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Continue reading →: Torture is not Good Education: A Response to WSJ’s Why American Students Need Chinese Schools
This piece was published in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet under the title There’s a new call for Americans to embrace Chinese-style education. That’s a huge mistake. on September 20 2017. ————————- Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Why American Students Need Chinese Schools?[1]” by Lenora Chu,…
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Continue reading →: The Courage to be Creative: My Interview with the Deep-Play Research Group
Had a great interview with the Deep-Play Research group led by my long time friend Dr. Punya Mishra, Associate Dean of Scholarship & Innovation and Professor in Leadership & Innovation at Mary Lou Fulton Teacher’s College, Arizona State University. Thanks to Carmen Richardson for the interview and turning some random thoughts…
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Continue reading →: Fatal attraction: Why Copying Each Other Won’t Improve Education?
This article was published in the New Internationalist on August 31 2017. Why is the West racing to copy Asia’s education system as fast as the East scrambles to reform it? Yong Zhao takes an unhealthy and deluded romanticization of education to task. Across the world, Western governments are hard…
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Continue reading →: What Works Can Hurt: Side Effects in Education
Published in Journal of Educational Change, Volume 18, Issue 1, February 2017, Pages 1-19. Download Full Article in PDF (personal copy, please do not distribute). This medicine can reduce fever, but it can cause a bleeding stomach. When you buy a medical product, you are given information about both its…
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Continue reading →: [video]Perils or Promises: Education in the Age of Smart Machines: Presentation at the City Club of Cleveland
On December 14th, 2016, I made a presentation at the City Club of Cleveland. Watch the presentation The Club’s website or Youtube. Title: Perils or Promises: Education in the Age of Smart Machines. According to a 2016 World Economic Forum report, advances in technology could displace as many as five million…
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Continue reading →: Did the Shift from Paper to Computer Bring Down East Asia’s (China’s) PISA Performance?
I was surprised by China’s 2015 PISA performance, particularly in reading. I was confident that even the expansion beyond Shanghai would not cause a significant decline based on my understanding of the Chinese education system. And Beijing, Jiangsu, and Guangdong are traditionally strong performers in China, and among the most…
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Continue reading →: Don’t Read Too Much Into It: What Brexit and U.S. Election Surprises Can Teach Us about PISA
The results of the Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election will go down in history as the biggest surprises of 2016. The final results defied all predictions. The polls were wrong, as were the pundits. Though they predicted that the majority of Brits would vote to remain in the EU,…
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Continue reading →: Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job: Top 5 Mistakes in Ed Tech
Do what you do best and let technology do the rest Technology has transformed our lives. Virtually every school and classroom is connected. Why then, has it not transformed education? Consider these five ways educators can begin to optimize classroom technology and rethink its use. See technology as a complement rather…
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Continue reading →: Stop Copying Others: TIMSS Lessons for America
TIMSS[1] has become one of the two most influential international testing programs in the world today, the other being PISA. First introduced in 1995, TIMSS is conducted every four years to assess math and science learning in fourth and eighth grade. It has had significant impact on math and science…
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Continue reading →: It must be the chopsticks: The Less Reported Findings of 2015 TIMSS and Explaining the East Asian Outstanding Performance
TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) beat PISA by one week. It just released its 2015 results. Within hours of the release, Google News has already collected over 10,000 news stories reacting to the results from around the world, some sad, some happy, some envious, and some confused.…
More about Yong Zhao
Dr. Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Additionally, he worked as a professor of educational leadership in the Faculty of Education at University of Melbourne and senior researcher at the Mitchell Institute of Victoria University in Australia. He was a visiting Global Professor at University of Bath and a visiting scholar at Warwick University in the UK.
Learning in the Age of AI 