Description
About the Author

The outstanding performance of East Asian societies in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is one of the most widely discussed topics in international assessments. PISA is a worldwide study of scholastic performance, conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), of 15-year old pupils in mathematics, science and reading.

This book provides readers with a comprehensive view on the excellent performance of students in Hong Kong and East Asian societies based on solid empirical data from the first five cycles of the PISA study from 2000 to 2012. Adopting a broad perspective, this book links the performance of students to themselves, their families and respective schools — the three major selves and social contexts that exert powerful influence on young people in Hong Kong.

It is unique that the book does not only define student outcomes narrowly as cognitive performance on various tests in PISA, but also employs a number of affective indicators, such as students' self-regulated learning, their self-concept measures, and attitudes towards learning. The book argues that schooling is a complex enterprise, and the relationships between school outcomes and the larger families, schools, and societal contexts are even more complex. The book utilizes summary statistics and multivariate methods to investigate how various measures of student outcomes are influenced by these contextual factors.
Esther Sui Chu HO is Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy and Director of the Hong Kong Centre for International Student Assessment at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has been the Project Manager of HKPISA–2000, 2003, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2015; Consultant of Macau–PISA–2003; China–PISA 2006 Trial Study and Shanghai–PISA 2009 Main Study. She was a Fulbright Scholar at Pennsylvania State University (2004) and Johns Hopkins University (2010); Research Associate for project Education and Development in South China. Teaching consultant at the World Bank in the District Primary Educational Program, India; and Principal Investigator of Home School Collaboration Project.

She has taught courses on School Effectiveness and School Restructuring; Structuring and Process of Schooling; Educational Policy and Practice in Hong Kong; Family, Community and School: Policy & Practice; Education and Society in Hong Kong; and Quantitative Analysis in Classroom and School Settings. Her research interests focus on parental involvement in children's education; home-school community collaboration; school effectiveness and school reform; decentralization and school-based management; research methodology in education; and multilevel analysis in educational research.

Authors

What We Learned from PISA