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  Motivation – a Surprising Finding

  With this amount of pressure coming from external sources, such as parents, one might think that while most Chinese students are motivated to study hard, this is entirely extrinsic motivation, and driven by fear of punishment or promise of reward rather than interest in the task. It would be easy enough to pick out examples of Chinese students being bullied by their parents and hating school – but would this fairly represent the ‘typical’ Chinese experience?

  It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume so. At the very least, given that British and American parents are more concerned with making learning interesting and fun than their Chinese counterparts, you’d think that their children would be more intrinsically motivated than Chinese children.168 Another reason for thinking so would be that Chinese teachers have been described as more ‘controlling’ than Western ones: putting more pressure on the children, giving them more tests and demanding more conformity.169 According to Ryan and Deci’s well-evidenced finding that autonomy is a key prerequisite for intrinsic motivation, it ought to follow that Chinese children have, on average, very little of it.170

  This is not actually the case. Wang and Pomerantz gave Chinese and American adolescents questionnaires that asked them to say how much (from 1–5) they agreed with various statements about their motivations for studying, which corresponded with the different types of motivation identified by Ryan and Deci on their taxonomy: intrinsic motivation (e.g. ‘I do my homework because it’s fun’), identification (‘I work on my classwork because it’s important to me to do so’), introjection (‘I work on my classwork because I’ll be ashamed of myself if it doesn’t get done’) and external motivation (‘I do my homework because I’ll get in trouble if I don’t’). They found that Chinese students actually had a higher index of relative autonomy – i.e. they gave more intrinsic and identified reasons for studying than American students. While this index declined over the course of junior high school (a period where the pressure intensifies in China due to the high school entrance exams) it remained higher than American students of the same age.171

  This is surprising – Chinese students are under lots of pressure from parents and teachers, and are taught in a way that doesn’t give students much freedom, and yet they report that they enjoy learning more than Americans do and that they work hard because it is important, rather than because their parents force them to. However, it is consistent with research carried out in the 1990s which found that Chinese children reported liking school more than American children.172 More recent research was carried out by the OECD in 2012 in which 85 per cent of Shanghainese 15-year-olds surveyed agreed with the statement ‘I feel happy at school’ compared to 80 per cent of American 15-year-olds and 83 per cent of British 15-year-olds (not a big lead for the Chinese, but they are not behind on this measure as you might expect).173

  How can we make sense of this? There are two potential explanations, one from some Chinese researchers and one from a tiger mother. Zhou, Lam and Chan suspect that the answer to this paradox lies in the different ways that students from different cultures interpret the apparently ‘controlling behaviours’ of their teachers (and I would argue this extends to parents and grandparents too).174 Zhou and colleagues tested their hunch by giving Chinese and American fifth graders various scenarios involving teachers, such as a teacher keeping a child behind in class to finish some homework they hadn’t handed in, and asked the children to say how they would feel if their teachers did the same to them (choosing from 12 emotions). They found that American students were more likely to interpret the teachers’ actions as being controlling, and to say it made them feel sad or mad, whereas the Chinese students interpreted exactly the same scenarios more positively, indicating that they felt looked after or cared for. In addition, they found that for students from both countries, feeling controlled led to less motivation in that teacher’s class, whereas feeling cared for led to more motivation, and that students were less likely to perceive an action as being controlling if they had a good relationship with that teacher.

  If you’ve been brought up in a Confucian culture, where fulfilling your role within the family is very important, and where parents impress the value of learning upon you from a young age, you are likely to have internalised these values and goals. When an adult then acts in a way that will benefit your learning, you are less likely to perceive that behaviour as being controlling, and more likely to see it as evidence of your teacher or parent’s concern for you and your future; especially where that relationship is a loving one. In other words, Chinese students have higher levels of autonomous motivation because they have internalised the cultural and familial goals, and made them their own. They are less externally motivated despite the pressure from parents and teachers because the pressure is to pursue goals that they themselves believe in.

  Another explanation for why Chinese students have, on average, more autonomous motivation by early adolescence than their American peers is articulated by the original tiger mother, Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She explains: ‘What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up.’175

  This sounds very much like external motivation to me. However, Chua continues: ‘But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something – whether it’s maths, piano, pitching or ballet – he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.’ So although Chinese parents may be getting their children to work hard against their will initially, the children may then develop genuine intrinsic motivation once they get good at the activity in question, and begin to enjoy it and pursue it for its own sake.

  The bottom line however, is that even though Chinese children seem on average to be more intrinsically motivated than their Western counterparts, in those cases where they lack this intrinsic motivation or enjoyment of study, they still continue to work hard – whether they like it or not.

  Critical Thinking and Creativity

  Based on their analysis of a survey completed by 479 Chinese university students and lecturers, Pratt and colleagues suggest that the Chinese think of basic knowledge as the first step in a four stage learning process:

  Memorising and mastering the basics

  Understanding

  Applying the knowledge to problems and situations

  Questioning or critical analysing176

  We know from the PISA tests that Chinese students are good at getting as far as stage 3, but what about questioning or critical analysing? Are they able to do these too or is this where their system of whole-class demonstrations and structured practice falls down? This is certainly something the Chinese government have been concerned about, along with a number of prominent Chinese commentators. In 2010, the then Premier of the State Council, Wen Jiabao, announced that: ‘Students don’t only need knowledge; they have to learn how to act, to use their brains. We must encourage students to think independently, freely express themselves, get them to believe in themselves, protect and stimulate their imagination and creativity.’177

  In recognition of this perceived problem, the Chinese government introduced a new curriculum in 2001 that emphasises the cultivation of independent and critical learners, and a reinforcement of inter-subject connections. They are moving away from tiányaˉshì (force-feeding the duck) – a concept used to describe the pressurised system of preparing children for high-stakes exams which was first explained to me in t
he migrant school by a teacher who mimed the force-feeding of a duck as she said it. Increasing numbers of Shanghai schools are aiming to foster innovative thinking in their students through their curricula, which are now partly designed by the schools themselves.178 Some are including ‘explorations’ in their lessons, during which students are encouraged to discuss and express their own ideas. Only time will tell whether their new efforts will pay off and result in greater creativity and critical thinking, or whether the threat of true independent thought will be too much for a government that recently told universities to ‘shun Western values’.179

  In the meantime, the West should not be complacent. Students from Shanghai and other Chinese regions don’t only score highly due to their intensive work ethic. Their lessons are highly structured, with a stated aim, clear explanations and modelling as a result of careful planning, and opportunities for students to practise and get prompt – lesson features which have consistently been found to correlate with high student performance.180 The Chinese fondness for memorisation is also aligned with research into ‘what works’ – committing certain facts to memory aids problem-solving by freeing up space in the working memory and illuminating contexts in which existing knowledge can be applied.181 And even the culture-soaked Confucian approach to effortful learning is something that schools in different countries can begin to embed by using the right language and instilling beliefs about the importance of perseverance from an early age. While we might not want to put our children under the kind of pressure that Chinese children are under, it would be a mistake to assume there is nothing we can learn from them.

  CANADA

  Chapter 14: Diversity, Relationships and the Limits of Individualism

  Diversity is Canada’s strength.

  Justin Trudeau, Canadian Prime Minister

  I got off the plane in Vancouver feeling groggy, and wondered for a moment if I’d ended up in the right country. The billboards and signs that greeted me as I walked through the airport were in some kind of East Asian script – Japanese or Chinese, I couldn’t tell. Once I’d seen a Tim Horton’s Café and Bake Shop and realised that I must at the very least be in North America, I made my way through customs, into town on the train shuttle, and went straight to bed in the first hostel I came across.

  Jetlag woke me up early the next morning, so I went and sat in a coffee shop while I waited for the rest of the city to wake up. As I nursed my latte in the window, I watched people of all shapes, sizes and colours passing by and I felt at home. Like London, Vancouver is a hugely multicultural city. British Columbia (BC), the province Vancouver is in, welcomes more than 40,000 immigrants every year,182 and Canada as a whole takes in about 250,000 annually,183 meaning that about one in five of the people living in Canada were born elsewhere, mostly in Asia or Europe.184 Mary Jean Gallagher, Chief Student Achievement Officer and Assistant Deputy Minister of Ontario – the most diverse province in Canada and the second that I visited – does not see this as a barrier: ‘It’s seen as an opportunity and a challenge.’ In a presentation I attended at the ministry in Ontario she described how they think it’s an advantage for their children to grow up in a diverse environment as it will help them to understand other cultures, preparing them to solve global problems, and do business with the rest of the world.

  This diversity is partly why I chose to come here. If you were to take averages of different systems’ reading, maths and science scores, Canada would rank seventh in PISA 2009, and eleventh in PISA 2012,185 so had I been just visiting the top five PISA countries in the world I wouldn’t have been to Canada; I would have added Korea to my itinerary instead and gorged myself on kimchi. But Canada is impressive and unique in that it gets these relatively high scores, while being a geographically dispersed and hugely diverse country, with a culture that is in many ways similar to the lower-scoring UK and the US.

  I found the Canadians to be welcoming, and polite but easy-going; there were none of the formalities that I’d got used to in Japan and China (let alone the stares and requests for photos). One of the families I stayed with exemplified this openness to experience, described by Mary Jean Gallagher in her talk at the ministry, by having a Chinese exchange student stay with them for a semester, and then welcoming me into their home in addition. Loree and Randy went out of their way to include their Chinese guest in the conversation at dinner (despite his English being elementary) which was no doubt helped by the fact that Loree also worked as a teacher for children who had English as their second language. In British Columbia, these students participate in the regular curriculum, but the ministry provides funds for additional language support if a series of criteria are met.

  Box 4: Does Canada’s immigration policy explain its PISA results?

  Having 8.4 per cent of Canadians identify as South Asian or Chinese doesn’t sound like many, but immigrants to Canada are not spread evenly across the country. Most settle in the four biggest provinces – Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta – which are also the provinces which get the highest PISA results. British Columbia, where Chinese Canadians make up 10 per cent of the total population, got the highest average PISA score of all the provinces in 2012. It does make you wonder doesn’t it? You’ve just read about the kind of attitudes Asian students have towards their studies, so you might just be thinking, ‘Does the presence of immigrants explain Canada’s PISA success?’

  Canada’s immigration policy of welcoming people who are likely to make an economic contribution to society means that they do have an educated and relatively affluent immigrant class. In 2008, 49 per cent of PhD holders in Canada were born elsewhere (and you’d imagine that their children, if they have them, would be doing pretty well at school), and the average ‘International Index of Socio-Economic Status’ of parents of teenagers taking the PISA test in 2000 was slightly higher for immigrant parents than for the ‘native’ parents (as it was in England).186 But they don’t only take in the educated and the affluent; about 9 per cent of the immigrants to Canada are refugees, who are less likely to score well at school, having spent their time enduring famine or conflict in their homeland, rather than at their books. And when you separate out the PISA scores of the first and second generation immigrants from the native population, and compare Canada’s average 2009 score with and without them, you can see that, overall, immigrants have a slightly negative effect on Canada’s PISA results. Without them, the score is 533, with them it is 527 (you find a similar, marginal difference between natives and immigrants in the UK and the United States).187 Of course, there is far more to immigration than its effects on PISA scores, but I’m spelling out the stats in case anyone is under the misapprehension that Canada’s generally high PISA scores are simply the result of their immigration policy.

  Canada is made up of 10 provinces, and three vast but sparsely-populated territories in the North. Each province and territory runs its own education, so Canada is effectively made up of thirteen different education systems, 10 of which contribute to the PISA data.188 These provinces have a surprising amount in common.189 They share approaches to comprehensive education, they have similar textbooks, they all have strong teacher unions, teacher training is based on a common model (with an important exception) and most of them have similar assessment approaches.190

  Overall, these approaches, and the rest of the Canadian context, result in a system in which fewer children than average fail to meet the baselines in reading, maths and science, and in which there is a relatively weak link between family background and PISA scores. What are the factors that might help explain the stronger performance of those that are usually the educational underdogs?

  Catering for Struggling Learners

  Let’s start at the beginning, before educational factors come into play. Canada has traditionally had a pretty decent welfare system, born of their response to the Great Depression, meaning that pregnant mums (along with everyone else) are guaranteed free healthcare. This welfare system includes low-income suppo
rt, so these mums and their young children are less likely to be malnourished than mothers and children in countries without this social safety net. This net has holes, and Canada is some way from eliminating child poverty, but the percentage of Canada’s PISA-taking students who have an index of economic, cultural and social status below -1 (one measure of coming from a poor background) is one of the lowest in the world.

  Compared to other OECD countries, not many children are enrolled in preschool before the age of five (which some suggest could be an area of improvement for Canada),191 although some provinces such as Alberta and Quebec offer free preschool places to younger children from disadvantaged backgrounds. You’ll remember the research discussed when we were looking at Finland – the early years are an important time when learning gaps between children from richer and poorer backgrounds can be widened or narrowed, and good quality preschools help to make sure it is the latter (though poor quality preschools can have a negative impact on everyone).192 By the time they are five, the vast majority of children in Canada attend kindergarten.193And my goodness it looks fun.

  I spent a morning with the kindergarten in one of the elementary schools I visited. All the displays were at child height – something that seems obvious to me now but that I’d not considered as being important before. Around the room were different stations where the children could choose to do different things – painting, building, play-acting, thinking. The thinking station had a laminated picture of a spider on it, with a question at the top (which was read to them) asking, ‘Is a spider a good guy or a bad guy?’ Six Post-its had been stuck on the laminate by the children: two said ‘good guy’, one said ‘googuy’, one said ‘good’, and two just had pictures of spiders on them.

  The kindergarten teacher, Melvyn, explained to me that they spend most of their time choosing what they want to do, but they do have prescribed learning outcomes including goals around physical activity and pre-reading and writing skills such as speaking and listening and letter identification. A lovely example of their attempts to support these skills is that children are encouraged to track words with their finger while the teacher is reading, and to ‘hug’ words, meaning they put one finger at the front and one at the end to develop their understanding of the concept of words.