Making Sense of Mathematics Achievement in East Asia: Does Culture Really Matter?

Abstract

East Asian students have persistently performed well in recent international comparative studies of mathematics achievement, and I have been offering explanations from the perspective of the influence of the Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), which is shared by these high performing East Asian countries. In this paper, two challenges to this cultural explanation will be dealt with: whether these East Asian countries really form a group and whether there is a more direct way to study the influence of culture on mathematics achievement. Three studies on secondary analyses of the TIMSS and PISA datasets are presented to support the assertion that the East Asian countries do form a cultural cluster, and preliminary results of a study that looks into the influence of the English and Chinese languages on students’ assessment in mathematics are reported.