And the results are:

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that the latest TIMSS scores were due out on December 8. Well, that day has come and gone, and you can hear a summary of the U.S. result at NPR's All Thing's Considered. We've shown slight improvement in math, it's true. If you take a look at the summary reports, though, you'll see that we're still positively average; and that's not average based on the most powerful countries. That's average based on all kinds of big and little countries.

From 2007 TIMSS
Table 1. Average mathematics scores of fourth- and eighth-grade students, by country: 2007
Table 3. Average science scores of fourth- and eighth-grade students, by country: 2007

Perhaps more significantly, some countries, like New Zealand and Australia, whose results were lower than the US in this measure, surpassed the US appreciably in the last PISA (a standardized test encompassing more countries) test. That would seem to mean that those countries are stronger in some areas (content gets divided up as a measure of fact knowledge, "explaining phenomena", or using scientific knowledge), and weaker in others, while the US is . . . average.

People homeschool for lots of different reasons, but I'm willing to make a bet that most of them aren't doing it with the idea of "average" as the outcome. I also know lots of moms and dads feel a little intimidated by science or math, but few of them would argue their importance. Next time you sit down to evaluate your science and math curricula, take some extra time to make sure that they measure up to something better than AVERAGE.

Do you want to see what's on these tests? Check out this page at Ediformatics to take a sample version.