ABSTRACT
Recent evidence from international comparisons reveals that students in the United States tend to compete well with those in other countries at younger ages (e.g., grade 4), but as U.S. students age, their academic achievement scores lag behind those of their international contemporaries. For instance, results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which administers assessments to nationally representative samples of 15-year-olds, reveals that the average reading score for U.S. students did not differ from the overall average across countries, but nine countries had higher average scores: including Shanghai, South Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia (Fleischman, Hopstock, Pelczar, & Shelley, 2010). 2 Despite the many efforts in the United States to improve reading since 2000, student scores showed no measurable change in the 2009 PISA results. In mathematics, the 2009 PISA results show that among all participating OECD countries, 23 had higher average scores than the United States, 12 were similar, and 29 had lower average scores. In science, 18 countries had higher average scores than the United States.
