US students fare well in science on international test, study finds

WASHINGTON — Comparing American students to their international peers typically prompts hand-wringing over the failures of U.S. schools. But a new study shows that when compared to their foreign counterparts, U.S. eighth-graders attending public schools in 47 states are actually above average in science.

Americans also fare well in math, with students in 36 states above the international average.

The study by the federal National Center for Education Statistics used scores from American eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in 2011 to predict what their performance would be on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a highly respected gauge of academic ability.

Researchers used the actual TIMSS scores of students in nine U.S. states to test their predictions.

Although most U.S. states were above average, the study showed wide disparities among them. And even the U.S. state with the highest scores, Massachusetts, produces far fewer top-performing students than the top-ranked education systems: Nineteen percent of eighth-graders in Massachusetts were rated “advanced” in math, compared with about half the students in Taiwan, Korea and Singapore.

In 2011, students from more than 60 countries and subsections of countries participated in TIMSS.