The science education of the East Asian regions

In PISA 2006, students were asked to indicate the time they spent in four kinds of science-related pedagogy in class: application of concepts, interaction between students and teacher, hands on activities and investigations (Table 6 ). Investigations are different from hands on activities in that investigation refers to those students are given the autonomy to decide on the question and design of the experiment.

Table 6. Sample items for the four constructs of science pedagogy in PISA 2006

Pedagogy	Sample of items
	When learning school science topics at school, how often do the following activities occur? (In all lessons/In most lessons/In some lessons/Never or hardly ever)
Application	The teacher explains how a <school science> idea can be applied to a number of different phenomena
Interaction	Students are given opportunities to explain their ideas
Hands on activities	Students spend time in the laboratory doing practical experiment
Investigation	Students are allowed to design their own experiments

As shown in Table 7 , the values of most of the pedagogy indices were negative, revealing that the use of these pedagogies in the East Asian classroom was less than that of the OECD countries on average. The teaching in Japan and Korea was more traditional than the Chinese communities- less application focused, least interactive, and few hands on and investigative activities. The traditional pedagogy, however, seemed not having very negative impacts on the cognitive performance of these regions.

Table 7. The indices of the four pedagogies in PISA 2006

Regions	Application	Interaction	Hands on activity	Investigation
Hong Kong	-0.003	-0.291	0.288	0.215
Taipei	0.13	-0.061	-0.101	0.09
Macau	-0.185	-0.41	-0.191	0.023
Japan	-0.931	-1.14	-0.519	-0.241
Korea	-0.335	-1.039	-0.419	-0.205

The value is scaled by setting the OECD average to be zero and a standard deviation of -1 to +1