Elementary School Mathematics Productivity in Twelve Countries.

The mathematics achievement scores of 28,274 students in 1443 Australian, Belgian, English, Finish, French, German, Israeli, Japanese, Dutch, Scotch, Swedish, and US. elementary schools were correlated with, and regressed on socioeconomic status, highest math course taken, weekly hours of homework, interest in mathematics, and several other variables with both individuals and schools within each country as units of analysis. The results corroborate recent syntheses of small- scale studies of productive factors in academic learning as well as regression analyses of large-scale surveys. Among directly alterable variables, the amount and the quality or vigour of instruction including homework most strongly influence achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]