high probability of government organized cheating
it's China and national pride justifies everything
Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#12A nice description of the OECD PISA: http://www.oecd.org/about/0,3347,en_2649_35845621_1_1_1_1_1,... This is a pretty decent summary: "PISA is a three-yearly survey of 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD member countries and 35 partner countries . It assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills essential in everyday life. They are tested in the domains of r…
This is not politically correct to say, but given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores. Also, when judging how well a country will do in science you should not look at the average, but rather at the top. Only a small number of people will choose a career in the sciences, so as long as you have those people, the ones at the bottom don't matter…
Not entirely unrelated:
In some of these countries, school is mandatory for 15-year-olds (e.g. the Netherlands). In other countries, like the US, you can drop out by (or before) that time. I wonder if this skews the results in any way. In the NL, a random sample of 15-year-old students is essentially a sample of all 15-year-olds. In the US, it's a sample of all 15-year-olds who are still in school; in other words, you are not testing the results of kids who have dropped out. If you did, it seems to me that this would likely bring the overall score down.
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#13This was in the Atlantic recently, looks at only the "top" performers in different countries since it's so hard to compare diverse populations and school systems. Yay for MA.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/12/your-chi...
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#14high probability of government organized cheating it's China and national pride justifies everything
It's certainly possible, but saying it without evidence is an extremely weak argument.
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not politically correct to say, but given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores. Also, when judging how well a country will do in science you should not look at the average, but rather at the top. Only a small number of people will choose a career in the sciences, so as long as you have those people, the ones at the bottom don't matter…
How well would Germany do if it took away Turkish scores, and how well would France do if it took away Arab scores? Perhaps the U.S would do even better if only Asian-Americans were allowed to participate.
American Chinese vs Chinese Chinese is the only fair way to do this; otherwise, it's apples and oranges (and oranges are better).
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#16A nice description of the OECD PISA: http://www.oecd.org/about/0,3347,en_2649_35845621_1_1_1_1_1,... This is a pretty decent summary: "PISA is a three-yearly survey of 15-year-olds in the 30 OECD member countries and 35 partner countries . It assesses the extent to which students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills essential in everyday life. They are tested in the domains of r…
This is not politically correct to say, but given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores. Also, when judging how well a country will do in science you should not look at the average, but rather at the top. Only a small number of people will choose a career in the sciences, so as long as you have those people, the ones at the bottom don't matter…
...given the gap between white and black scores, I wonder how the US would do if you ranked it based only on white scores.
Also, when judging how well a country will do in science you should not look at the average, but rather at the top.
What would be the point of such exclusions and comparisons?
I don't think that these surveys are merely meant to find out which countries are leading in certain subjects. Of course you can look at it that way, but I think a better way to look at it is to see it as a measure of how well each country's education system is doing at educating its students on average.
I think it's great if our top students are at the top worldwide in science, but I'm still really, really concerned that the US education system is failing to educate the average student.
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to be too much of a pedant, but: Turkish-Germans make up only 2.1% of the German population and while France doesn't have hard numbers because it's illegal to survey on the basis of race/ethnicity, estimates are around 7% of the population. American blacks make up nearly 13% of the population in the US. That's a pretty significant difference and if you include all minority groups, America's a significantly less h…
Actually, to be more precise, the difference in Pisa scores in Germany is not exclusively turkish, it's between people with "Migrations-background" and people without. I.e, ethnic Germans vs non-Ethnic Germans. According to this article, the difference is 56 points now ( http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/0,1518,733188,00.h... ). It was 90+ points previously. Non-ethnic germans make up 20% of the population, f…
Well, clearly this means moving to Germany makes you stupid. Being born in Germany clearly provides some kind of immunity.
Or am I drawing erroneous conclusions from the data?
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#18About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city.
Who did the "choosing" and what defines "representative."
We were all impressed with the Chinese Women's Gymnastics Team during the last olympics. Then it turned out many were barely of age to compete. And they were very careful about interacting with the cameras.
Were I the U.S. education chief, I'd be talking to the Fins and Hong Kong Chinese instead.
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#19About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. Who did the "choosing" and what defines "representative." We were all impressed with the Chinese Women's Gymnastics Team during the last olympics. Then it turned out many were barely of age to compete. And they were very careful about interacting with the cameras. Were I the U.S. education chief, I'd be talkin…
Indeed, we've recently seen how much Shanghai is not representative of China as a whole: http://blog.sokanu.com/200-countries-200-years-4-minutes
(skip to near the end of the video if you haven't seen it already)
If the US chose only students from say, California and New England, I'm sure we'd be competitive with China as well.
Re: Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, to be more precise, the difference in Pisa scores in Germany is not exclusively turkish, it's between people with "Migrations-background" and people without. I.e, ethnic Germans vs non-Ethnic Germans. According to this article, the difference is 56 points now ( http://www.spiegel.de/schulspiegel/wissen/0,1518,733188,00.h... ). It was 90+ points previously. Non-ethnic germans make up 20% of the population, f…
Well, clearly this means moving to Germany makes you stupid. Being born in Germany clearly provides some kind of immunity. Or am I drawing erroneous conclusions from the data?
1. Some/many (?) Germans do not accept all children born in their country as native Germans. So a person with 'migration-background' may be born in Germany, but one of the parents has immigrated.
2. I interpret the PISA data as: If parents have a low education, then in Germany their children will probably get a low education, too.