Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics - IEA

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TEACHER PAY AND STUDENT MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT
mathematics skills into the profession. But again, without a historical events analysis, it
is difficult to determine if the high mathematics skills were there before union impact
or if the high mathematics skills were the result of unions raising salaries and attracting
highly skilled individuals into teaching.
Keeping these complexities in mind, we estimated the relationship between the teacher/
scientist salary ratio and student performance on the mathematics portion of the TIMSS
and PISA tests. All of the countries for which we estimated relative teacher salaries had
participated in TIMSS 2003 or PISA 2003. We first needed to estimate a TIMSS score
and a PISA score for each of the 20 countries in our sample that participated in one or
other of the tests. Fourteen of the 20 countries participated in TIMSS and 11 in PISA. In
total, 17 countries in the world (including many not in our sample) participated in both
tests that year. From those 17 scores, we estimated a relationship between the scores and
used that relationship to estimate TIMSS scores for those countries in our sample where
students sat the PISA but not the TIMSS test. We also used the relationship to estimate
PISA scores for those countries in which the students sat the TIMSS test but not the
PISA. 6 Table 10 shows the average scores of students in each country in our sample. The
imputed TIMSS and PISA scores for 2003 are indicated in bold font.
Table 10: TIMSS and PISA Mathematics Scores, by Country, 2003
Country TIMSS Mathematics Scores PISA Mathematics Scores
Australia 505 524
Botswana 366 358
Bulgaria 476 460
Chile 387 377
Chinese Taipei 585 562
Finland 551 544
France 525 511
Germany 518 503
Hong Kong SAR 586 550
Italy 484 466
Korea 589 542
Mexico 424 385
Philippines 378 369
Singapore 605 581
Spain 504 485
Switzerland 537 527
Thailand 450 417
United Kingdom 498 481
United States 504 483
Source: TIMSS—Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, and Chrostowski (2004).
6 The estimated relationships were as follows:
R 2 = 0.73);
R 2 = 0.73).
When we developed estimates for the 1999 TIMSS score compared to the 2000 PISA score, based on the 22
countries that took both tests in those years, we found very similar results, although R 2 (0.70) was slightly lower.