Thousands more school students
from China will participate in the next round of the world’s most
influential international education tests it was announced today.
The
news that the provinces of Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong are to join
Shanghai in representing the People’s Republic in the 2015 edition of
the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) could be
particularly daunting for competing countries like the UK.
In
Pisa 2012, published last year, Shanghai finished top and three other
cities and a country with majority Chinese populations – Singapore, Hong
Kong, Taiwan and Macau – took four of the next five places.
If
the new participating provinces do anything like as well, they could
further cement East Asia’s dominance of Pisa, pushing countries from
other parts of the world further down the league table.
But that
will depend on whether Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong, have
their results published separately or as a joint entry. The Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which runs Pisa, says
that decision will not be confirmed until October 2016.
China’s
new entrants also may not do as well as Shanghai, a wealthy metropolitan
powerhouse, which commentators say has education standards that are
higher than the rest of the country.
Students in a total of at
least 12 Chinese provinces have already taken Pisa tests, but apart from
Shanghai, their results have never been released.
Andreas
Schleicher, education director at the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), which runs Pisa, has revealed that
the trial tests in China showed that: “Even in some of the very poor
areas you get performance close to the OECD average.”
The OECD
told TES in December that it expected that enough Chinese regions would
take part in the next Pisa to allow a single score for the whole country
would be released.
But this week a spokesman instead there could
be individual results for each of the four participating mainland
provinces – a decision that would prevent the table-topping success of
Shanghai from being diluted.
OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría
said: “This is excellent news that China is increasing its involvement
in the OECD’s Pisa programme. It also marks another step in China’s
growing collaboration with the OECD.”
Source: news.tes.co.uk
Below
are the results for year of assessment 2012, 2009 and 2006. Let's wait
and see which country dominates the scores in 2015 assessment!
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China's Pisa prowess to come under pressure
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