• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.387-401
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• 2004

The recent international comparative studies such as PISA(Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS-R(Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat) provide results of relative mathematics achievement of participating countries. The purpose of this paper is to compare the mathematics results of PISA and TIMSS-R. To make PISA and TIMSS-R results comparable, they were standardized. The close investigation of these standardized results reveals that the two Asian countries(Korea and Japan) and several English speaking countries have the commonality in mathematics achievement. Thus this study looks for patterns and similarities within a group of Asian countries(Korea and Japan) and Western countries(the U.S and Australia) by in-depth analysis of PISA mathematics achievement based on item response theory. As a result, it was noted that Western countries tend to perform well on open constructed items and are likely to perform better when an item involves less formal mathematics. On the other hand, Asian countries perform well when an item involves numeric or algebraic computation related to curriculum-based content, but they are relative poor at an item calls for verbal explanations or interpretations of graphs.