Chapter 1: International Student Achievement in Mathematics

Exhibit 1.1 shows the distribution of student achievement for the participants in TIMSS 2007, including the average (mean) scale score with its 95 percent confidence interval and the ranges in performance for the middle half of the students (25th to 75th percentiles) as well as the extremes (5th and 95th percentiles). The first page of Exhibit 1.1 presents the distribution for the achievement for the 36 countries and 7 benchmarking participants at the fourth grade and the second page presents the distribution of student achievement for the 49 countries and 7 benchmarking participants at the eighth grade.1 For each grade in Exhibit 1.1, countries are shown in decreasing order of average (mean) scale score (with the exception of Morocco at the eighth grade2) followed by the benchmarking participants also ordered from highest to lowest average achievement. The benchmarking participants followed the same procedures and met the same standards as the countries, the difference being that they are regional entities (in some cases parts of