Curriculum and Learning Gains in Mathematics: a Cross-country Analysis Using Timss

The unique contribution of international studies allows an examination of educational structure, curriculum, and policy frameworks from various countries and how these are related to cross national achievement differences. Measures of both the intended curriculum (derived from country standards and textbooks) and the implemented curriculum (derived from teacher questionnaires) were collected in a way to provide OTL measures in the same topics areas as represented by the 20 sub-test areas. Only three of the 20 tested areas – ‘relations of fractions’, ‘two dimensional geometry’, and ‘probability’ – demonstrated no statistically significant relationship to learning. Gain in the other 17 topic areas were significantly related to measures of the various curricular topics. Curriculum was related to learning in mathematics across countries in 17 of the 20 tested topic areas as measured by the TIMSS Population 2 test. Further, the relationships with gain involved different aspects of the curriculum for different topics but across the topics, all aspects of curriculum other than the content standards measure were represented. All of this has powerful implications for mathematics education and in particular for curriculum policy which is further discussed.