Spectacular findings comparing the national mathematics achievement of American students with those in other mostly Western nations have lately reached the news media. These mostly descriptive findings show that American students perform comparatively poorly: in the eighth grade they are at an achievement level that is only average among all nations; by the twelfth grade, far below average. This research proposes to undertake an analysis of these educational outcomes. This research will be using one of the sources of the much publicized findings -- the Second International Mathematics Study Data covering the mathematics interests and achievements of students from 32 countries, as well as measures of students' knowledge of material from the curriculum used by each teacher. But this research begins by merging this data with information on the institutional characteristics of each nation's education system, e.g., data on how centralized is the control of curricula and teachers, the basis on which students are assigned to the next leveling of schooling, types of schools, sizes of schools and of classes in which sampled individuals are placed, per capita expenditures, characteristics of post-secondary education systems and their linkage with secondary education and other relevant national data including rates of female labor force participation. As a result, the proposed analyses should provide a much improved understanding of the impact of the characteristics of national educational systems, as well as the characteristics of school, classroom and individual students on how well they learn mathematics.
