From: L' Ermit (lhermit@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jan 12 2002 - 21:09:41 MST
Roly said:
I see your point completely and I'm not sure about the source either, but I
thought that I'd send it in anyway. Are the schools in china really that
great!?
Elen síla lúmenn' omentielvo. Roly/Orly/Vinyacálë.
====
Hermit responds:
I was thinking more of the "Asian Tigers" (i.e. Pacific Rim countries
including Japan, ROC (Taiwan), Malaysia, S. Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong,
Indonesia, Thailand, India) but the PRC, despite its "developing nation"
status competes well with the industrialized countries in maths and science
competency. As their "school focus" program started in the late 70s, they
are beginning to see the results of increasing numbers of teachers who have
"been through the system" and are rapidy increasing the overall
years-of-education. Note that every PRC scholar takes Chinese, Maths,
Science and a foreign language - currently split about 70:30 between English
and Japanese. This is one reason that I think that if we manage to avoid
blowing ourselves to hell, that China will become the world's dominant
superpower in the latter years of this century.
One of the troubles in developing a ranking is that access to reliable
figures from the PRC is difficult and that where results are available, they
are often contradictory. Unfortunately, the PRC is not a member of the TIMSS
project, but by comparing the relative rankings of the TIMSS project with
the Maths Olympiad, some idea of how the PRC is doing may perhaps be
obtained.
My estimation is that the PRC and US are currently very close in terms of
the median quality of teaching, but that the PRC will improve very rapidly
as they acquire an ever increasing number of competent teachers (which has
been a severe problem since the purges of the 50s thru the early 70s).
The following may be informative:
Information on School System within the PRC
http://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/china/education.htm
Regards
Hermit
====
Resources
The AAAS has a very rich data set, but this is not publically available, and
would be a lot of work to transfer to email as most of it is reflected in
the form of gifs. My analysis largely concurs with theirs. Another rich
source of data is the UNESCO statistics program, accessible at
http://www.uis.unesco.org/en/stats/stats0.htm. Because they don't provide
comparative figures (although they could be derived), I have not used their
resources.
TIMSS
This is possibly the best publically accessible source of comparative data.
http://nces.ed.gov/timss/
Complete reports are available at:
http://www.timss.org/timss1999b/publications.html
The highlights of the 1999 Study (TIMSSR) are on the abave page and make for
interesting reading. They are directly accessible at the following URL.
http://www.timss.org/timss1999b/pdf/t99b_highlights.pdf
>From that report:
In 1999,the U.S.eighth graders performed significantly abov the TIMSS
international average in mathematics and science, but about in the middle of
the achievement distribution of the 38 participating
countries (abov 17/18 countries, similar to 6/5, and below 14 in both
subjects). In TIMSS 1999,the world class performance levels in mathematics
were set essentially by fiv Asian countries – Singapore,
the Republic of Korea, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong SAR,and Japan. In
science,four Asian countries and a central European one had the highest
performance – Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Hungary, Japan,and the Republic of
Korea.
===
An interesting alternative ranking - which compares the "best-of-the-best"
is the Math Olympiad. Refer http://imo.math.ca/
These are competitions between the 6 top pupils selected through nationwide
competitions, so one would anticipate that countries with large populations
would do better than small ones.
Here are extracts from the unofficial ranked results:
2000
China 218
Russia 215
USA 184
South Korea 172
Bulgaria/Vietnam 169
Belarus 165
Taiwan 164
Hungary 156
Iran 155
Israel/Romania 139
Ukraine 135
India 132
Japan 125
Australia 122
Canada 112
Slovakia/Turkey 111
Armenia/Germany 108
UK 96
1999
China 182
Russia 182
Vietnam 177
Romania 173
Bulgaria 170
Belarus 167
South Korea 164
Iran 159
CHT 153
USA 150
Hungary 147
Ukraine 136
Japan 135
Serbia-Montenegro 130
Australia 116
Turkey 109
Germany 108
India 107
Poland 104
UK 100
===
Yet another perspective on the health of teaching may be found in the
following paper, which provides a teacher oriented look at the problem:
http://www.ied.edu.hk/cric/new/apjted/1_1/pp17-27.htm
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