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Abstract
A small group of high-performing East Asian economies dominate the top of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. This has caught the attention of Western policymakers, who want to know why East Asian children obtain such high PISA scores, and what can be done to replicate their success. In this paper I investigate whether children of East Asian descent, who were born and raised in a Western country (Australia), also score highly on the PISA test. I then explore whether their superior performance (relative to children of Australian heritage) can be explained by reasons often given for East Asian students’ extraordinary educational achievements. My results suggest that second-generation East Asian immigrants outperform their native Australian peers by approximately 100 test points. Moreover, the magnitude of this achievement gap has increased substantially over the last ten years. Yet there is no ‘silver bullet’ that can explain why East Asian children obtain such high levels of academic achievement. Rather a combination of factors, each making their own independent contribution, seem to be at play. Consequently, I warn Western policymakers that it may only be possible to catch the leading East Asian economies in the PISA rankings with widespread cultural change.
Acknowledgements
This work has been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council Future Research Leaders scheme.
Notes
2. A child is defined a ‘native Australian’ if they and both parents were born in Australia.
3. In most countries, a sample of 150 schools is selected. This was increased to 775 schools in Australia to allow comparisons between states.
4. All age-eligible Indigenous students were also included to enable analysis by this sub-group.
5. Such information is not available in the international database. It is also not available for most other countries (at least in such detail).
6. Indigenous children (approximately 3% of the Australian population) have been excluded. My experimentations suggest this has little impact upon conclusions reached.
7. Of the children defined as a second-generation immigrant from a high-performing East Asian jurisdiction, 68% reported both of their parents being born in one of the countries listed; 19% reported just their mother being born in a high-performing country; and 10% just their father. Around 80% of the high-performing second-generation East Asian group have at least one parent born in China.
8. Vietnam also performed reasonably well in PISA 2012 maths (511). However, this country was excluded from the ‘high-performing’ group as it remained significantly below the leading East Asian nations such as Singapore (573), Hong Kong (561), South Korea (554) and Japan (536).
9. Appendices A–D can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2015.1028525
10. The ISEI index is a continuous measure of occupational prestige (see Ganzeboom & Treiman, Citation1996). It has been designed to increase comparability of occupational status across countries, with higher values indicating more prestigious jobs.
11. Children are asked questions about household possessions (e.g. number of computers, number of cars, whether they have a dishwasher). The survey organisers use this information to create a measure of wealth.
12. It is not possible to apply the BRR replicate weights within Stata when including a school fixed effect. In these models, cluster-robust standard errors are used instead.
13. These scales were created from children’s responses to statements such as: ‘If I put in enough effort I can succeed in mathematics’ and ‘sometimes I am just unlucky’.
14. Multiplying figures in the results table by 100 gives differences in terms of PISA points.
15. This is based upon the high-performing East Asia parameter estimate falling from 1.022 in model 1 to 0.148 in model 10.
16. This is clearly a controversial issue. The point is raised here to recognise that there has been some debate about this matter within the literature (see Uttal, Citation1997 and Lynn & Meisenberg, Citation2010) and that the empirical evidence presented is unable to conclusively support or reject such claims.
17. In England, it is possible to investigate the maths achievement of second-generation Chinese pupils in high stakes national exams. Strand (Citation2010) demonstrates the exceptional attainment of Chinese students at age 11, along with the remarkable progress they make from age seven. This holds for both boys and girls, and pupils from low income households. This suggests that exceptional performance of second-generation East Asian immigrants in mathematics exams may generalise to England as well.