“There is a declining environment,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which is responsible for administering TIMSS in this country. Carr said that group of students has been pulled to the bottom, a pattern she’s seen in different tests and different subjects since the pandemic.
US 4th graders on TIMSS, 1995–2023, by student percentiles
Another way to understand the shrinking environment is to look at how few American children meet basic math benchmarks. The test found that 13 percent of fourth-graders could not add and subtract numbers with up to three digits, multiply and divide single-digit numbers, and solve simple word problems. In 2019, the last time the test was administered, only 7 percent of fourth graders couldn’t handle these basics. In 2023 32 percent of American fourth graders couldn’t reach the second of four levels, called “intermediate,” meaning they couldn’t multiply three-digit numbers, add decimals or measure straight distances. In other words, one-third of fourth graders struggle with grade-level math.
England, Germany and Portugal had more students reaching and surpassing these two bottom levels. (Click here to see how many fourth graders in each country reached the four levels: low, intermediate, high, and advanced.)
“Reducing the environment is something that sets the United States apart,” Carr said. Although the decline in the middle was most pronounced in fourth-grade math, Carr said she saw a similar decline in the skills of the average U.S. adult, ages 16-65, at another international assessment for 2023also released this month.
The increasing bifurcation of math skills between a small cluster at the top and a growing cluster at the bottom, with a dent in the middle, reflects the distribution of income among US households. “It looks like society,” said Goldhaber, a labor economist who worries that academic losses caused by the pandemic will make it harder for many young Americans to earn a good living. “They predict greater inequality in the future,” he said.
The math skills of even the highest-scoring eighth graders have deteriorated
The math story with eighth graders is different from that of fourth graders. The achievement gap between the lowest performing students and the highest performing eighth graders has not increased. But the math scores of the top students fell dramatically, 50 percent more than those at the bottom.
It is not clear what is behind the decline.
These eighth graders were in fifth grade when the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020. Despite tutoring and extra help at home, many students in the upper 90th percentile do not appear to have mastered math skills in middle school as well as previously high-achieving eighth graders.
These results show the importance of learning math in school as children get older, and how difficult it is even for affluent families to make up for missed classroom time.
The gender gap is emerging again
American boys have historically done better than girls in math. This gender gap disappeared in 2015. among eighth graders. But as scores plummeted, the gender gap reappeared in 2023. The gender gap never disappeared in fourth-grade math, but in 2023. boys outscored girls by the largest margin ever.
Boys again outperformed girls in eighth grade math
Historical difference between boys and girls in fourth grade mathematics
“Crazy” models around the world
William Schmidt, a professor at Michigan State University, has studied international assessments for decades and has analyzed mathematics curriculum around the world. He called the 2023 TIMSS results. “the craziest” he’s seen, and said it’s hard to make sense of the mixed results. Some high-scoring nations fell significantly but remained at the top. Meanwhile, students in Turkey, never a high-performing nation, suddenly rose to the top tier. It will take time to figure out what that means. (Here they are international rankings for fourth grade and eighth grade math.)
Students in Sweden, who kept schools open during the pandemic, posted sharply higher math scores between 2019 and 2019. and 2023 Theirs fourth graders hit a record. Still, the analysts were unable to say whether shorter school closures were consistently associated with higher math gains. Sometimes the results moved in opposite directions within the same country. For example English the fourth graders slipped while on the side eighth graders improved. Covid closures were similar for both groups of students. Schmidt says it will take more time for researchers to collect this data and analyze it. (Here are the historical math scores from 1995 to 2023 for each nation among fourth and eighth folders.)
Calculating the Covid effect
Another mystery is how much of the decline in math scores in the US is due to Covid and how much is due to other problems in US math education. It should be noted that math scores for US fourth graders have been declining since 2011. this way. Eighth graders post lower math scores since 2015. this way. Perhaps they would continue to decline between 2019. and 2023 if the pandemic had never happened.
Reasons for hope
Dishearteningly, the United States consistently ranks far behind the top 10 nations in math. (In the 2023 TIMSS, American eighth graders are ranked 22nd out of 44 countries and subnational regions.)
Still, there are 360,000 American eighth graders in the top 10 percent who have the most advanced of four levels. Just average students in top-performing Singapore do just as well, but there are only 33,000 eighth-graders in the city-state in total, according to Tom Loveless, an independent researcher who studies international assessments. Some of these advanced American students may eventually develop skills to cure cancer or find a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels. Some will start companies and drive the American economy.
“One lesson from this is that the sheer size of the United States makes up for a lot,” Loveless said. “We produce 360,000 kids every year who go to high school, and they know a tremendous amount of math.”
Another potential bright spot is that this TIMSS test was administered in the spring of 2023, a year and a half ago. Since then, several state tests in 2024. show that students recover, even if only by a small amount. Spring 2024 results are in New York, Florida and California. “Forty years from now, we may see these TIMSS scores as the lowest, representing the full impact of the pandemic,” Loveless said. “We may have progress from here.”
If there is a rebound, we should be able to find it in the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which was administered earlier this year. These results are expected to be published in early 2025. I will follow them.
Contact the staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.
