Comparative international assessments of academic achievement consistently indicate that US students trail behind many peers, particularly those from east Asia, in math and science. Traditional efforts to explain this finding have focused on identifying characteristics that might differentiate the United States from top-performing countries.…

Teachers learn a lot about learning and teaching from dialogue with each other. Association for Science Education (ASE) meetings and other science conferences are ideal ways of coming into contact with other professionals to engage in dialogue. One special dimension of that contact is encountering overseas colleagues. Authors Brenda Keogh and…

Since 2010, annually updated data on instruction time has been available on the Eurydice website. Given the great similarities between the two data collections, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurydice networks have decided to produce one single data collection tool and conjointly manage the data collection on…

Based on the data gathered and the interviews with administrators, the author makes the following suggestions. These twelve recommendations are targeted primarily toward educators wanting to strengthen their own mathematics and science offerings, possibly by establishing a school-within-a school or launching a charter school. The recommendations…

The globalized nature of modern society has generated a number of pressures that impact internationally on countries' policies and practices of science education. Among these pressures are key issues of health and environment confronting global science, global economic control through multi-national capitalism, comparative and competitive…

Weighted student funding (WSF) is used in several U.S. cities as a method for providing more funds to schools with high concentrations of disadvantaged students. The practice has been used successfully in the Netherlands since 1985. Several factors make the success of the Dutch system unlikely to transfer to the United States, including the Dutch…

U.S. students spend too little time and effort on academics in high school, compared with harder-working young people in China and India, according to a new documentary being shown to "thought leaders" in states holding presidential primaries this winter. The documentary, conceived and financed by high-tech entrepreneur Robert A.…

American officials lament U.S. students' mediocre skills in math and science, and warn that China, with its firm academic emphasis on those subjects and its enormous student population, stands to reap economic rewards from American complacency. They suggest reforming math and science education in the U.S. to more closely resemble the systems…