Tom Loveless has been analyzing international tests for many years. Before his retirement, he directed the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Previously he was a professor at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. And before that, he taught sixth grade in the public schools of California.
The news from TIMSS is that scores fell. Was the decline an after effect of the pandemic? We don’t know. There is much speculation but no certain answers.
Loveless writes:
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is given every four years in 4th and 8th grade math and science. Seventy-two countries participated in 2023. Scores are typically released in December of the year following test administration.International assessments are complicated by the sheer scope of the enterprise, including the fact that schools in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have different school calendars. The 2023 scores were released on December 4, 2024.
U.S. scores fell sharply from 2019 to 2023, with the declines reaching conventional levels of statistical significance in math, but not science, at both grade levels. Comparing pre- and post-pandemic scores on the same test heightened interest in what the 2023 TMSS would show. TIMSS scores are only one data point, but the 2023 results reinforce other trends evident in the other two assessments that are designed to produce valid estimates of achievement at the national level: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
Two trends stand out.
1. Larger negative effects in math than in other subjects. The most prominent explanation is that learning math is more dependent on formal instruction in schools.
2. Gaps increased between higher and lower scoring groups along several demographic dimensions, including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and the 90th and 10th percentiles (high and low achievers).Note that many of the gaps began widening before the pandemic, but Covid seemed to exacerbate thetrends.
In addition to the gaps that continued to widen, a gap that had disappeared in earlier TIMSS assessments suddenly re-appeared, the gap between male and female scores. In 8th grade math, for example, U.S. score differences by gender were statistically significant in 1999 and 2003, fell short of significance from 2007-2019, then widened substantially in 2023. The 14-point scale score difference recorded in 2023 (males, 495, and females, 481) is the largest U.S. gender gap in 8th grade math since TIMSS began in 1995.
The re-emergence of the gender gap is unique to TIMSS. Results of the 2024 NAEP are scheduled for release on January 29, 2025. We will see if NAEP confirms or contradicts the trends discussed here. There are reasons to believe NAEP will offer a more optimistic snapshot of U.S. achievement. First, the scores were collected a year after TIMSS, allowing for an additional year of pandemic recovery. Second, state assessments administered in 2024 have generally shown improvement, albeit at a slower pace than many hoped for or expected.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There has been much discussion about the correlation between income level and test performance here on this forum and elsewhere. Anyone who has read my comments knows I tend to be jaded about testing, but I got to thinking about my experience giving tests and evaluating their results during my tenure as a teacher from 1987-2022 in a small, rural school. I think I can explain why the correlation exists.
It begins with a personal story. I grew up on a small dairy farm that was not very profitable. About the time my father had begun to see some profit, he suffered a brain tumor and was disabled for the rest of his 16 years. From the time I was 15, I was the bread winner along with my older brother, keeping the dairy in case my father ever got well enough to go back to it. He did not. The major part of our income was his social security, a few soybeans, my mother’s music pupils, and the dairy.
Throughout that experience I never thought of myself in terms of class, however, even when a local private school paid for my matriculation there among very wealthy people. I was sort of a folk hero, since I was in high school when it was popular to be poor and “of the people.”
Then I graduated from college and found myself unable to get a teaching job. Wanting to travel, I took a job with a company that ran cameras through sewer pipes. For a year I traveled from city to town, spending my days with the things people flush down. It became really obvious to me that I inhabited a very low rung on the ladder of society.
The self image I developed during this time made me act in ways that were not really good for me. Even though I was earning a much larger piece of the economic pie than I had ever earned farming, there were aspects of life that told me negative things about who I was. I took more risks. I cared for others less. When I did get a job teaching (at a 50% pay reduction) I remembered that feeling.
This experience, along with the thousands of students I have taught, suggest to me that performance on these tests is related more to the degree of positive thought processes students are accustomed to using. If they consume a negative self worth from society the way I did for that year, tests become meaningless. No amount of pizza party, academic pep rally, or test prep package will ever make a student try on a test. If you have the image of yourself that is positive, as I have for most of my life, tasks become challenges, things to compete with. If you work in the sewer, what the heck.
It is important to admit that I am a Caucasian male, with a naturally assumed place in society. If I felt the way I did, how much more difficult will it be for people in subgroups places on lower social rungs of our ladder?
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TIMSS = Totally Invalid Mental Side Show.
What we should learn from TIMSS?
That, like all standardized testing, TIMSS is nothing more than onanistic mental masturbation that is a waste of time, energy and monies.
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