Culture key to Asian students’ success—亚洲学生-为什么数学成绩好？
ASIAN students in Australian schools are performing as well as any teenagers in the world, suggesting culture matters more than teaching when it comes to education.
A NEW report has found 15-year-old students with at least one parent born in an educationally successful East Asian country are 2.5 years ahead of their Australian classmates in mathematics
“It does suggest these children do excel whatever school system they seem to be in and that would point more towards a significant impact of culture rather than just the schooling system,” study author John Jerrim told AAP.
“Schools alone can’t cause a country to leap up the rankings.”
The study, from the Institute of Education at the University of London, is based on international PISA test results from 2012.
The only cohort to better the score of Australian-born East Asian students were pupils from the Shanghai region of China, which topped the rankings.
Dr Jerrim says his paper, published on Thursday, suggests policy-makers are wrong to look at countries such as China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea and say “what can we copy”.
“The experience of second-generation East Asian immigrants in Australia illustrates how high-level maths skills can be developed even within average-performing表现一般的 educational systems,” the academic concludes in his paper.
“The attitudes and beliefs East Asian parents instil in their children make an important contribution to their high levels of academic achievement.
“Yet as such factors are heavily influenced by culture and home environment, they are likely to be beyond the control of不受控制 schools.”
Education Minister Christopher Pyne says mounting evidence大量证据 along these lines is why the government is committed to encouraging greater parental engagement in schools.
The federal government is spending $4 million over the next four years to develop resources to encourage parents to become more involved.
Dr Jerrim argues replicating East Asian students’ educational success may only be possible in the long-term following a cultural shift “where all families instil a strong belief in the value of education amongst their children, along with the realisation that hard work and sacrifice may be needed to achieve it”.
The academic found that family background, including parents’ education, accounted for almost 20 per cent of the 102-point PISA achievement gap between East Asian students and their Australian peers.
A further 40 per cent was accounted for by school factors with East Asian families tending to send their children to better institutions.
A combination of out-of-school factors and personal characteristics explained 25 per cent of the difference in performance.
East Asian teenagers, for example, did 15 hours of homework each week while Australian students completed nine hours.对比
Children of migrants also had higher aspirations: 95 per cent expected to go to university compared with 58 per cent of students with two Australian-born parents.
Dr Jerrim speculates the remaining 15 per cent difference in the PISA scores could be due to early educational experiences or East Asian students gaining access to higher quality teachers within schools.
It could also be the result, he suggests, of “higher inherent ability”.
The researcher recognises that migrants are somewhat self-selecting in that on average they are more able, ambitious and aggressive.
To see whether this could explain the performance of East Asian students Dr Jerrim examined the 2012 test results of children whose parents came from lower-performing Asian countries and Britain.
“What we see there is immigrants from high-performing East Asian countries massively outperform the (other) immigrants,” he said.
“What that suggests is some of the difference could be due to immigrant self-selection, but that really doesn’t seem to be the whole picture.”
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