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Reporting Student Achievement
TIMSS 2019 provides a comprehensive picture of the mathematics and science achievement of fourth and eighth grade students in each participating country. This includes achievement in each of the content and cognitive domains (as defined in Chapters 1 and 2) as well as overall mathematics and science achievement. Consistent with the goal of comprehensive subject coverage, the complete TIMSS 2019 assessment consists of a large pool of mathematics and science questions (known as items) at each grade level. However, to keep the assessment burden on any one student to a minimum, each student is presented with only a sample of the items, as described in the next section. Following data collection, student responses to the items in each assessment are aggregated and converted to the TIMSS mathematics and science scale metrics at each grade level to provide an overall picture of the assessment results for each country.
One of the major strengths of TIMSS is its measurement of trends over time in mathematics and science achievement. The TIMSS achievement scales provide established metrics on which countries can compare students’ progress in mathematics and science from assessment to assessment at the fourth and eighth grades. The TIMSS mathematics and science achievement scales were created with the first TIMSS assessment in 1995, separately for each subject and each grade. The scale units were established so that 100 points on the scale was equivalent to one standard deviation of the distribution of achievement across all of the countries that participated in TIMSS 1995, and the scale midpoint of 500 was located at the mean of this international achievement distribution. The TIMSS achievement scales were first used for reporting TIMSS results with TIMSS 1995, and all results from subsequent TIMSS assessments have been reported on the same scale metrics, making it possible to measure growth or decline in countries’ achievement distributions from assessment to assessment.
Using items that were administered in both 1995 and 1999 assessments as a basis for linking the two sets of assessment results, the TIMSS 1999 data also were placed on the scales so that countries could gauge changes in students’ mathematics and science achievement since 1995. This was done separately for mathematics and science and for fourth and eighth grades. Using similar procedures, the data from TIMSS 2003, TIMSS 2007, TIMSS 2011, and TIMSS 2015 were placed on the TIMSS scales, as will be the data from TIMSS 2019. This will enable TIMSS 2019 countries that have participated in TIMSS since its inception to have comparable achievement data from 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, 2011, 2015, and 2019, and to plot changes in performance over this 24 year period.
As previously mentioned, in addition to the achievement scales for mathematics and science overall, TIMSS 2019 will construct scales for reporting relative student performance in each of the mathematics and science content and cognitive domains defined in the TIMSS 2019 Assessment Frameworks. More specifically, in mathematics at the fourth grade there will be three content scales, corresponding to the three content domains—number, measurement and geometry, and data display—and four at the eighth grade—number, algebra, geometry, and data and probability. In science, there also will be three content scales at fourth grade—life science, physical science, and Earth science—and four at the eighth grade—biology, chemistry, physics, and Earth science. The TIMSS 2019 Assessment Frameworks also specify three cognitive domains— knowing, applying, and reasoning—which span the mathematics and science content at both grades. Reporting scales will be constructed for each cognitive domain in mathematics and science at each grade level.