Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Chart of PISA results of all participating countries from the source:

https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png

A quote from the Economist article on PISA results (which the NYT article is also based on):

“In these parts of China the average pupil’s maths score is 591, compared with an OECD average of 489, suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average.”

Note that the total population of the four Chinese provinces that rank global top in all three PISA core subjects is about 180 million.

This following bit of insight from the same article can be implemented and should have impact over time. I would add that small class size might be more important for younger kids. At the junior high and high school levels, larger classes are acceptable when the teacher is engaging.

“Andreas Schleicher, head of education at the OECD, bemoans the fact that lots of countries have, for instance, prioritised shrinking classes over hiring and training excellent teachers, despite evidence suggesting this is a bad idea. As he points out, one place that has given the quality of the teacher priority over the size of the class is Shanghai. Another is Singapore. And they are reaping the benefits.”

https://www.economist.com/international/2019/12/03/after-two...

To handle a larger class, Singapore schools use technology such as an in-class messaging system that allows students to submit answers individually and show them all at once on screen, thus reducing the bandwagon effect and promoting independent thinking. (I saw a YouTube video on it and it was used really well.)

Before reading too much into China's scores, there reason to believe there is selection bias in who they are testing. In 2017, applying the same rules to the US would have resulted in it shooting up to first and second place in some subjects, which shows that methodology has a bigger impact than what we actually want to measure.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/01/04/are-the-pis...

Math results of the best performing US state, Massachusetts, was actually 20th and 9th in the world for PISA 2015 and 2012, respectively, according to the links below.

Moreover, MA's population of ~7 million is only ~2% of US population, whereas the four provinces' 180 million is about 13% of China's population.

"for the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. It shows the state is tops in the country in math, but when you zoom out and look globally, Massachusetts ranks 20th in the world."

https://www.wbur.org/edify/2017/04/10/massachusetts-math-edu...

"I found that if Massachusetts were allowed to report subject scores independently ... the Bay State would rank 9th in the world in Math."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2014/09/29/...

I think there should be a clear-eyed view toward China's progress in education as well as advanced research. For example, based on some measures of publications in top AI conferences, among the top 10 academic institutions in the world, 4 are in China, 4 in the US, and 2 in Singapore.

http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2018/toyear/2019/index?ai&v...

I think the population density was one of the points. The current system allows countries to pick the schools within a selected region, and in a high population region they can focus on top performing schools.

> that the sampling done on mainland China (Beijing, Jiangsu, Guangdong and Shanghai) and other cities was not taken from a wide variety of schools. Rather, the very best schools were chosen and the very best students were cherry-picked from those schools.

So this is more than just focusing on Massachusetts, this is picking only the best students from the best schools in Massachusetts.

"...suggesting local teenagers are roughly three years ahead of the OECD average."

I don't find this all that surprising. I've done casual comparisons of Chinese curricular materials for math vs. Canadian (Ontario) materials, and there is about a 3 year difference in content level being presented to the students at equivalent age levels. Of course, there could be other elements like selection bias, etc. playing into the results, but there is actually an underlying divergence in terms of the basic curricular material.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this. You noticed a grade differential in raw math concepts. Is it possible to notice things like creativity, communication, and imagination as applied to mathematics?

https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2015/11/more-on-chinese-an...

>In many cases, the teachers would like to take a lesson from American schools and concentrate more on imagination and resourcefulness. They say it is the parents who want to keep the focus on objective assignments, drills, and tests to prepare students for exams.

>Any understanding of Chinese culture has to begin with how a "repeat after me" education focused entirely on objective tests affects communication skills, analytic thinking, teamwork, creativity, imagination and initiative.

My expectation was that the Chinese curricula would be more rote, but that was not entirely true. There is more structured work in the Chinese curriculum, but also a considerable amount of high-level problem solving. It's a lot like the JUMP Math approach, if you're familiar with that curriculum, but pushed ahead a couple of years.

Creativity understood more broadly is a tough thing to shoehorn into a math curriculum, because average teachers have difficulty with mathematically creative material that is sufficiently in-depth. The Discovery math curriculum that's popular in North America is emblematic of that; there is a huge amount of time devoted to finding multiple creative ways to visualize/deconstruct basic operations, but actual, profound mathematical creativity like exploring various ways to prove interesting theorems is largely absent.

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