Draft Draft Draft Lack of Focus in the Mathematics Curriculum: A Symptom or a Cause

When the original TIMSS study was first released in 1997 preceding it was the report of the curriculum component. That report stressed the importance of curricular differences among countries in interpreting the cross national differences in achievement. One of the original findings achieved significant importance for possibly understanding the relatively poor performance of US students. That finding was characterized by the description of the US mathematics curriculum as one that was “a mile wide and an inch deep.” The data indicated a tendency for the US curriculum to cover more topics at each grade level than all of the other countries in TIMSS. This was true of state standards, the NCTM standards, district standards, textbooks and even in terms of the curriculum as implemented by the teachers. The fact was that there was little focus in the US curriculum given the large number of topics that needed to be and actually were covered. In this paper we return to the issue of focus and ask whether such a concept is useful not just as an hypothesis about the US but more generally in understanding cross-national differences in achievement.