[MD] Imaginings

[Steven Peterson]

Malcolm Gladwell shed a lot of light on the international testing
disparagies between Asia and the West in a chapter of his latest
capped Rice Paddies and Math Tests:

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

I thought this part below was very interesting and supports Arlo's
assertion that the issue is not about the instructional delivery or
administration ends of education. The differences in the test scores
is best explained by the willingness of the student to sit and take a
boring test that doesn't count for anything. Asian kids are much more
likely to do that than Americans. If we are to be concerned about
these test scores, we have to decide how much we care about whether
are students should be willing to submit to tedious tests or whether
we want them to be creative thinkers.

Best,
Steve

"Every four years, an international group of educators administers a
comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior
high students around the world. It's the TIMSS...and the point of the
TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with
another's.

When students sit down to take the TIMSS exam, they also have to fill
out a questionnaire. It asks them all kinds of questions, such as what
their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math
are, and what their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise.
It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it is so tedious and demanding
that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank.

Now, here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number
of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to
country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating
countries according to how many items their students answer on the
questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the
questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on the TIMSS? They are
exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing
to concentrate and sit still long enough to focus on answering every
single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries
whose students do the best job of solving math problems.

The person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at
the University of Pennsylvania named Erling Boe, and he stumbled
across it by accident. "It came out of the blue," he says. Boe hasn't
even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal,
because, he says, it's just a bit too weird. Remember, he's not saying
that the ability to finish the questionnaire and the ability to excel
on the math test are related. He's saying that they are the same: if
you compare the two rankings, they are identical.

Think about this another way. Imagine that every year, there was a
Math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world. And every country in
the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Boe's
point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every
country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math
question. All we would have to do is give them some task measuring how
hard they were willing to work. In fact, we wouldn't even have to give
them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at
math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest
emphasis on effort and hard work.

So, which places are at the top of both lists? The answer shouldn't
surprise you: Singapore, South Korea, China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and
Japan. [Mainland China doesn't yet take part in the TIMSS study.] What
those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures
shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work.
They are the kind of places where, for hundreds of years, penniless
peasants, slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a
year, said things to one another like "No one who can rise before dawn
three hundred and sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.""