Kuwaiti Students’ Achievements in Mathematics: Findings From the TIMSS Assessments: Reality and Reasons

Abstract

Kuwait, has participated in international TIMSS test for many years, however, there has been little systematic effort to compile and assess changes between genders. This study attempts to look at the results of Kuwaiti students on the TIMSS mathematics assessments in general and according to gender in particular and the views of supervisors on the relatively low performance of Kuwaiti students. The study employed a mixed method approach in which data analysis of test results, IEA-issued documents, and statistics and official reports were used. Two focus group interviews were conducted with a convenience sample of nine educational supervisors from mathematics and science. The results show that the performance of Kuwaiti students in both the fourth and eighth grades was extremely low on the TIMSS mathematics assessments in general and in content areas in particular, since the first participation in 1995, even though the performance of eighth graders showed a slight improvement in 2015 in all areas. The TIMSS results also show that the higher the level of thinking that was assessed, the lower the performance of Kuwaiti students was. The data indicate that throughout all years, Kuwaiti girls outperformed boys, considering the slight improvement especially in 2015, yet both performances lagged behind international norms. Focus group transcript analysis reveals that supervisors perceived that students’ low performance on the TIMSS assessment test is related to a number of reasons as lack of interest in TIMSS test, unfamiliarity with TIMSS questions, and students’ weakness in the Arabic language. The paper concludes the need to systematically evaluate the TIMSS results, and develop interventions and a competent national curriculum in Kuwait.

Science teachers’ perceptions of pedagogical learning theories in relation to their classroom practices

“…However, male and female students are taught in separate schools in cycle 2 (grades 5 to 10) and post basic education (grades 11-12) and the teachers can be male or female. These results aligned with those of Kuwait, a neighboring country of Oman, where the TIMSS results indicated that Kuwaiti girls outperformed boys (Al-Mutawa et al, 2021). However, our results contradicted those of a study concerning gender differences by Beijaard et al (2000), who found that relatively more male than female teachers perceived themselves as having good pedagogical content knowledge.…”

International comparative study of learning trajectories based on TIMSS 2019 G4 data on cognitive diagnostic models

“…Mathematics, as one of the core tests of TIMSS, has also been widely studied. For example, research data collected using TIMSS reveal that girls in Kuwait outperformed boys in Mathematics ( Al-Mutawa et al, 2021 ), students’ achievement in TIMSS has a significant linear relationship with variables related to school factors ( Wardat et al, 2022 ), and the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and TIMSS-results in mathematics has two mediators among Norwegian fifth graders ( Østbø and Zachrisson, 2022 ). These studies either focus on the factors that affect TIMSS scores or the impact of TIMSS scores on society and education, but few studies analyze TIMSS projects, especially exploring the deep-level mining of information presented by Mathematics Content Domains in TIMSS.…”