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Japanese Students' Basic Science Skills Decline

Posted on: Wednesday, 15 December 2004, 09:00 CST

Japanese students' basic science skills decline

TOKYO, Dec. 15 (Xinhua) -- The basic academic abilities of Japanese elementary and junior high school students in science have been declining over the past few years, according to an international student assessment test released Wednesday.

The result further highlights the decline in Japanese students' academic level. It comes after another international survey released Dec. 7 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that indicated a marked drop in reading abilities of Japanese high school students in 2003 from three years earlier.

The third Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS, showed that Japanese junior high school students in their second year, or eighth-graders, maintained their place in mathematics at fifth in 2003 from 1999 but dropped to sixth from fourth in science.

Fourth-graders at elementary schools, too, maintained their arithmetic skills in 2003 from 1995 but dropped from second to third place in science, the Amsterdam-based International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement said.

While their relative positions in mathematics remained unchanged, their scores in the subject edged down in the TIMSS tests.

Based on the TIMSS scale which was devised so that the average score comes to 500 points, eighth-graders in Japan scored 570 points in math, down by nine, and 552 points in science, up by two. Fourth- graders, meanwhile, scored 565 points in math, down by two, and 543 points in science, down by 10.

The OECD Program for International Student Assessment seeks to establish how well students can develop and apply their knowledge to real-life situations. The TIMSS, conducted once every four years, is intended to assess the students' basic knowledge and ability to calculate.

The study also found that the daily average number of hours children watch television programs and videos was tops for Japan's eighth-graders at 2.7 hours, while for fourth-graders it was 2 hours, just behind the United States at 2.1 hours.

Some 117,000 fourth-grade students from 25 countries and territories took part, and about 4,500 of them came from 150 public and private schools in Japan.

For the eighth-graders, about 225,000 students from 46 countries and regions took part, with about 4,900 students from 146 schools representing Japan.

Nariaki Nakayama, minister of education, culture, sports, science and technology, said at a press conference, "Results of two international comparative surveys indicate declines in achievements by the children of our country. I do take seriously the fact that they were not at the world's top levels."

"We must acknowledge the results and take measures accordingly, " he said.

Source: Xinhua News Agency - CEIS

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