what paradox?

ABSTRACT

Chinese classrooms present an intriguing paradox to the claim of self-determination theory that autonomy facilitates learning. Chinese teachers appear to be controlling, but Chinese students do not have poor academic performance in international comparisons. The present study addressed this paradox by examining the cultural differences in students' interpretation of teacher controlling behaviors. Affective meanings of teacher controlling behaviors were solicited from 158 Chinese 5th graders and 115 American 5th graders. It was found that the same controlling behaviors of teachers had different affective meanings for different cultural groups (Chinese vs. American) and for groups with different levels of social-emotional relatedness with teachers (high vs. low). Chinese children perceived the behaviors as less controlling than American children and, in turn, reported that they were more motivated in their teachers' class than American children. Regardless of culture, children with high social-emotional relatedness with teachers perceived the behaviors as less controlling than children with low social-emotional relatedness with teachers. It was also found that internalization mediated the relation between social-emotional relatedness and children's learning motivation in both cultures. The findings revealed cultural differences as well as similarities in the psychological process of internalization.
The Chinese Classroom Paradox: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Teacher Controlling Behaviors
Zhou, Ning 1; Lam, Shui-Fong 1; Chan, Kam Chi 2
Journal of Educational Psychology
Publish Ahead of Print, 19 March 2012

High discipline/high joy.

The secret of success.

The Jesuits figured it out 400 years ago.

US public schools forgot it back in the 1960s, I think. The 60s, or maybe not 'til 1985.

update 9/11/2012:
Doug Lemov on warm/strict
all Teach Like a Champion posts

The Day of Reckoning, brought to us from India

Together, the rise of Reform Math, the reduction in ability-based grouping and AP classes, the demise of the close reading and the analytical essay (see also this), and the growing rarity of instruction in the finer points of English grammar and sentence construction, have caused current and future American high school graduates to be decreasingly prepared for college. As more and more American college students display skills in math, writing, and reading comprehension that are way below expectations (ending up, even in some of the more selective colleges, in remedial math and writing classes), college admissions committees are increasingly looking abroad.

While much of the news about overseas applicants centers on China, with its thousands of Ivy League-aspiring applicants and their glossy, high-production value applications (and the growing suspicion that a fair amount of cheating is involved), it's India, I predict, that will bring to the American K12 education system the day of reckoning that we so desperately need it to have. First, unlike their Chinese counterparts, college applicants from India face no linguistic barriers; many speak and write a much more eloquent English than American (and even British) students do. Second, there are apparently tons of extremely well-qualified Indian applicants pinning their hopes on America's top colleges.

Indeed, as an October New York Times article inadvertently suggests, the Day of Reckoning may be close at hand:

Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University, better known as D.U., her family’s first choice and one of India’s top schools.
...

Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handful of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.

True, another reason--indeed, the only reason mentioned in the Times article--why American recruiters are seizing on this opportunity is because so many of the crème de la crème of overseas students are wealthy enough to pay full tuition, unlike many of their American counterparts. But it also helps that the K12 schools they attend aren't using Reform Math, aren't renouncing ability-based grouping, and aren't failing to provide college prep classes that are truly college preparatory. Indeed, if it were primarily her parents' pocket books that make Moulshri Mohan so attractive to Dartmouth and Smith, why are they offering her so many thousands of dollars of scholarship money?

So here are my dire predictions. In the next ten years, as the effects of Reform Math continue to percolate up the American school system, and as the number of highly qualified Indian students continues to outpace the numbers of spots at the best Indian universities, there will be a the growing displacement of American students by Indian students. Only then will a large enough proportion of the Powers that Be start realizing how urgent it is to enact actual education reform--reform, that is, that reverses the century's-long tide that has pushed our K12 schools further and further away from what's happening in the most successful school systems overseas.

(Cross-posted at Out In Left Field)

Tiger Mom

Debbie's been telling me for ages how wonderful Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom is, and I finally bought the book.

She's right. It's incredible.

Here is the first page:

This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. It’s also about Mozart and Mendelssohn, the piano and the violin, and how we made it to Carnegie Hall.

This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones.

But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.

A lot of parents whose kids are heading off to college will find the book moving, especially parents who've been part of kitchen table math. All the things you wanted to do, and tried to do, and failed to do because your kids had other ideas....your kids and your schools and your culture: all the things you didn't manage to do because no one thought it was a really good idea to spend 4 years of your child's life reteaching math (and spelling) at home so he could be on par with his peers in Europe and Asia.

Hard to sort it all out.

That's what the book is about, though for Amy Chua's kids the contested territory was music, not math.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is the memoir of a Chinese afterschooler.

the children of immigrants

One surprising characteristic unites the majority of America’s top high school science and math students – their parents are immigrants. While only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition were the children of immigrants, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. Just 12 of the 40 finalists at this year’s competition of the nation’s top high school science students had native-born parents. While former H-1B visa holders comprise less than 1 percent of the U.S. population, 60 percent of the finalists had parents who entered the U.S. on H-1B visas, which are generally the only practical way to hire skilled foreign nationals. Finalists’ parents sponsored through a family preference category represented 7.5 percent of the total, about four times higher than their proportion in the U.S.

THE IMPACT OF THE CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS ON SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT IN AMERICA (pdf file)
BY STUART ANDERSON

another Chinese mom

Caught this line in a Wall Street Journal review of The Woman Who Could Not Forget:

..."As my mother used to say to me, the success in one's life was dependent on 70% hard work and only 30% talent or genetic makeup."

Stigler and Stevenson found that "American children, teachers, and parents emphasize innate abilites as a component of success more strongly than their Japanese and Chinese counterparts do."

I'd be interested to know what percentages American parents would slot into Ying-Ying's statement on the subject of math and math learning.

I'd really be interested to know what percentages American math teachers would pick - !




The Woman Who Could Not Forget: Iris Chang Before and Beyond the Rape of Nanking- A Memoir



Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education

Engineering Professor: Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China

Interesting comment from Engineering professor in post about Chinese students taking SATs:

As a professor in Engineering, I see that the Chinese students who study in the US are just incredible. Out of 18 Ph.D's I advised, 16 were from China and we don't get any Americans into the doctoral program with nearly their qualifications. When they go back home, they will just leap-frog the US within the next 10 years.

not puzzling, and not a paradox, either

Barry spotted this Thursday session (pdf file) at the NCTM's upcoming 2011 Annual Meeting:

The Chinese Paradox: How Traditional China Trumps U.S. Reform Attempts
(General Interest) Session

Using video of urban Chinese math classes and professional development, the speaker will explain the puzzling paradox for how seemingly traditional Chinese educational methods—large, teacher-centered, lecture-based classes; exam-driven curricula; and so on—produce students who excel over their U.S. peers, despite the United States’s recent reform attempts initiated by NCTM.

Thomas Ricks
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

The success of large, teacher-centered, lecture-based classes where students learn exam-driven curricula is not a puzzling paradox to me.


seemingly?

I'm wondering about that word seemingly.

seemingly traditional Chinese educational methods

I'm wondering whether Thomas Ricks is going to resolve the paradox by arguing that Chinese educational methods are only seemingly traditional.

I hope not.



Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States (Studies in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series)

in today's mail

from the 25th Anniversary edition of the Harvard Education Letter:

[Jerome Bruner’s “Man: A Course of Study”] was my first deep exposure to progressive education, and I liked what I read, heard, and observed: the hands-on experiences, the deep exploration of inviting topics, the belief that the questions asked are as important as their answers, and that the reasoning behind questions and answers is crucial. I became a card-carrying enthusiast of progressive education, American style.

[snip]

As one personally committed to progressive education, I was well prepared for my initial visits in the early 1980s to the small northern Italian city of Reggio Emilia, home of what are widely regarded to be the finest preschools on the planet. Initially launched in the post-World War II era, these municipal school operate on the assumption that children’s natural curiosity should be the centerpiece of education. An object (or experience) that captures the children’s attention—a shoe, a fax machine, a rainbox, a birdhouse, or a carved lion at the central Piazza—can become the focus of curriculum for weeks, even months. As the young students explore this fertile object, they have the opportunity to draw on the “hundred languages” that are the birthright of every child—their senses, available media and symbol systems, the arts, the sciences, the natural world—to gain relevant insights into the various spheres of life in which these objects occupy a role. What is learned and created each day becomes the starting point for the following days’ activities. And these learnings are publicly displayed – or “documented”—so that teachers, parents, and other children can share in them and build on them.

Alon with other educators, including my mentor Jerome Bruner, I have visited, studied, and learned from the Reggio Emilia approach for 30 years. This flagship educational enterprise has changed my mind about what is possible to achieve with young children, the importance of group—as opposed to individual—learning, and the role that can be played by documentation of learning over days, weeks, and even longer stretches of time. I have also learned how a single educational experiment—conceived 50 years ago by a determined grouop of citizens—can affect practices all over the world.

Yet shortly after visiting Reggio Emilia for the first time, I undertook a series of trips to China. There I found that my progressive educational philosophy—Italian as well as American style-was sharply challenged. In classrooms in major cities around the country, I saw the same “prefabricated” lessons presented in essentially the same manner. Little latitude was permitted to either teacher or student. Indeed, in one college class in psychology, I was shocked to observe obviously talented students simply repeating the same lesson over and over. When I challenged the teacher about what seemed to be an obvious waste of time, we had an unproductive conversation that she finally terminated with the terse remark, “We’ve been doing it this way for so long that we know it is right.”

Yet I was also surprised by some of the positive results. In a first-grade art class, I watched the students slavishly copy a model over and over. I wondered whether these six-year olds could use their developing skills to portray an unfamiliar object—in this case, an Italian stroller that they could not possibly have seen before. Although the teachers protested when I proposed this assignment, I stuck to my guns. To everyone’s astonishment, the students were able to draw the stroller with considerable skill—far greater aptitude than would have been shown by most American youngsters. This experience convinced me that an effective education can begin with a singular focus on skill building rather than on the play of unfettered imagination, and that the skills that are developed, often precociously, have the potential to be mobilized to more creative ends.

From Progressive Education to Educational Pluralism
by Howard Gardner
Harvard Education Letter
September | October 2010