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By Dr. Harry Tennant
Wednesday, December 29, 2010 In The News: Despite #1 International Ranking, China's Schools Need Reform About a month ago, the latest results were released for the international standardized testing effort known as the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. I blogged about it on December 7th ...and posted a follow-up on December 14th. Despite ranking first on this testing, however, Chinese educators are not at all satisfied. In fact, they acknowledge that this sort of testing plays to the strength of the Chinese educational system---->which may actually be so overemphasized that it is the weakness of the Chinese educational system. For more, see the article highlights below, or click on the link to see the entire story. So, in assessing how our students are doing against the rest of the world, are these measures more misleading than they are valuable? What good is the information if most all who are exposed to it will not understand the nuances---if even the general conclusions---to be drawn from the results? Do we want students like those from countries at the top of this list? Or, are we after a different sort of student (citizen)? What do we really want out of our schools? What are we willing to expect of our students and the adults who guide them? Highlights of the National Public Radio article are quoted below. Read or listen to the entire article on NPR here! "...Some educators are calling it "a Sputnik moment," like the launch of the Soviet satellite in 1957 that so shocked America. But the Chinese are not gloating about their success: They realize their educational system — which stresses memorization and largely ignores critical thinking — is in need of reform." "...All Chinese people, no matter poor or rich, they have very high expectations in education. That kind of culture pushes people to study and study and study. I think this is very important," Zhang says. "...The teacher teaches, the students repeat, and even the principal admits the feared final high school exam that gets you into college — known as the gaokao — is all simply about memorization and rote learning. That principal, Liu Jinghai, though he is proud of his students for testing well, says the West shouldn't worry about the PISA results. "Developed countries like the U.S. shouldn't be too surprised by these results. They're just one index, one measure that shows off the good points of Shanghai's and China's education system. But the results can't cover up our problems," he says. "Why don't Chinese students dare to think? Because we insist on telling them everything. We're not getting our kids to go and find things out for themselves," he says. "...As well as the limitations of the Chinese education system, Liu says, it was only students in Shanghai who took the PISA tests, and Shanghai has some of the best schools in China. "As long as the gaokao
scores are what get you, a student, into college — and those are the
scores that also rank the high schools — parents and principals and
teachers can't afford to really experiment with a kind of learning that
encourages independent thinking, and perhaps, learning from mistakes..." Posted at 2:36 PM Keywords: In The News , PISA , International Assessment , Assessment 0 Comments |
