Achievement in Content and Cognitive Domains

TIMSS Advanced 2015 provides achievement results for each of the three TIMSS Advanced physics content domains—mechanics and thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, and wave phenomena and atomic/nuclear physics. To enable TIMSS Advanced countries to examine relative performance in the content domains, IRT scaling was used to place achievement in each of the three domains on the TIMSS Advanced physics achievement scale. The average scale score for each content domain is shown, together with the difference between physics achievement overall and achievement in the content domain. Up and down arrows are used to indicate whether a country’s average content domain score is significantly higher or lower than its overall physics average score.

Generally, the highest performing countries overall had the highest achievement in the content domains and lower performing countries had lower achievement in the content domains. However, each country demonstrated one or two relative strengths and one or two relative weaknesses in comparison to its overall achievement.