2025探究因果理论：解读美国学生成绩趋势的四大关键要素报告

Testing Theories of Why Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Nat MalkusJANUARY 2025 Executive Summary Although national test scores provide clear evidenceon student achievement across time, they do not illu-minate what is driving gains or losses. Nonetheless,careful examination of test scores can corroborate performance should account for: a downward trendbeginning around 2013; declines driven by the bot-tom half of the distribution, both before and after thepandemic; higher absolute achievement gap growthin the US than other nations; and adult assessment This report examines recent trends in US studentachievement, as measured by national and interna-tional assessments, and identifies four key trends thatany satisfactory explanation of recent US student Testing Theories of Why Four Keys to Interpreting US Student Nat Malkus Once or twice a year, a familiar sequence of eventsrepeats itself: A new round of national test scoresare released. The results make the news because theyare new and because test scores are important. Andthen gallons of ink are spilled arguing why scoreschanged as they did. It’s cable TV, or MTV, or vio-lent video games, or the internet, or the phones. It’sthe teachers unions, or the parents, or the inactionof policymakers, or the meddling of No Child LeftBehind. It’s the advent of MySpace—no, Facebook—or Instagram, definitely TikTok. It’s the obesity epi- concerned with the effectiveness of the schools weinvest so much in, the trajectory of the childrenwe care for, or the future of the economy we depend However, although national test scores do providestrong evidence of student achievement across time,they are not great at telling us why students get thescores they do. Test scores tell us where studentsare academically, not why they are there. Nonethe-less, careful examination of test scores can provide In the wake of the pandemic, test score releasesmay be more important than ever. Two years ago,scores from the 2022 administration of the NationalAssessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—theself-styled“Nation’s Report Card”—showed just how National test scores are important. They pro-vide us with a big picture of student achievement atthe national level and tell us whether achievement While understandable, recent test scores suggestthat factors outside of school might play a consid-erable role. To wit, during the pandemic, test scoresdeclined significantly for American adults, the vastmajority of whom were not in school at any point NAEP, will help education researchers, pundits, andpolicymakers answer one of the biggest questionsin education right now: Are students and schoolsrecovering from COVID learning loss? But even that anodyne question includes atleast three implicit stories of student achievementthat, I argue in this report, are not supported bya careful analysis of recent test score trends. Thefirst implicit story is that declining student perfor-mance in recent years is solely attributable to the Changes to test scores are not easy to account for,and in this report I don’t try to. Instead, I look at testresults from a number of national and internationaltests and identify several patterns and trends that any In this report, I analyze longitudinal average andselected percentile scores from a range of nationallyrepresentative assessments spanning various sub-jects, grades, and age groups. The main NAEP assess-ments cover reading, math, science, and history forgrades four, eight, and 12 from 1992 to 2022. TheNAEPlong-term trend (LTT) assessments gaugereading and math for ages nine and 13 from 1978 to2022. The Trends in International Mathematics andScience Study (TIMSS) assesses science and mathfor grades four and eight from 1995 to 2003. The Pro-gram for International Student Assessment (PISA) Insofar as the pandemic was probably the big-gest disruption to American schooling in over a cen-tury, this story has a lot to recommend it. However,this story suffers from pandemic myopia, leading toa woefully incomplete picture of how performancehas declined in recent years and why. Indeed, aver-age test scores began declining well before the pan- The second implicit story is that things are get-ting much worse for all students. For good reason,average scores get the headlines, and averages havebeen trending downward. However, averages canmask what’s going on underneath, and over the pastdecade, test scores show a sharp divergence in how The third implicit story is that changes to stu-dent performance are the result of what happens inschools: Tests assess students on the skills they prac-tice in the classroom, and so changes to test scoressuggest changes to what happens in the classroom. Four Aspects of Recent Test Trends This section highlights four important aspects ofrecent trends in US tests and contains several figuresthat display many assessments together. I begin withone assessment, NAEPfourth-grademath, to demon-strate how I transform scores in this report