Assessing Mathematics Academic Ability at the Elementary Level in El Salvador Based on Cognitive and Content Domains : Combining TIMSS’s Framework and El Salvador Mathematics Curriculum

This paper addresses the assessment of the students' academic ability in El Salvador, by defining it considering previous contributions. Academic ability has been considered as the students' cognitive skills as a consequence of how well children have been taught about the curricular contents; some results from a total of 3981 students in 6th grade at elementary schools in El Salvador were analyzed. Achievement level in academic ability can be considered as adequate in some domains with accuracy percentages above 50%, but worrying in some other domains like geometry, or reasoning with 29% and 25% correspondingly. Finally, some insights are presented about the trends of students' responses and relationship with the way that they were probably taught.