A Sociological Study of Education in Taiwan Province

What's the use of studying sociology? Huang is a researcher at the European and American Institute of Academia Sinica. She tries to find a way to respond to the real world in her daily data collection. Among the cold characters, he pays attention to the problem of "education" and explores the root of "social inequality".

Researcher Huang has two sons, and he has deep expectations for education in Taiwan Province. He frowned and looked at the question, thinking, "Are there any other observations and possibilities to put forward?" This seems to open the switch for researchers to ask questions and explore further.

What are the reasons for starting to study "educational inequality"?

Ideally, we hope that school education is an equal process. After students from different family backgrounds come to school, inequality gradually tends to be consistent.

Ideally, this is the case, but sometimes school education is not like this. It just reflects the different family backgrounds of students and maintains or intensifies such inequality.

I study sociology, and one of my fields is "social stratum", that is, studying social inequality. We know from the literature that the most important thing that affects a person's professional status is "education". What has the greatest influence on the education level is the individual's academic performance in school, including mathematics, science and other subjects.

An individual's academic performance in school not only affects his education level in the future, but also directly affects his work performance and income in the future. After seeing this key point, I focused my research on students' academic performance, because it has a great influence on students' future.

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How to collect information and observe the educational problems in Taiwan Province Province?

The materials I use are divided into two parts, one is local in Taiwan Province Province, and the other is transnational.

Transnational materials mainly include two items, namely, International Student Assets Project (PISA) and International Trends in Mathematics and Science Research (TIMSS). Another place, built by Taiwan Province Province itself, is called TEPS.

PISA and TIMSS cover the evaluation and investigation of the learning situation of middle school students and primary school students in dozens of countries. The collection of these materials is promoted by transnational educational evaluation organizations, and standard procedures and practices for data collection are established, and then student data are collected by university research teams in various countries. Data are published regularly for researchers' use.

I used to be the co-host of the TEPS data collection project, and I was mainly responsible for designing student learning assessment tests to measure students' learning growth from grade one to grade three.

The long-term education tracking database in Taiwan Province (TEPS) is a survey of 200 1 students in Grade One and Grade Two, with about 20,000 samples each. The survey is conducted every two years until the next semester of senior three.

The content of the questionnaire contains many questions, including students, parents, teachers, school administrators and other different questionnaires. In addition to the questionnaire, students also received a set of 75 questions about learning evaluation, and the test time was about 90 minutes. The purpose of this set of learning evaluation is to evaluate the growth of students' academic performance in junior high school and senior high school.

Only with the evolution of the times, students' learning situation will change, and it is necessary to build a new database, which requires teams, funds and time to maintain and develop. Among them, people who can do sampling, design questionnaires and have experience in data collection are needed.

After all, doing research is a profession.

What is unique about education in Taiwan Province Province in East Asian countries?

In the international education evaluation data, we can see that East Asia is usually the best performer, and Singapore is usually the first, followed by South Korea, Japan, Taiwan Province Province and Hongkong. We will suspect that it may be because there are exams, we attach great importance to school study and exams, and we need to make up classes in order to get into a good university.

However, there is an assessment in PISA that is not math or reading, but called "creative problem-solving ability", which is relatively good in East Asian countries, which makes the statement that "you only take exams, but you are not creative" self-defeating.

In addition, Taiwan Province Province has another feature. In TIMSS, students' math scores in the same grade are divided into four benchmarks, namely, advanced, high, medium and low international benchmarks.

As shown in the following table 1, in 2003, only 16% of primary four students in Taiwan Province province performed better than the fourth grade of the international advanced benchmark, far lower than 38% in Singapore, 22% in Hong Kong and 2 1% in Japan. However, four years later, this group of fourth-grade students made remarkable progress when they were promoted to the second grade. As many as 45% of the students in the eighth grade (second grade) scored better than the international advanced benchmark and surpassed other East Asian countries.

This "fast-growing" learning model shows that students in Taiwan Province Province can make great progress in the world with the improvement of their grades, which is quite strange. However, not all students in Taiwan Province Province have made rapid progress in mathematics in the same session, and some students are still making slow progress.

As shown in Table 2 below, in 2003, only about 65,438+0% of the fourth-grade primary school students failed to meet the international primary school mathematics standards, but four years later, these students reached the eighth grade (second grade), and the proportion of students who failed to meet the international primary school mathematics standards rose to 5%.

That is to say, with the improvement of grades, the number of students in Taiwan Province Province who are seriously backward in mathematics has increased by about five times in the four years from grade four to grade two.

These slow math students in Taiwan Province Province are usually people with low socioeconomic status and low grades. Therefore, behind the rapid progress, we should still pay attention to whether there are students who are left behind and the gap is aggravated under these learning conditions.

Why do we use the subject of "Mathematics" for comparison?

First, mathematics is something that everyone has to learn before graduating from high school. Second, mathematics subjects are not influenced by culture, for example, reading ability is limited by language, so there is no comparative benchmark for transnational data analysis. So in comparison, mathematics will be more objective.

Why should we study the "urban-rural gap" in education?

I found that the public has some stereotypes about the gap between urban and rural students' academic performance.

Media coverage of rural schools has deepened people's stereotype of the gap between urban and rural areas. Homesickness has become the object of enthusiastic investment by non-governmental education groups, and it is also the specific object and key goal of * * * investment resources. Folk education groups and * * * seem to be influenced by stereotypes.

But I think: the formulation of education policy needs to be based on empirical research.

I once wrote an article about the gap between urban and rural areas, looking at the performance of mathematics in grade four or eight (grade two) in Taiwan Province Province. It is generally believed that as long as they are in rural areas, their academic performance will be relatively low, students in cities will have better academic performance and school equipment teachers will be better. However, through the research data, it is found that although there are significant differences between rural areas and cities on average, there are more students with learning difficulties in cities or towns between them.

If we only pay attention to the countryside, it seems that we can solve the problem of large learning gap by improving the academic performance in the countryside, but in fact there is no way-because most students with poor academic performance are concentrated in "cities" or "towns on the outskirts of cities", and rural areas only account for a small part-that is to say, while paying attention to the differences between urban and rural areas, we should also pay attention to the huge differences within schools and even classes.

The difference is not only between schools, between urban and rural areas, but also within schools and even classes.

Therefore, our focus should not actually become a "geographically different" thinking, but "every school" deserves our attention, because students with low learning are scattered in various schools, not concentrated in rural areas.

How does sociology apply or participate in the real society?

Sociologists should run around and enter different fields to understand society? Or are you locked in your own research room and immersed in research? I think there are different views. Personally, I didn't say what a sociologist should do, but I can say what I have done so far.

I use the collected data because other sociologists go to the field and schools to send questionnaires for evaluation, and even people from many different countries collect and sort out the data. These materials are constructed by a group of professional teams with large scale, strong representativeness and good quality. I put forward research questions, analyzed these materials and put forward some research results.

These research results are usually not immediately seen when entering the field, but must be presented with data and convincing.

Therefore, as a sociologist, my participation often leads to the research results that you won't know until you do it, which will help us to know more about the learning situation of students in Taiwan Province Province. This is how I present these research results or my observation of society. It may be said that the role of each sociologist is different.

"I think it is more important to ask a research question that I think is important and meaningful, and then respond and present such a question through data," Huang said.

I'm not the only one who cares about asking a question, but society will be interested and want to know. Many times, I am thinking about what to do next. This is the most important question that affects a scholar: What are you going to do next? What kind of topic is it? What is the significance and importance of the topic itself? Why do you spend so much time on this topic? Convince yourself with others. This is an important issue worthy of attention.

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Sometimes, my inspiration comes from such discussions, or from discussions with some people, my research assistants and other teachers. I don't think it's enough just to shut myself in the research room, do data analysis, study research methods and find statistical models. I think I need to go out more, too. I think the biggest challenge for me is what I will do next, which is the most important thing.

From data analysis, we can see the root of "social inequality"-family and school education.