<p>Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators, </p>
<p>With Chinas debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam, </p>
<p>Wonder what the competitive peak will China climb next, now that they have scored the highest number of gold medals in Olympics, built the world's fastest super computer,....,?</p>
<p>I believe your question is addressed in the article itself:</p>
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<p>The wake-up part of the story, to me, is (how does one make quotes?):</p>
<p>This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China, Mr. Schleicher said. While thats important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.</p>
<p>Large fractions of these students demonstrate their ability to extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations, he said. "</p>
<p>It’s a tired old argument that the Chinese do rote while we do creativity and critical thinking. Frankly I am not impressed by the creativity and critical thinking ability of our average high school graduates, despite our significant investment in the arts, publications, extra-curriculars, athletics, free time, etc., and I think there is a fair bit of denial in asserting that the Chinese are not attaining fair levels of creativity and critical thinking themselves.</p>
<p>Coming from another country: I love America! It is an incredible country. Education for all cultures, translations, accomodations, and every effort to facilitate success for numerous people. Many of the countries celebrated as spectacular do not have cultural diversity. It is easier to educate people that start at the same stage.</p>
Well, this doesn’t quite answer my question. You can’t, for example, compare top students in one country to all students in another country. What you really have to find out is who *doesn’t *take the test.</p>
<p>“Schools in each country are randomly selected by the international contractor for participation in PISA. At these schools, the test is given to students who are between age 15 years 3 months and age 16 years 2 months at the time of the test, rather than to students in a specific year of school. This average age of 15 was chosen because at this age young people in most OECD countries are nearing the end of compulsory education. The selection of schools and students is kept as inclusive as possible, so that the sample of students comes from a broad range of backgrounds and abilities.”</p>
Could be for specific subjects such as Math, and only if compared with kids from a city like Shanghai. However, if taking different knowledge/skills into consideration, I think the overall results would at least be comparable. The “new generation” of Chinese Americans include some of the best educated professionals from China and they invest heavily on their children’s education.</p>
<p>I would agree that this may be comparing apples and oranges if this test is taken during secondary/high school yrs; I think China only requires 9 yrs compulsory education, and high schools are very competitive and accept only the top students</p>
<p>^^I believe the majority of kids in cities like Shanghai go to high school nowadays, but then as the article pointed out they’d let the top students from outside the city stay for high school, so there’s a “magnet school” effect. In general, you can’t be too serious about some statistics like this, but you should note the trend and the momentum and get that China is cathing up in all fields - very quickly!</p>
<p>You can’t take 1000 students from one of China’s intellectual and academic hubs like Shanghai and compare them to a mixed pot of students from across the United States. </p>
<p>China is a third world country, but less so in its large cities which it concentrates all of its top universities. This essentially translates to all of China’s best students, who are chosen from a burgeoning population of more than 1 billion, moving to the big cities and raising children. The Chinese–and I’ll extrapolate to say East Asians in general–have a natural penchant for studying like machines, and their educated masses, who number into the hundreds of millions, are no different.</p>
<p>Also, I believe Chinese high school students are self-selected and not everyone is allowed to attend. If this is true, the statistics are further skewed as the United States has no equivalent barrier to entry with regards to high school.</p>
<p>I’m stunned that “Educators” are stunned. From the article’s description, the PISA is clearly scored on a scale where 500 is the mean, and 100 is the standard deviation. Oddly, this is very similar to the SAT scoring arrangement. (Yes, I know that the means and standard deviations shift somewhat over time, but this is the way it was originally set up.) If you take a look at the College Board data for the SAT performance by Asians, given at:</p>
<p>then you will see that a math SAT score of 600 is only at the 49th percentile for Asians in the US. This is quite comparable to the set of scores in Shaghai, where 600 appears to be the 50th percentile score for those students.</p>
<p>As someone who teaches a lot of Chinese international students here at a community college in the U.S., I will tell you there is a flipside to all this academic success, which comes at a very high personal price: anorexia, bulimia, cutting, gender confusion, depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, a high rate of car accidents, absentee parents…these are just a few of the issues my Chinese students suffer from. Mine are the ones who are less successful and succumbed to the high pressure to be the top in China. I wouldn’t wish the Chinese model of success on anyone.</p>
<p>China is NOT a 3rd world country, FYI. And I know the Chinese educational culture close hand (having observed those schools closely and visited) and I would hate that kind of life style. In a school I visited last year, it was very competitive to attend and classes were going on even till 9pm! And the only get Sunday afternoons off!</p>
Ah yes, the “Chinese model of success” is the problem. America should probably stop using this “Chinese model of success” seeing as “anorexia, bulimia, cutting, gender confusion, depression, suicide, alcohol abuse, a high rate of car accidents, absentee parents” are almost all highest in America. You are a complete idiot.</p>
<p>This is an interesting study, despite its limitations. I do find it frustrating that American students do so poorly, relative to our “competitors.” I am curious about the other countries’ high-school programs. For instance, as some have alluded to, if many students do not attend high school, or many attend trade high schools, we would definitely be comparing apples to oranges. In other words, we would be comparing students who had placed into a highly-focused academic track, with a range of students in the U.S. I have friends from Latin America who are appalled at high school in the U.S., mainly because high school in their countries were all academic. (Of course, there, many people do not finish elementary school. A minority attend high school, much less college.) Their expectation, when noting that the U.S. had such a high rate of high-school graduation, was that they would encounter a very highly educated populace. The countries mentioned in the article, though, it would seem to have high rates of both high-school attendance and graduation. But, what are those high-schools like? I am very interested in the input from people with international experience or viewpoints. Thanks</p>