The National Center for Education Statistics is responsible for the collection and distribution of U.S. data for international education comparison efforts conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. AIR supports these efforts through technical assistance and expert measurement advice, including input on study design, analysis, reporting, and dissemination, and reviewing of reports for several international assessments.

International Benchmarking: State Education Performance Standards provides policymakers international benchmarks against which they can compare and monitor the educational performance of students.

This special analysis examines the performance of U.S. students in reading, mathematics, and science compared with the performance of their peers in other countries that participated in PIRLS, PISA, and TIMSS in terms of students’ average scores and the percentage of students reaching internationally benchmarked performance levels.

In June of 2009, AIR released a new international grading index. Watch a video of the panel discussion with Gary Phillips Dane Linn, Douglas Levin and Mitch Chester.

In June of 2009, AIR released a new international grading index. Watch a video of the report presentation.

This report describes how the education system in the United States compares with education systems in the other G-8 countries--Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian Federation, and the United Kingdom.

In a highly interconnected world, the students served by urban school systems—the subject of this report—will require strong mathematic skills to compete against their peers around the globe. Reports such as Counting on the Future help policymakers and educators to know how well they are doing in meeting this challenge and to track progress over time.

The paper argues that the United States needs to substantially increase the scientific and mathematical competency of the general adult population so that the voting citizenry can better understand and reach a consensus on policies that address many of the world’s most pressing problems.

This report uses data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) assessment and summarizes the performance of U.S. students.

This paper links the scale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to the scale of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The purpose of this linking is to project the NAEP achievement levels onto the TIMSS scale.

This report compares the content of two science assessments for grades 4 and 8, and provides information useful for interpreting and comparing results from the two assessments, based on an in-depth look at the content of the respective frameworks and assessment items.

This study reexamines the TIMSS and PISA results to correct this comparison bias by analyzing U.S. mathematics performance relative to a common set of 12 countries that participated in all three assessments.

This paper is a contribution to test translation review. It provides a conceptual framework for the coding of translation errors, and provides some empirical evidence on the effect of translation errors on student performance.

Singaporean students ranked first in the world in mathematics on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)-2003; U.S. students ranked 16th out of 46 participating nations at grade 8. This exploratory study compares key features of the Singapore and U.S. mathematics systems in the primary grades, when students need to build a strong mathematics foundation.