Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t).

Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by temphn on Sunday October 16, 2011 @01:56AM (#3116663)

"Superior" is only one bit of information, in that it only says "x is greater than y"...but not by how much, and with no measure of statistical significance.

Finland's technological and industrial output clusters with Sweden, Denmark, and Norway to a far greater extent than it does with countries outside Northern Europe.

In the same way, when you look at the TIMSS, intra-European variance exists and is nontrivial, but European and East Asian nations do tend to cluster together quite a bit:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009001.pdf

See Table 3 on page 19. Top 5 countries in grade 8 in math: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. The very top European countries are towards the lower end of the East Asian distribution in math, and are only close in 4th grade (before puberty onset).

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Re:Why Finland’s schools are great (by doing what we don’t). by henrikschroder on Sunday October 16, 2011 @04:37AM (#3116877)

Finland does so much better than Sweden that Swedish newspapers semi-regularly feature the same article as the parent of this discussion, i.e. "our schools are crap, Finland is right next to us, they're awesome, how do they do it, why can't we?".

Of course, nothing ever happens.

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