Mathematics Education of Chinese Communities from the Perspective of International Studies of Mathematics Achievement

Abstract

International studies of mathematics achievement have been gaining importance in the past decades in the mathematics education community and have drawn much attention from policy makers around the world. In this chapter, results of some international studies in terms of mathematics achievements, student attitudes and classroom teaching are reviewed in order to gain a better understanding of mathematics education in the Chinese communities. It was found that Chinese students did very well in mathematics as measured by these international studies, however they did not do correspondingly well in terms of the affective outcomes of mathematics education. Superficially, mathematics teaching in the Chinese systems looked very traditional and backward, but a more fine-grained analysis of the data in these international studies of classroom teaching showed that the quality of teaching was high. It is argued that the underlying cultural values of these Chinese communities may be a plausible explanation of these findings. Chinese communities should be proud of their students’ achievement, but there is certainly no scope for complacency.