the time. He also argues that the refinements are welcome but are unlikely to change the
nature of the challenge of raising the availability of school quality of school inputs and
distributing them more fairly.
2.2.3 Some results from the IEA science
studies
The Second International Science Study of the IEA justifies a brief review since it
addresses a learning area frequently recognised as central to human resource
development policy. This study includes data from 24 countries of which China, Ghana,
Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe can be clearly
located as developing countries. Hong Kong, Singapore, and Korea might also be
classified in this way albeit that their economic development has reached a different
level. The IEA studies have been conducted on three populations, broadly speaking 10
year olds (Population 1), 14 year olds (Population 2) and those in the last year of
schooling before university entrance (Population 3).
The interpretation of the IEA findings is very complex and it is only possible to draw
attention to some of the main findings here. These are tentative since variations in the
data sets are important for any comparison between countries and all of the overall
findings need contextualising in more detail than can be provided. Moreover what may
be true in the lowest scoring developing countries as a group is often not true in the
other developing countries. With all these caveats some of the main findings are
described below.
In terms of total score Ghana, Nigeria, the Philippines and Zimbabwe have the lowest
total scores on the science tests. This is true in aggregate and in different subject areas.
Other developing countries - e.g. Papua New Guinea, Thailand and China have means
that are comparable with industrialised countries like England, and the U.S.A. Hungary
and Japan score consistently well above most other countries. In general there is a high
inter-correlation between scores at the population 2 level and those for population 1
suggesting that low performance is compounded through the system. There are
considerable changes in the ranking of mean scores by country at the population 3 level
which are heavily influenced by the selection practices of different countries which, in
some cases, concentrate resources on the most able science students.
In general the proportion of schools scoring below the lowest school in the highest
scoring country (Hungary) was high in the low scoring developing countries in the
population 2 sample (Ghana 64%, Nigeria 88%, Philippines 87%, Zimbabwe 80%). In
these countries the performance of the lowest 20% of students tested indicates that they
have learned very little science. This is particularly worrying when it is realised that the