THE MATHEMATICAL ACHIEVEMENT OF FOURTH-

Taiwan's mathematics curriculum has undergone three reforms in the last three decades. The Standard of School Mathematics Curriculum, issued in 1993 and implemented in 1996, has been in effect for six years. There is a heated debate over the content of mathematics curriculum and over whether students still maintain mathematical proficiency. For this reason, student performance in each mathematics strand in the TIMSS 2003 field test was examined. Moreover, the study proposed to use curriculum as a source to explain differences in academic achievement. Data were drawn from the fourth-grade test conducted in the TIMSS 2003 field test. Taiwan sampled 1601 students in 50 classes distributed in 25 primary schools. Two curriculum specialists and two teachers inspected each item of the test, to see whether it was covered in the intended curriculum, issued in 1993. It was found that Taiwanese students performed better in mathematics than the international average. The average performance of Taiwanese students in number, measurement, geometry, and data was higher than international average, while the performance of Taiwanese students in algebra was lower than the international average. This study offers a curriculum analysis as a resource to explain the differences in academic achievement of mathematics topics. In this time of great interest in mathematics education reform, the findings of the field test provided powerful evidence to diminish opponents ' attacks on the 1993 version reform. The assessment afforded an important marker of the level of students ' achievement in the period of reform. The lack of learning the topics measured in the field test, unfamiliarity with assessment format, the culturally unfamiliar in some context referred to questions were possible factors contributing to Taiwanese studentsÕ poor performance in some items