The science education of the East Asian regions

The performance of the East Asian students is often attributed to their diligence. With respect to the formal science lesson at school, over 40% of Hong Kong and Macau students took four or more hours of science lessons a week, which was higher than the OECD average of 32.7% (Table 9). Other East Asian regions, however, had similar or lower proportions of students in that respect. The East Asian students also did not study any harder on homework or self-study than their counterparts in the OECD countries. However, when looking at the out-of-school lessons, East Asian regions except Japan had a much higher proportion of students spending a substantial amount of time on tutorial class than the OECD average (OCED, 2007, p.55). The prevalence and importance of tutorial class, or shadow education in Asian countries have been well documented and researched (Mark & Chad, 2012). Interestingly, these after school tutorial lessons differed not only in quantity, but also in their roles for the East Asian regions and western countries. East Asian regions except Japan had more top performers taking out-of-school lesson than low performers, but it was the reversed for the western countries (OCED, 2007b, p.55). It seems that East Asian students tended to see tutorial class as a "booster" of performance for the top performers, whereas Western students deem it more as a "remedial" measure for the low performers.

Using the data from PISA 2012, we can understand better the learning time of the students. Though these data were for math class, but they were likely applicable to the science class as well. In the survey of truancy in PISA 2012, virtually no students of the East Asian regions had skipped a day of school in the two week prior to the PISA testing, as compared to 15% across the OECD countries (OECD, 2014). This had reflected that the importance of education has been deeply ingrained in the minds of the students, teachers and parents of the East Asian regions. The data in PISA 2012 also showed that East Asian classrooms were less disordered and less noisy than that of the average OECD countries (Table 10). The attentiveness in class, together with other time factors discussed above, had given East Asian students much more actual learning time at school and after school than their Western counterparts.

Table 9. Time students spent on learning science in PISA 2006

	Students having 4 or more hours of science lesson a week at school (%)	Students having 2-4 hours of out-of-school science lessons a week (%)	Students having 2-4 hours of self study/homework a week (%)
HK	40.2	12.4	18.3
Taipei	27	14	17.6
Japan	12.2	3.4	5.4
Korea	35.7	18.8	14.9
Macau	45.6	10.8	17.3
OECD average	32.7	8.2	18.6

Table 10. Classroom discipline surveyed in PISA 2012

	There is noise and disorder in my math lessons (% of every/most lessons)
Japan	10.73
Korea	30.28
Hong Kong	18.65
Taipei	28.12
Singapore	28.18
Vietnam	10.53
Shanghai	13.47
Macau	15.42
OECD average	31.71