Learning strategies and affective factors could have a profound impact on student standardized mathematics performance. This study investigated gender differences in affective factors, learning strategies, and preferred learning situations, and how these variables affect math achievement of 15 year olds in the United States and Hong Kong on the PISA 2003 assessment. Math self-efficacy was found to be the best predictor of math performance in both countries. A striking mismatch was identified between Hong Kong students' superior math performance and extremely low math self-concept and between U.S. students' high confidence and weak performance. In addition, U.S. students' interest in math was significantly negatively related to their math performance. Contrary to a widely reported finding that East Asian students emphasize memorization, U.S. students were found to heavily rely on memorization strategies, which was also a negative predictor of math achievement.
[Copyright of International Journal of Testing is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15305050903106875]

Recent international studies have highlighted the success of students from Hong Kong in mathematics and problem-solving, and have begun to suggest some of the factors associated with this success. Other studies have suggested that Hong Kong students are averse to risk-taking, favouring memorisation and imitation in their solution strategies. Year 5 students in Hong Kong and Australia were given mathematics assessments of different types: orally presented mental computation problems, and a performance task that was undertaken in normal classroom conditions. Observations of the students' approaches to these tasks in the classroom and analyses of their responses revealed similarities and differences between the two countries. The implications of these findings are discussed in light of the curriculum diversity and differences in metacognitive skills.
[Copyright of Evaluation & Research in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500790802485211 ]