Boey Kok Leong an - NIE Digital Repository

Singapore Students’ Trend in the Performance in Mathematics by GenderIn TIMSS 2003 and 2007Boey Kok LeongNIE, Nanyang Technological Universitykokleong.boey@nie.edu.sgJaguthsing DindyalNIE, Nanyang Technological Universityjaguthsing.dindyal@nie.edu.sgAbstractIn this study we report the secondary analysis of the gender-related data from theTrends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 2003 and 2007 (TIMSS2003 & 2007) for Singapore students in Mathematics. It was noted that girls inSingapore performed significantly better than boys in TIMSS 2007 at both grades 4 and8 in mathematics. Similar results for mathematics were obtained in the TIMSS 2003whereby, in addition, girls from Singapore performed better than boys in all reportedcontent domains at grades 4 and 8.Keywords: TIMSS 2007 Grade 8, TIMSS 2003 Grade 4, Mathematics, GenderIn 2000, gender equality became one of the eight United Nations MillenniumDevelopment Goals. As such, gender has emerged internationally as a social andpolitical issue (Adams, 2002). It is important to mention that we look at gender not onlyfrom the perspective of females but also as a male issue. We shall take a closer lookat the performance of grade 4 students in 2003 and grade 8 students four years later.In this presentation, we report the secondary analysis of the Mathematics data forSingapore from the TIMSS International Data Base and the International TIMSS Report(Mullis, Martin, & Foy, 2008), with a focus on gender. TIMSS 2003 data were used toprovide for comparison of the data from TIMSS 2007 (see Mullis, Martin, & Foy, 2004).Also, for an overview of the gender perspective we included the gender related fromthe top-five performing countries in mathematics. In our analysis, we looked into theoverall performance in mathematics of the students and their performance by genderwithin content domains and cognitive domains at grade 4 in 2003 and grade 8 in 2007.Students’ self-confidence was also examined from a gender perspective. The samplein the analyses presented were responses from the international databases from thesetwo studies. SAS was utilised to compute various statistics and the correspondingstandard errors. The performance by gender of the students on the TIMSS 2003 and2007 mathematics items was also examined. In addition, we look at achievementitems from each of the content domains for significant differences in performance bystudent gender, paying particular attention to the trend items.DataTIMSS surveyed students in their fourth and eighth years of school. The datacollected from the students and their teachers provided an opportunity to investigateresults by gender for both Mathematics and Science. The TIMSS 2003 (Martin, 2005)and 2007 data (Foy & Olson, 2009) has been used in the analysis of the results of thispaper. A word of caution is appropriate here; since, the sampling of the teachers inTIMSS 2003 and 2007 were based on participating students (i.e. the Mathematics andScience teachers of the sampled students were sampled), teachers’ responses did notnecessarily represent all teachers of each grade. The responses only representedteachers of the representative samples of students assessed.