Average Environmental Knowledge and Scale Score Distributions
To understand what students around the world know about environmental issues, two environmental knowledge subscales were constructed based on the achievement items covering environmental science included in the TIMSS 2023 assessments. The TIMSS 2023 fourth- and eighth-grade science assessments included a range of items addressing a variety of environmental topics, including both local issues like water pollution to global issues such as climate change and its impact. Efforts were made in developing new science assessment material for TIMSS 2023 to increase coverage of environmental topics, while adhering to the prescribed assessment framework targets.
TIMSS 2023 items assessing environmental knowledge were selected by experts from the life and earth science content domains at the fourth grade and within the biology and earth science domains at the eighth grade. The fourth-grade environmental knowledge subscale included 44 items and the eighth-grade scale included 58 items. For information about how the subscales were created, see Chapter 12 in the TIMSS 2023 Technical Report.
Exhibits 7.1.1 and 7.1.2 present estimates of the average achievement on the environmental knowledge subscale, the corresponding confidence intervals, and standard deviations for the TIMSS 2023 participants at the fourth and eighth grade, respectively. Additionally, the exhibits include visualizations of the score distribution, illustrating percentiles of the distribution and the 95% confidence intervals of the average achievement.
