TIMSS MATHEMATICS RESULTS: A JAPANESE PERSPECTIVE

Japan has been a member country of IEA since the organization was first established and has participated in all of its mathematics studies: the first in 1964 (FIMS), the second in 1981 (SIMS), the third in 1995 (TIMSS), and most recently in 1999 (TIMSS-R). In addition, Japan has participated in several IEA studies of science education and computer education. Both the results and the methodology of the IEA studies (Robitaille et al., 1993; Robitaille & Garden, 1996) have had a strong impact on Japanese education. In this paper, the impact of the TIMSS results on the Japanese mathematics education are interpreted and discussed. Readers may find it helpful to read more on this topic in the chapter by Miyake and Nagasaki on Japan in The Impact of TIMSS on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Science (Robitaille, Beaton, & Plomp, 2000). LEARNING FROM THE FORMER IEA STUDIES OF MATHEMATICS Mathematics education has a long history in Japan (JSME, 2000). In recent years, lEA’s international mathematics studies have impacted on mathematics education in Japan in a number of ways. Japanese mathematics educators have paid particular attention to students' outcomes in the affective domain and to background information as well as achievement in the cognitive domain. FIMS revealed that higher-achieving Japanese students tended to think of mathematics as stable knowledge to be memorized (NIER, 1967). In response to this, national courses of study developed during the 1970s and 1980s stressed the developmental aspects of mathematics, now more commonly known as “mathematical ways of thinking.” SIMS revealed that Japanese students did not like mathematics and that they thought of mathematics as being irrelevant to society. It further revealed that calculators were not used in mathematics classrooms (NIER, 1981; NIER, 1982; NIER, 1983; NIER, 1991). The national courses of study developed in the 1990s therefore