Objectives

Educational reforms and initiatives in many countries around the world are aimed at narrowing achievement gaps between important demographic groups.  For example, findings from the PISA 2000, which ranked Germany’s school system 21st (out of 32 participating countries) (OECD, 2001), vigorously challenged the highly tracked German secondary education system. Specifically, PISA findings indicated that students in general and vocational tracks were far behind their academically tracked peers. In response to a call by German educationalists and policy makers to close the achievement gap of the lowest performing students (Grek, 2009), reforms included nation-wide education standards and a four-billion euros expansion of all-day schooling, and other initiatives intended to equalize education throughout the country (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, n.d.).

Few would argue that providing quality education for all students and raising achievement for low performers is critically important; however, a recent study (Plucker, Burroughs, & Song, 2010) showed that in the U.S., gaps between high achieving students from certain demographic groups continue to grow. These findings suggest that not all students are being provided with the resources needed to reach their full educational potential. Importantly, neglecting or under-serving groups of high performing students might have long-term economic consequences (Dillon, 2010; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2009). As such, it is important to understand whether gaps among the highest performing groups exist and whether these gaps are growing over time. 

Theoretical framework

The investigation of excellence gaps is a relatively new area of inquiry with, to our knowledge, no international investigations regarding the current state of excellence gaps around the world. As such, this paper aims to analyze data from all four cycles of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement’s (IEA’s) flagship study, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for the presence of excellence gaps in mathematics and science internationally. To this end, we concentrate our analysis on traditionally under-represented demographic groups, including girls, students with an immigration background, and students from less educated families.

Our study seeks to extend recent U.S.-focused excellent gap work (Plucker, Burroughs, & Song, 2010) to include an international focus. To that end, we examine excellence gaps in mathematics and science achievement in 16 countries that participated in all four TIMSS cycles (1995, 1999, 2003, and 2007). In particular, we examine the proportion of students from demographic groups that achieve at the TIMSS advanced benchmark (discussed subsequently) at each of four study cycles. That is, we compare the proportion of high achieving students in the focus group of interest (e.g. girls) to the proportion of high achieving students in the associated reference group (e.g. boys). We then examine changes in these proportions over time. Given several time points and a relatively long time span from a policy perspective (12 years), changes in these proportions provide evidence internationally of the expansion or contraction of excellence gaps in math and science. 

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