As part of its mission, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) is committed to the development of the community of researchers who work in the area of assessment both nationally and internationally. The association also has a commitment to provide policymakers with the types of data and analyses that will further their understanding of student achievement and the antecedent factors that are implicated in student learning. As part of a larger strategy to achieve these broad goals, the IEA sponsors a research conference every two years as a means of providing opportunities for new researchers and more experienced scholars to meet, discuss, and present the findings of their work as it relates to the secondary analysis of IEA studies. The proceedings of the Second IEA International Research Conference, which was held in Washington DC, November 2006, and hosted by the Brookings Institution, are published in two volumes. The papers in this volume have as their central focus the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Contents include: (1) Foreword (Hans Wagemaker); (2) Effects of science beliefs and instructional strategies on achievement of students in the United States and Korea: Results from the TIMSS 2003 assessment (J. Daniel House); (3) Relationships between student and instructional factors and algebra achievement of students in the United States and Japan: An analysis of TIMSS 2003 data (J. Daniel House and James A. Telese); (4) Capturing the dynamics that led to the narrowing achievement gap between Hebrew-speaking and Arabic-speaking schools in Israel: Findings from TIMSS 1999 and 2003 (Ruth Zuzovsky); (5) The paradoxical relationship between students' achievement and their self-perception: A cross-national analysis based on three waves of TIMSS data (Ce Shen and Hak Ping Tam); (6) A residual analysis of effective schools and effective teaching in mathematics (Constantinos Papanastasiou); (7) Change in mathematical achievement in the light of educational reform in Lithuania (Jolita Dudaite); (8) The influence of item-stem format and item-answer format on the results for selected items in TIMSS 2003 (Jolita Dudaite); (9) Differences in science teaching and learning across Australian states (John Ainley and Sue Thomson); (10) Exploring student-level explanatory factors in science achievement in South African secondary schools (Sarah Howie, Vanessa Scherman, and Elsie Venter); (11) Gender differences in mathematics learning in Malaysia (Halimah Awang and Noor Azina Ismail); (12) Profiles of scientific competence in TIMSS 2003: Similarities and differences between countries (Marit Kjaernsli and Svein Lie); (13) Test-taking motivation on low-stakes tests: A Swedish TIMSS 2003 example (Hanna Eklof); (14) Grade 4 Norwegian students' understanding of reproduction and inheritance (Jorun Nylehn); (15) Examining the problem-solving achievement of Grade 8 students in TIMSS 2003 (Alka Arora); (16) Consistency between attitudes and practices relating to mathematics in the United States and South Korea (Melissa McNaught and Seoung Joun Won); (17) Effects of public preschool expenditures on the test scores of fourth-graders: Evidence from TIMSS (Jane Waldfogel and Fuhua Zhai); (18) TIMSS versus PISA: The case of pure and applied mathematics (Liv Sissel Gronmo and Rolf Vegar Olsen); (19) Achievement of Australia's junior secondary school Indigenous students: Evidence from TIMSS (Sue Thomson); (20) The effect of students' perceptions of the learning environment on mathematics achievement: Explaining the variance in Flemish TIMSS 2003 data (W. Schelfhout, G. Van Landeghem, A. Van den Broeck, and J. Van Damme); (21) The relationship between classroom practices related to homework and student performance in mathematics in TIMSS 2003 (Ming-Chih Lan and Min Li); (22) Gender differences in mathematics achievement among Iranian eighth-graders in two consecutive international studies (TIMSS 1999 and TIMSS 2003) (Ali Reza Kiamanesh); and (23) Differences in teaching and learning mathematics in relation to students' mathematics achievement in TIMSS 2003 (Radovan Antonijevic). Individual papers contain figures, tables, footnotes and references. [For "The Second IEA International Research Conference: Proceedings of the IRC-2006, Volume 2", see ED510140.]