How is china doing math better- I want to be better.?

Take a good look at Finland. Those guys are not Asian. The hardcore East Asian education systems are all very similar and they all get similar scores. I call bs on the genetics until non-Asian countries implement the EA education systems and sit their PISA tests.

P.S. I obviously acknowledge that intelligence has a genetic determinism on it but that is only one fifth of the story.

Finland fell quite a bit in the latest rankings, I think the only country even coming close to the East Asian countries this time around was Switzerland.

Take a look at India. They have a strong education culture, I'm sure you'd agree, but they performed far, far worse in PISA than did East Asians.

I, too, don't claim the gap is accounted for entirely by genetics. But I think it's simply unscientific (and a possible waste of money by governments who start making wholesale changes to educational systems) to not consider that it may cause some of the disparity. To quote myself from earlier in the thread:

"Regardless, I'm not attempting to prove that they are smarter - I'm just saying that I think it's something PISA and governments in general should take into account when looking at the disparity of test scores, and not assume the difference is 100% due to the education systems."

As far as I know, East Asian way of teaching is nothing different from British way of teaching. However, more than a half of EA students go to cram schools in the evening and they get supplemental trainings + massive amount of homework every week. If kids aren't serious, the cram schools call parents, and warn parents they can kick their kids out. Many parents start to send kids to cram schools when kids get 10-ish. All those efforts are made for very competitive university entrance exams.

My opinion is perhaps proven by the PISA score by Asian Americans kids.
Although they have even crappier secondary education than UK, their average score was exactly same as EA countries.

Overall PISA rankings, including America by race

OECD average 496 501 494 497

Shanghai-China 570 580 613 587
Singapore 542 551 573 556
Hong Kong-China 545 555 561 554
Asian Americans 550 546 549 548
Korea, Republic of 536 538 554 542
Japan 538 547 536 540
Chinese Taipei 523 523 560 535
Finland 524 545 519 529

This mystery can be easily solved if we know many Asian kids in USA also use some sort of supplemental schools in the evening.


So if you want to introduce EA solution, it's very simple. A) All public universities (or at least Russell Group unis) are legally forced to require candidates to take an A-level in Further Mathematics, even for art and humanity studies. B) you open a cram school business in the UK

University entrance exams are the fundamental indicators of secondary education. If those exams become more difficult, students study harder. There should be a correlation between the introduction of curriculum 2000 and the fall of UK on PISA.

TBH, I personally don't think it's necessary to copy EA education system. Not all students need advance math for their studies. I know many students studying Social Science or Art and Humanities and they are highly intellectual and logical without math knowledge.

But current A levels may be better to be reviewed once, because of grade inflation.

The fact that asian americans have nearly equal levels of PISA scores to east asians, despite a completely different culture, environment and nationality basically proves that intelligence is mainly genetic.

British kids will never equal east asian kids because they are genetically inferior in intelligence.

First, as much as could perhaps be extrapolated from that is that East Asians are better at math.

But I think there are as well confounding factors, among them:

1. I would dispute that East Asians in the US have a completely different culture to those in East Asia. While not all of them are 'tiger mothered' there is a high degree of cultural carry-over, and we're all familiar with, predominantly American, memes of the pushy Asian parent.

2. Recent immigrants are a self-selecting group who have satisfied rigorous visa criteria - unusually ambitious and resourceful, and often as well unusually highly educated. There is as well good reason for the children of first generation immigrants, where English is often not the language of the home, to concentrate on math, where that circumstance is the less a disadvantage than it plainly would be in other subjects.

3. Stereotyping based on expectations can serve to secure the realizing of those expectations. If it is imagined that a Chinese child will prosper in maths and be a duffer at sports, he will be steered toward the math club and away from the track. And several years later really will be better at math than the children from whom he was sorted-out.

4. Asian Americans are chieflly settled in large cities on the East and West coasts, and particularly in California. If correction were made for this variable (i.e. ignore the stats from Alabama, Kentucky, etc.) there might be the less marked a difference than is seen now.

If asian americans are a self-selecting group of motivated highly educated workers, how come their PISA scores are lower than that of average east asians? In any case your assertion is wrong, most east asians in the US are illegal immigrants, or immigrated in mass when the US relaxed its immigration policy.

So simply being stereotyped as smart makes you smart?

Why does living in a big city make any difference at all? Asians do extremely well in education whether they live in a city or on the farm. In fact the poorest parts in the western world (and with the worst educational prospects) are in cities, e.g. east london, inner city detroit, LA, chicago.

You just got to stop making excuses