Found this interesting article on NT times yesterday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/education/07education.html?ref=education

I am not too surprised by the results given the fact that the scores of Taiwan, Hong Kong students were up there for years. The Chinese students share the same value system and work harder simply because their environment is more competitive.

I was actually more interested in the methodology PISA test used and whether the school had a chance to prep students. I dug up some old articles using baidu (Chinese version of google).

It looks like that the 5000 students in Shanghai were selected �randomly� from 150 schools. Each school contributed no more than 30-35 students. So sampling approach seems to be okay. Content of PISA tests were somewhat different from what Chinese kids were used to. Not just multiple choices. Some of them required giving explanations. The sample math test is very simple though. No wonder Chinese kids almost got them all correct.

What is interesting is the responds from Chinese media. There were none. Nobody seemed to care. �We are #1 in the world for education? you got to be kidding.� Average Chinese are actually very unhappy with China�s education from elementary all the way to college.

I thought this quote from the very end of the article was interesting:

"This is the first time that we have internationally comparable data on learning outcomes in China,� Mr. Schleicher said. �While that�s important, for me the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held hypothesis that China just produces rote learning.�

I remember reading that the US is number 1 in terms of student confidence. I wonder where the Chinese rate on the confidence scale.

For anyone who hasn't seen them, I found sample test items here: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/23/41943106.pdf

The tables at the back also have percentage right by topic, question, and country for 2000, 2003, and 2006.