TIMSS 2007 is an international mathematics and science assessment conducted at the fourth and eighth grade and is designed to measure trends in children’s mathematics and science achievement and to collect information about the policy and practices related to learning mathematics and science. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) is a large-scale assessment providing internationally comparative data in order to help countries making informed decisions about mathematics and science education. Inaugurated in 1995 and conducted on a regular 4-year cycle, TIMSS assesses students’ mathematics and science achievement in primary school (fourth grade in most countries) and secondary school (mostly eighth grade). The results for the fourth cycle, TIMSS 2007, have been released in December 2008 and are the focus of this paper. Altogether, 59 educational systems and 8 benchmarking participants (regional entities) around the world participated in the TIMSS 2007 assessment. Complementing the students’ achievement results, TIMSS collected information about key factors related to students’ home and school environments by administering questionnaires to the tested students, their teachers, and school principals. The TIMSS 2007 Assessment Frameworks (Mullis, I.V.S. et al., 2007) is the basis for the TIMSS 2007 assessment of mathematics and science in fourth and eighth grades. The foundations for the TIMSS assessment are different content domains specified for mathematics and science. Additionally, TIMSS defines a set of cognitive domains outlining the skills and abilities associated with the cognitive dimension: · Knowing: covers facts, procedures, and concepts · Applying: focuses on the ability of students to apply knowledge, and · Reasoning: covers unfamiliar situations, complex content, and multi-step problems. · The first part of the presentation is intended to provide an overview of the purpose and methods of the TIMSS assessment. This part also presents and discusses a summary of the methodological challenges that are faced by this and other IEA assessments that must be considered when analyzing the data. The second part gives an overview of some of the uses that are made of the information collected by these programs to improve quality of education, and a discussion of the additional uses that could be made of the information. This part also summarizes the major results of the most recent assessment cycle, TIMSS 2007. - --- continues in Methodology---

--- For the TIMSS assessment, a total of 4,500 to 6,000 students were tested in each participating country. The TIMSS sampling approach used a stratified, multistage, cluster-sampling technique. In this approach, schools are sampled in the first stage while (usually) intact classrooms are selected in the second stage. Sampling weights are used in order to take into account the characteristics of the sample and the selection procedure. Student achievement on the entire assessment is measured by a three-parameter Item Response Theory (IRT) model. Resulting achievement estimates are conditional on student responses to the achievement items and student background characteristics and are based on an imputation process. As there is some error inherent in this imputation process, generally five estimates or “plausible values” are calculated for each student on each of the mathematics and science scales and its subscales. ---continues in Conclusions---

--- It is intended to give a short overview on some major results in the field of mathematics and science achievement and factors associated with high achievement presented in the TIMSS 2007 International Reports.