Every four years, The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) researches the mathematics and science achievement of students in the U.S. and other countries. In 1999, TIMSS tested eighth-grade students in 38 countries and found that the students in the Asian nation performed much better than their peers in the world in math achievement. Singapore, Korea, Taipei, Hong Kong and Japan had the highest mathematics achievement average scale score (Mullis et al. 32). Many Americans struggle with math skills. Reports have indicated that 58% of American adults don’t know how to calculate a tip for their waiter when they eat out, 71% don’t have the knowledge to calculate miles per gallon, 78% can’t calculate the in¬terest paid on
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Some students believe that they are not good at math because they are not talented in mathematics genetically. However, “Asian Americans, partculaly Chinese and Japanese Americans, achieve far beyond what their mean IQ would lead us to expect,” says James Flynn, an emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “For example, the post-war generation of Chinese Americans, those born from 1945 to 1949, had a mean IQ of 98.5 with Whites set at 100” (1). That is to say, Asians’ being good at math is not because of their birth with intelligence. So what’s the most important element for being good at math? Before students sit down and take the TIMSS test, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks things such as how often do you watch video games, are you born in the United States, do you have a computer in your home, etc. It’s not a math quiz. It’s about 120 questions long. It must be frustrating filling out the questionnaire. Some might leave several columns blank. Erling Boe compared the rankings of the questionnaire and that of math and found that there is a significant correlation between Student Task Persistence (STP) scores and math scores through analyses and statistics (Boe et al. 7). In other words, students, who are not willing to give up their math problems, perform better than those who easily give up …show more content…
When you can’t solve a math problem while others can, don’t blame yourself as not being good at math. Why you can’t answer it is because the language you use or you spent less time on math in the whole life compared with each of those who solved it. If you want to improve your math skills, what you have to do is to keep working on math. Anyone can be a math
Some students believe that they are not good at math because they are not talented in mathematics genetically. However, “Asian Americans, partculaly Chinese and Japanese Americans, achieve far beyond what their mean IQ would lead us to expect,” says James Flynn, an emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “For example, the post-war generation of Chinese Americans, those born from 1945 to 1949, had a mean IQ of 98.5 with Whites set at 100” (1). That is to say, Asians’ being good at math is not because of their birth with intelligence. So what’s the most important element for being good at math? Before students sit down and take the TIMSS test, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It asks things such as how often do you watch video games, are you born in the United States, do you have a computer in your home, etc. It’s not a math quiz. It’s about 120 questions long. It must be frustrating filling out the questionnaire. Some might leave several columns blank. Erling Boe compared the rankings of the questionnaire and that of math and found that there is a significant correlation between Student Task Persistence (STP) scores and math scores through analyses and statistics (Boe et al. 7). In other words, students, who are not willing to give up their math problems, perform better than those who easily give up …show more content…
When you can’t solve a math problem while others can, don’t blame yourself as not being good at math. Why you can’t answer it is because the language you use or you spent less time on math in the whole life compared with each of those who solved it. If you want to improve your math skills, what you have to do is to keep working on math. Anyone can be a math