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“American students aren’t in the league of the top-achieving countries,” says Gary Phillips, who conducted the study. Phillips is chief scientist at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C. “Even our top states are running far behind the highest-performing countries.”
The study was released last month. It compared achievement by eighth-grade students in 46 countries with eighth-grade students in the United States. Students in 11 countries outscored the U.S. students in science. The top-scoring nations in science were (in order) Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan.
In math, American eighth graders came in 10th. Singapore, a small island country in Southeast Asia, placed first in mathematics too. In fact, Singaporean students’ math scores were almost 20 percent higher than U.S. students’ scores!
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“Look at cell phones today,” Phillips observes. “Teenagers in Japan have cell phones that are two or three years beyond ours. Cell phone companies do their testing in Japan, because the Japanese want the most advanced technology.” Why? Because, Phillips says, there’s much more interest in technology as a career in Japan. About 64 percent of Japanese college students get degrees in science, technology, engineering, or math. In the U.S., the rate is 17 percent.
“There’s an even bigger problem,” laments Phillips. “Americans are becoming scientific illiterates." He points to studies that show how little American adults know: “Fifty percent of the adult population doesn’t know how long it takes the earth to go around the sun. And 25 percent didn’t even know that the earth goes around the sun!”
That ignorance could be disastrous for the United States’s future. “Look at the problems facing the world—population growth, deforestation, global warming,” he says. “These are scientific problems. To solve them, the people of our country need to understand science. If they do, they can vote people into office who can do something about these problems.”
The recent report stated that “the U.S. needs more students preparing for careers in science, technology, engineering, and math.”
“Math and science could literally save the future of the planet,” Gary Phillips told Weekly Reader. “I hope students reading this think about that.”
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