found no single "magic bullet" that is universally associated with high or low achievement across the countries. Rather, differences in national performance appear to be connected to what schools teach and how they teach it. What schools teach is delineated in standards, curricula, and textbooks. Fortunately, these are areas that can be influenced by educational policy.
TIMSS performance data contradict the common public perception that American students have not grasped "basics" like arithmetic. The problem instead is that many are not learning the kinds of advanced mathematics and science that form the new basics in the global arena. The TIMSS studies point to the need for all U.S. students to learn more demanding content, taught in depth as they progress through the grades.
Curriculum in American schools lacks coherence, focus, and rigor compared with that of other countries. The United States has a notably fragmented vision of math and science, while other countries have a clear and unitary voice about what is expected.
Most state curriculum frameworks in the United States demand breadth over depth, calling for many more topics and skills to be taught in a given year than other countries expect. At each of the first eight grades, our states have more topics in the average mathematics framework than three-quarters of the TIMSS countries. In science the problem is not as extreme, although we still try to cover numerous topics. Teachers respond to these demands by giving superficial coverage to as many topics as they can, seldom spending enough time on any one topic to allow students to achieve mastery.
The United States also has a problem with packaging and sequencing curriculum. Subjects are taught in an episodic way, skipping from topic to topic with little relationship from week to week or year to year. Topics like basic arithmetic skills are repeated in grade after grade, well into the middle school grades. In most other countries, by contrast, instruction is concentrated on a few related topics for a meaningful period of time. Then instruction moves in sequence to a set of different topics that builds on what students presumably have already learned. As an illustration of this difference, the top-achieving TIMSS countries introduce an average of 20 new math or science topics with an intense focus between fourth and eighth grade; U.S. schools seldom give this kind of focus to any new math or science topic in these years (Schmidt and Valverde, 1997).
The U.S. curriculum is also less demanding than that of other TIMSS countries, particularly in the "wasteland" of the middle school years. While most U.S. middle school students are revisiting elementary school arithmetic and introductory science, their counterparts in the rest of the world are moving into algebra and geometry, and physics and chemistry. By eighth grade, U.S. students are out of synch with other nations, and there we stay through high school. The TIMSS video study videotaped eighth-grade math lessons three countries. The average level of mathematics actually taught varied significantly: in the United States it approximated a mid-seventh-grade level; in Germany it was a mid-eighth-grade level; and in Japan a beginning ninth-grade level (James Hiebert, University of Delaware, TIMSS Policy Forum).
The content in the TIMSS 12th-grade general knowledge tests in mathematics and science is introduced later in the United States than it is in other TIMSS countries, on average (NCES, 1998). American 12th-graders spend limited time studying advanced mathematics, even when it is available. A relatively low proportion of U.S. students receive at least 5 hours per week of advanced math instruction. The countries with higher proportions of students receiving advanced instruction tended to do better on TIMSS (NCES, 1998).
U.S. textbooks mirror the incoherence, fragmentation, and lack of rigor found in the curriculum. No other country includes as many topics in its textbooks as we do. The textbooks used by American fourth-graders run an average of 530 pages in math and 397 pages in science, compared with an international average of 170 pages in math and 125 pages in science (Schmidt and Valverde, 1997).
How did we arrive at this kind of curriculum? Control of curriculum in the United States. is dispersed among local, state, and federal governments and other less official actors. Anyone with a strong idea and a political constituency can successfully add something to the curriculum. Textbooks and packaged curricular materials constitute yet another "hidden" curriculum that is not accountable to the public. The problem is that no one has the courage to take anything away or keep out counterproductive ideas (Elmore, 1997).
[Using TIMSS to Inform Changes in Curriculum]