School Reform: America’s Winchester Mystery House

Abstract

This quantitative study examines the correlation between international student achievement test outcomes and national competitiveness rankings. Student achievement data are derived from a variation-adjusted, common metric data set for 74 countries that have participated in any of the international mathematics and science achievement tests since 1964. National competitiveness data are taken from the 2014-15 Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) published by the World Economic Forum. A Spearman’s rank-order correlation was run to assess the relationship between student performance on international achievement tests and the competitiveness of nations. For all nations, there was a moderate positive correlation between student performance on international achievement tests and the competitiveness of a nation, rs(98)=0.688, p