Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ China No. 1 on 2018 PISA: Is the country really an education powerhouse as the rankings suggest?

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

The answer to the question in the title is "no", though the story doesn't explicitly say so. The tests were from a total of 12,058 students from 361 schools in Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang (B-S-J-Z), a small fraction of the total student population. As always, "socio-economically advantaged students outperformed disadvantaged students," so what we have here is a sample of the wealthiest students in China's wealthiest cities. Now this sample, and this population, is nothing to be disregarded - it is equivalent to the entire student population of other countries.

Meanwhile, in the JMD article, there's a lot of expression of discomfort with the results even taken at face value. China's education system ranks among the least 'efficient' (ie., it is supplemented with a lot of time spent learning outside school). The students' "satisfaction with life" ranks near the bottom. And there's concern about the type of learning that results: "Preparations for exams are a little bit too exaggerated... the exam is just one of many ways to verify learning. It is about whether you can think like a scientist or mathematician, translate a real world problem into a mathematical solving, interpret the result back in the problem context."

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
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Last Updated: Nov 03, 2024 3:12 p.m.

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