ABOUT TIMSS 2019

The TIMSS assessments of student achievement are updated with each cycle in collaboration with the participating countries, who review the frameworks describing the mathematics and science content to be assessed and participate in item development. TIMSS also provides important policy relevant data about students’ contexts for learning mathematics and science based on questionnaires completed by students and their parents or caregivers, teachers, and school principals. Taken together, TIMSS provides comparative data about countries’ student achievement over time and in relation to key home, school, and classroom variables.

TIMSS 2019 continues the long history of international assessments in mathematics and science conducted by IEA—the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. An independent international cooperative of national research institutions and government agencies, IEA pioneered international comparative assessments of educational achievement in the 1960s to gain a deeper understanding of the effects of policies across countries’ different systems of education. IEA has been conducting international assessments of mathematics and science and collecting data about the factors associated with achievement in countries around the world for more than 50 years. TIMSS at the fourth grade is complemented by IEA’s PIRLS—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study—conducted every five years since 2001.

TIMSS and PIRLS are directed by IEA’s TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center at Boston College, in close cooperation with IEA Amsterdam, IEA Hamburg, and Statistics Canada. Each participating country has a National Research Coordinator who is responsible for implementing TIMSS in accordance with international procedures and to TIMSS’ standards of technical excellence.