Impressive! Best performers in Asia in terms of Educational standards = best performers in the world. Of course, everything is relative, and Finland still ranked highly in reading and science, where it was the top European nation. But the domination of PISA rankings by Asian countries looks complete, with countries from the region holding all the top seven spaces in math, the top five in reading, and the top four in science. Ultimately, this success might come down to something simple and harder to imitate — hard work. Finland was perhaps unique amongst the top achievers in PISA as its education system had many quirks which other countries could imitate; a late start to schooling for children, a lack of focus on examinations, more recess time, more teachers (who are also better paid than their U.S. counterparts), and strict rules and limits for private schools. Following a political decision made in 1985, there is only one math pro- gram in the compulsory phase of education, in the first nine school years (age 7 to 15). We consider this quite natural in the primary level: everybody has to acquire the basic arithmetic skills. But the present situation means that almost all formal algebra and geometry has disappeared from the curriculum as too difficult for a major part of the student population. A consequence of this is that upper high school math has to start almost from scratch, and there is really a long way to go if one hopes to reach a level sufficient to university studies in any subject involving mathematics. One indicator of the low level from which the part of student population to which mathematics is or would be important is the consistently low results obtained by Finland in high school level international competitions like the International Mathematical Olympiad. businessinsider/why-finland-fell-in-the-pisa-rankings-2013-12
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 13:43:59 +0000
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