The Importance of National Options in Iea International Comparative Studies: Exploring the Effects of Language Proficiency upon Secondary Students’ Performance in Timss’99 Mathematics in South Africa

Apart from the international comparative data and analysis that International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) studies traditionally provide, there is also an opportunity for countries to include national options that may enrich a country’s knowledge in a focus area. This paper reports on research that was conducted by including a national option in IEA’s TIMSS’99 and illustrates the potential and richness of such studies for individual countries. The research was a secondary analysis of the performance of the South African pupils in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study 1999 (TIMSS’99) in which pupils wrote tests in mathematics and science; in South Africa pupils also had to write an English test, which was included as a national option. The South African pupils’ performance in mathematics was significantly below that of all other participating countries including other developing countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Chile, Indonesia and the Philippines. This paper presents the final results of a three-year research project (Howie, 2002) and includes the final Partial Least Squares analysis and multilevel analysis of the effect of language and other contextual factors on mathematics at student and school level.