Abstract:
Comparative assessment data from TIMSS and PISA indicates that Singapore trumps Australia on these particular metrics of educational achievement. This result has occasioned no end of metaphysical hand-wringing in Australia -- and the West generally -- and prompted any number of pedagogical and structural reform initiatives, borrowing from the East Asian model, intended to lift levels of educational achievement in Western countries. In this presentation I will briefly report these results and, drawing on a decade of research in Singapore, explore what is it about Singapore's instructional regime, cultural order and institutional arrangements that might explain why Singapore does so much better than Australia on these measures of educational achievement. But given the enthusiasm for many Western governments for the East Asian model of pedagogy, it's also important to keep in mind the strengths of Australian pedagogy, the limits and opportunity costs of the East Asian pedagogical model, to think hard about the cultural and institutional differences between the two systems, and to be clear about what matters in improving the quality of teaching and learning at the classroom level over the long run.