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TIMSS offers a promising model of how to do sophisticated policy research while producing findings that are accessible to the people who must implement them. TIMSS represents a major advancement in the literature of comparative assessment by going beyond the horse race aspects in its design and data reporting. By comparing curriculum, textbooks, and instruction in many different countries, TIMSS has opened up dialogue about issues that were once considered risky to discuss. Through its use of video analysis, extensive questionnaires, teacher journals, and classroom time studies, TIMSS has also demonstrated how to apply new research tools to the study of teaching practice. And TIMSS has developed new structures for engaging multiple countries in true, cross-national research, which in turn has stimulated new cross-national studies of real classroom interactions (Susan Fuhrman, University of Pennsylvania, TIMSS Policy Forum).
TIMSS raises several fascinating avenues for additional research. NCES will soon be releasing international results of a subset of performance-based items included in the TIMSS assessment. Multivariant analyses on the current TIMSS data base have yet to be done. State and local people could benefit from more detailed data about how TIMSS researchers coded the videotaped lessons; this kind of information could help educators develop a common language for analyzing classroom lessons. State and local people also express interest in video studies of fourth-grade lessons that would complement the eighth-grade video project.
TIMSS also points out the need for continuing research about what works--in other words, which practices and policies most effectively support systemic change. Right now state legislators get "mixed messages" about such critical policy issues as the educational value of reducing class size; they would like more definitive answers (Ron Cowell, Pennsylvania State Legislature, TIMSS Policy Forum).
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