Why Do East Asian Children Do So Well in PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)? Evidence From Second-Generation Immigrants Into Australia

• In Event: 52.020 - Proceeding Toward Justice: Understanding Aspects of Educational Equity Through International Comparative Research

Abstract

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a major cross-national study of school pupils’ academic achievement. Since its launch in 2000, it has received an unprecedented amount of academic, media and public policy attention. Countries now eagerly await the tri-annual update from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) – the survey organisers - with particular interest in whether they have moved up or down the international rankings. Yet it now comes as little surprise when a small group of high-performing East Asian jurisdictions dominate the top spots, having consistently out-performed their Western competitors over the last decade and a half (and longer in other large-scale educational assessments such as the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study – TIMSS). Indeed, results from PISA 2012 suggested that the achievement gap between East and West remained as large as ever. This was particularly true in mathematics, where children in Shanghai, Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong were found to be more than a year ahead, on average, than their American, British and Australian countries. Moreover, from an equity perspective, the OECD found these countries to have more “resilient” children (high performance despite a disadvantaged social background) than almost all other economies across the world.
Educational policymakers in the Western world have consequently begun to ask “why are children in East Asia so much better at maths than us” and “what can we do to catch up”? Unfortunately, due to the sheer number of possible explanations, these are not straightforward questions to answer. Potential candidates include teacher selection and quality, teaching methods, work ethic, “tiger” parenting, extensive out-of-school tuition, genetics / natural ability, the value children and their parents place on education, the design of the school curriculum, along with several others.
However, this paper attempts to shed light on this important public policy issue via a case study of second-generation East Asian immigrants in Australia. These children are born and raised in a Western country, and have thus been exposed to its educational and institutional structures (e.g. the Australian schooling system – which scored around the OECD average in PISA 2012). Yet their parents originated from a high-performing East Asian jurisdiction – bringing with them their culture and values. Thus a large part of the home and family environment experienced by these children will reflect their East Asian heritage (despite them being Australian nationals and attending Australian schools). As East Asian educational success is often linked to cultural factors (e.g. the value placed upon education, willingness to invest in out-of-school tuition, installing a hard-work ethic in their children, high aspirations) one might expect second-generation East Asian immigrants to outperform their native-Australian peers in the PISA maths test. This paper thus attempts to establish whether this is indeed the case, and the extent to which such differences can be explained by reasons frequently given for East Asian pupils’ extraordinary educational success.

Author

• John Jerrim, Institute of Education - University of London