Test Scores
American students’ math scores took a bigger hit from the pandemic than their peers overseas, according to a closely watched international exam.
U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students’ math performance on a big worldwide test fell between 2023 and 2019, the last time the test was administered. America’s rankings slipped relative to other countries.
The exam, called the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study or TIMSS, is a broad math and science assessment of fourth- and eighth-graders from the U.S. and dozens of other countries.
Research has linked school closures to greater learning loss, and the U.S. had a higher duration of at least partial school closures than many other countries, including all of Europe, according to a Unesco analysis. Still, at least one other big exam of high-schoolers, released last year, suggested U.S. learning loss wasn’t worse than its peers.
The stakes are high. Test scores predict economic success both for countries and individual students.
“I would call these declines sharp, steep,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of a statistical agency at the U.S. Department of Education, said in a call with reporters about the test data. The pandemic drops deepen slides that had already started, she said. “Something that we should be concerned about is that this isn’t just the impact of the pandemic.
U.S. scores were no better than when the tests were first given in 1995. In math, the recent declines wiped out years of gains. American science scores have fallen since 2015, although the latest drops from 2019 weren’t statistically significant.
