Shanghai China Stuns World With PISA Performance

Out of the blue, Shanghai has shocked the education world by scoring #1 in Literacy, Math and Science on the world exam PISA.

One might argue that the Chinese have distorted the results in a variety of ways:

1- testing kids in China's most developed city

2- pressuring kids to take the test more seriously than their international peers

3- even stacking the deck by holding top students in Shanghai schools an extra year to get better results.

From several years experience in China, I know a few things for certain:

A- if there is a way to "game" the system, the Chinese will find it

B- national pride is a huge motivator of the Chinese people

C- winning at all costs is a Chinese attribute

Despite the carping by some, the performance is spectacular. Shanghai is a huge city - over 22 million people - 4 times the size of former #1 Finland.

Comments

[Peter Pappas]

Is PISA "a Sputnik wake-up" or are international comparisons invalid. Rather than wade into that debate, I'd rather look more closely at the questions in the PISA test and what student responses tell us about American education. You can put international comparisons aside for that analysis.

Are American students able to analyze, reason and communicate their ideas effectively? Do they have the capacity to continue learning throughout life? Have schools been forced to sacrifice creative problem solving for “adequate yearly progress” on state tests?

I focus on a sample PISA question that offers insights into what American students can (and cannot do) in my post "Stop Worrying About Shanghai, What PISA Test Really Tells Us About American Students" http://bit.ly/eChNoY

[mark]

I am not a statistician but it would seem obvious from the large gap in the scores between China and the second place scores, there must be some "irregularities" between the data for China and the rest of the world.

I have no doubt that China would be at or near the top but the size of the gap brings the validity of the data into serious question.