Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 15, Issue 2, Article 9 (Dec., 2014) Kwok Chi LAU The science education of the East Asian regions – what we can learn from PISA Previous Contents Next

Introduction

East Asian regions (all the countries and economies are called regions in this article) have consistently ranked top in international assessments of science, particularly in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). In PISA 2012, among the top ten regions in science performance, six come from East Asia (culturally defined), including Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Hong Kong has never been ranked below 3rd since 2000, and Shanghai ranked 1st in two consecutive assessments since she first joined PISA in 2009.

The remarkable PISA performance of the East Asian regions have gradually created puzzles about what counts as ‘good’ science education in particular, and ‘good’ education in general. The western countries are interested in finding out what makes the East Asian students outperform their students given the common notion that the East Asian learners generally learn by rote and teachers are authoritarian and traditional, using expository and didactic pedagogy. More puzzling is that PISA does not purport to assess only memorization of facts but application of concepts in novo contexts, problem solving abilities, and understandings of scientific process and nature of scientific knowledge. These learning outcomes hardly come as a result of rote learning and diligence. This has created the so called "paradox of the Chinese learner" and the "paradox of the Chinese teacher" (Chan & Rao, 2009; Watkins & Biggs, 2001).

This study aims to shed light on these paradoxes through looking more closely into the performances and other features of the science education of the East Asian regions through the lens of PISA. The analysis will base on the data from all cycles of PISA assessments, particularly those from PISA 2006 wherein science was the major domain and much more information regarding the science pedagogy and attitudes of students are available. Since only five East Asian regions took part in PISA 2006: Hong Kong, Taipei, Japan, Korea and Macau, while Shanghai, Singapore and Vietnam joined the assessment later, some of the analyses can only be made on the five regions having data in 2006. Though the data in PISA 2006 seem a little outdated, this study is deemed timely since the 2015 PISA is coming with science as the major domain again, and a comprehensive review of the top East Asian regions in the past ten years would give directions to more in-depth study using the 2015 data.

The specific questions this study aims to answer are:

1. What are the performances, both cognitive and affective, of the East Asian regions in the PISA assessment of scientific literacy?
2. What are the characteristics in science pedagogy of these East Asian as revealed by the PISA data?
3. How are the science performances connected with pedagogy and other school factors in these East Asian regions?