At a panel discussion Wednesday with five former governors rebutting critics of the Common Core State Standards, BRT President John Engler offered several slides that illustrated how students in many countries are doing much better in answering math questions than U.S. students. Much better ...
The slides draw on the results of the Programme for International Student Assessments, an arm of the OECD that surveys 15-year-old students around the globe, and The TIMSS 2011 International Results in Mathematics, which surveys 8th graders.
Here they are.
The question:
The answer.
Eighty-six percent of Japanese eighth-graders answered correctly, but only 24 percent of U.S. students did!
Here's another, this asked of 15-year-olds.
A simple matter of multiplication, right? The answer:
Nearly half of American 15-year-olds cannot multiply?
Finally, just one slide. It involves the ability to read a simple bar chart.
Forty-one percent of U.S. 15-year-olds cannot glean through the information and figure out a bar chart.
These are good test questions because they require a student to examine the information and then assess what really matters. Call it "critical thinking," the ablility to analyze -- exactly what the Common Core State Standards stress.