ABSTRACT
Among the 21 nations in the study, American high school seniors came in 16th in general science knowledge and 19th in general math skills. In physics, they were dead last in a field of 16. The US performance was actually worse than it looked because Asian nations, which do particularly well in these comparisons, were not involved in this study. Otherwise America might have been fighting for 39th or 40th place in a 41-nation field. About the IQs: no one knows for certain why they are rising, but one factor is surely the growing visual sophistication of each new crop of students. The new survey is the Third International Math and Science study. It found that US fourth-graders did fairly well on math and science and US eighth-graders were mediocre or poor—they ranked in the middle of the pack on science and below the international average in math.
