IEA is a recognized pioneer of international assessments, having conducted
comparative studies of students’ academic achievement for 50 years.
However, even for IEA and its TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at
Boston College, TIMSS 2007 was a very complex and ambitious undertaking,
involving 67 participants (59 countries and 8 benchmarking entities) in a
cooperative, global endeavor to develop and implement a wide-ranging
assessment of mathematics and science achievement at fourth and eighth
grades, providing a wealth of information about the educational context
and current achievement of students in 2007, while measuring trends from
earlier cycles of TIMSS in 1995, 1999, and 2003.
The design, development, and implementation of TIMSS 2007 are
documented in a series of publications produced at various stages of the
project. The TIMSS 2007 Assessment Frameworks (Mullis, Martin, Ruddock,
O’Sullivan, Arora, & Erberber, 2005) contains the mathematics and science
frameworks underlying the assessments at the fourth and eighth grades as
well as the contextual framework for the questionnaires, and describes the
design of the assessment.
Implementing TIMSS 2007 involved widespread participation from
countries around the world, many of whom were collecting the third or
fourth cycle of trend data. The TIMSS 2007 International Mathematics
Report (Mullis, Martin, & Foy, 2008) and the TIMSS 2007 International
Science Report (Martin, Mullis, & Foy, 2008) summarize fourth-and eighthgrade
students’ mathematics and science achievement in each of the 59
participating countries and 8 benchmarking participants. The complete
TIMSS 2007 database is available on DVD accompanied by the TIMSS 2007
User Guide for the International Database (Foy & Olson, 2009).