In what is perhaps a sign of the growing maturity of the field of school research, scholars from around the world yesterday announced plans to form the first World Education Research Association.

The 25 groups that make up the organization represent more 60,000 researchers from six continents. The member groups come from, among other nations, Australia, the U.K., Mexico, Pakistan, Japan, Singapore, Peru, Turkey, Germany, and, of course, the United States, which has the largest and possibly the oldest education research group in the world. And, unlike some other international scholarly groups, this one will include both specialty groups, such as the Spanish Society of Pedagogy, and groups like the Nordic Education Research Association, which represent regions of the world.

Felice J. Levine, AERA's executive director, is the interim secretary general for the

group and Ingrid Gogolin, an education professor from the University of Hamburg in
Germany, will be the interim president.

There are no plans now for publishing any academic journals or holding any world congresses on education research. (If you think AERA meetings are overwhelming, can you imagine what would it be like at a convention for this group?)

What the association does plan to do, however, is spark the formation of international working groups on particular topics, collaborate on issues of common interest, and synthesize findings from around the world, among other activities. A Web site is already up and running and the group's first meeting of organizational leaders is scheduled to take place next week in Vienna.

Levine says the collaboration was the idea of Eva L. Baker, who was AERA's president in 2006-07, and its development was two years in the making. The group's headquarters will be wherever the secretary general is, which, for now, is in Washington.

Photo of Felice J. Levine courtesy of WERA.

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Mark Schneider, the former statistics czar for the U.S. Department of Education, offers an interesting critique in Education Next of efforts afoot to enlist states to participate on their own in international assessments, such as TIMSS and PISA. (For the uninitiated, TIMSS stands for the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment.) Schneider writes:

What would be gained if, in addition to the nation as a whole, individual states were to participate directly in these assessments by testing a much larger and more representative sample of students? Not as much as many advocates would have us believe, and probably not enough to justify the considerable cost.

He offers two reasons for his skepticism. First, it's likely that most states won't have much to crow about in the results. Studies that use existing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to link student achievement in states to that of other countries have shown that even the best states can't match high-performing Chinese Taipei or Korea.

Second, he writes, the results can't offer much in the way of sound policy guidance for educators because of their statistical limitations. On this point, Schneider is particularly critical of PISA, which he says routinely issues sweeping policy conclusions without offering any qualifications.

The cost to a state for fully participating in TIMSS or PISA can be as much as $500,00 to $700,00 per grade, according to Schneider. A less expensive way to go, he added, might be to use statistical measures to link data from NAEP to international-exam results for other countries. If states still want to pony up to expand their participation in international assessments programs, though, Schneider's advice is caveat emptor.

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Despite educators' best efforts to create an even playing field for girls and boys, gender gaps appear to be growing around the world, says a report out this week. (A hat tip to the Gotham Schools blog, which picked this item up from a U.K.-based blog called SchoolGate.)

The report, which was published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, bases its findings on results from three successive administrations of tests from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which are taken by 15-year-olds in dozens of countries.

The study says the largest gaps are in reading, where girls outperform boys by an average of 32 test-score points, which seems like a lot to me. What's more, girls have the edge in that subject in every participating country. Surprisingly, high-scoring Finland had the largest gender differences, but researchers attributed that mostly to the unusually good performance of Finnish girls in that subject.

The study also found that gender differences in reading grew between 2000 and 2006, with some of the greatest growth coming in Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Spain. (Don't look for the U.S. on this measure. The report contains no data for American students on the latest reading test.) Even more disturbing, that growth is due mostly to the declining performance of boys, according to the OECD researchers.

In math, a small gender gap of 11 points on average favors males over females, with Korea racking up the biggest gender difference. The trend is more hopeful here: Across the board, there were no substantive changes in the size of the gap between the 2003 and 2006 test administrations. If you look at the appendix in the back of the report, you can also see that the math gap is smaller than average in the U.S., which is also good news.

The report contains no trend data for science because the 2006 PISA test was the first for that subject. But those results show that male and female 15-year-olds generally performed at similar levels on that test. Still, boys outperformed girls on questions requiring students to "explain phenomena scientifically," while girls had the edge on questions that involved "identifying science issues." In science, though, the gender gap is slightly larger for the U.S. than it is for OECD nations overall.

It's for better minds than mine to determine whether the persisting gaps are due to culture or innate differences in the way that girls and boys think—the Mars vs. Venus thing, in other words. But the report does point to two possible causes for girls' advantage in reading: Girls around the world do more homework and spend more time reading for pleasure than their male counterparts do.

Check out the full text of the report, "Equally Prepared for Life? How 15-Year-Old Boys and Girls Perform in School," here.

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