User Guide for the TIMSS International Database.pdf - TIMSS and ...

C H A P T E R 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N
1.6 Management and Operations of TIMSS
TIMSS is managed by the International Study Center at Boston College in the United States.
The TIMSS International Study Center was responsible for supervising all aspects of the
design and implementation of the study at the international level, including development and
design of the study, data collection instruments, and operational procedures; data analysis;
reporting the international results; and quality assurance.
Several important TIMSS functions, including test and questionnaire development, translation
checking, sampling consultations, data processing, and data analysis, were conducted by
centers around the world, under the direction of the TIMSS International Study Center. The
IEA Data Processing Center (DPC), located in Hamburg, Germany, was responsible for
checking and processing all TIMSS data and for constructing the international database. The
DPC played a major role in developing and documenting the TIMSS field operations
procedures. Statistics Canada, located in Ottawa, Canada, was responsible for advising National
Research Coordinators (NRCs) on their sampling plans, for monitoring progress in all aspects
of sampling, and for the computation of sampling weights. The Australian Council for
Educational Research (ACER), located in Melbourne, Australia, has participated in the
development of the achievement tests, has conducted psychometric analyses of field trial data,
and was responsible for the development of scaling software and for scaling the achievement
test data. The International Coordinating Center (ICC), in Vancouver, Canada, was responsible
for international project coordination prior to the establishment of the International Study
Center in August 1993. Since then, the ICC has provided support to the International Study
Center, and in particular has managed translation verification in the achievement test
development process; and has published several monographs in the TIMSS monograph
series. As Sampling Referee, Keith Rust of Westat, Inc. (United States), worked with Statistics
Canada and the NRCs to ensure that sampling plans met the TIMSS standards, and advised the
International Study Director on all matters relating to sampling.
TIMSS was conducted in each country by the TIMSS National Research Coordinator (NRC)
and the national research center. NRCs and their staff members were responsible for carrying
out the TIMSS data collection, scoring, and data entry, and contributing to the study design
and development, and the analysis plans.
The Acknowledgments section contains information about the management and operations of
TIMSS, the National Research Coordinators, and the TIMSS advisory committees.
1.7 Additional Resources
Although this User Guide is intended to provide secondary analysts with sufficient
information to conduct analyses on the TIMSS data, some users may want additional
information about TIMSS. Further documentation on the study design implementation, and
analysis can be found in these publications:
• TIMSS: Quality Assurance in Data Collection (Martin and Mullis, 1996)
• TIMSS Technical Report, Volume I: Design and Development (Martin and Kelly,
1996)
• TIMSS Technical Report, Volume II: Implementation and Analysis (Martin and
Kelly, 1997)
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