The Cabinet, at its meetng on Wednesday, should form an inquiry to ascertain why Malaysia had not taken part in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) - the largest, most comprehensive, reliable and important international study of educational outcomes ever undertaken in the world involving 45 countries, more than 15,000 participating schools and more than half a million students.
This is a grave omission and oversight for Malaysia which wants to build a world-class educational system and become an international centre of educational excellence, as it reflects poorly on Malaysia’s educational system.
TIMSS is not just a “horse -race” among nations to judge the relative ranking of student scores among the 45 participating countries, but even more imporant, a major source of information for discussion of the quality of education around the world.
TIMSS, which has just released its first major report, will not only measure student achievement in mathematics and science internationally and on cross-national attainments of different educational systems, it will also investigate differences in curriculum and instruction.
This is because the design of the ambitious cross-nation TIMSS is meant to produce unprecedented amounts and kinds of information that will be helpful to educators, parents and policymakers when it comes to thinking about effective strategies for improving school mathematics and science education.
All over the world, policymakers are focussing more attention on the areas of science and mathematics achievements of their education system, as these factors are seen as strongly linked with economic development during a time of rapid and pervasive technological development.
Malaysia should not be an exception, and it is a great national loss and shame that Malaysia could not have benefitted from TIMSS in providing a new boost to science and mathematics education in Malaysia.
Malaysians are entitled to know why Malaysia had not participated in TIMSS which would have also provided us with an excellent opportunity to compare the attainments of our students in these two subjects with students in the rest of the world.
TIMSS is conducted by the Dutch-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IAE) and the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP). The IAE and IAEP had conducted two previous international surveys on science and mathematics achievements on cross-national attainments of different educational systems, the first one in 1964 and the second one in the 1980s - but Malaysia had not participated in anyone of these international surveys.
My parliamentary office had written to the IEA in Amsterdam, the Netherlands to inquire as to how a country could take part in its international educational survey, and this is the reply from the IEA Co-ordinator for Professional Studies, Dr. Barbara Malak-Minkiewicz:
“I also would like to inform you that every country can participate in the IEA surveys (even a country that is not an IEA member). The research institute interested in this should however have a strong research tradition, working relationship with national policy makers and access to funds: study participants should be able to cover national costs of the study and to contribute to the costs of international co-ordination”.
In the first major report on TIMSS released only last month, Singapore was the top-performing country in both science and mathematics at both the seventh and eight grades. For science, the five top-performing countries included Japan and Korea; while for mathematics, the five top-performing countries included Japan, Korea and Hong Kong.
How would have Malaysian students fared in TIMSS? If Malaysia is not even prepared to participate in such an international study to test the mathematics and science knowledge of our students in comparison with their peers in the rest of the world, how can Malaysia become an international centre for educational excellence?
(15/12/96)