Universal factors of student achievement in high-performing Eastern and Western countries.

Abstract

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South Korea, Hong Kong China, Singapore, and Japan; 5 top-performing Western countries, including Finland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands; and the 3 “superpower” countries of Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Ten extensively studied achievement-related attitudinal and behavioral variables—including attitudes toward school, enjoyment, learning strategies, reading habits, and reading strategies—were investigated. Overall, when comparing the East and West across the 10 variables, there were small to medium effect sizes, with Cohen’s d ranging from 0.04 to 0.47, which resulted in salient differences between the 2 regions. More important, there were striking similarities across all 13 countries in their “best” predictor of reading achievement—either enjoyment of reading or utilization of reading strategies to efficiently summarize the text. Enjoyment of reading in particular was a strong predictor at both individual and country levels. This study concludes that what motivates human learning is invariant across countries with vastly different educational, cultural, and language systems.

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