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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.…
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Continue reading →: From Deficiency to Strength: Shifting the Mindset about Education Inequality
From Deficiency to Strength: Shifting the Mindset about Education Inequality To be published Journal of Social Issues Vol. 72, No. 4, 2016, pp. 716–735. Download the PDF version. Yong Zhao University of Kansas Author Note Yong Zhao, Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, University of Kansas. Correspondence concerning this…
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Continue reading →: Are American Students Over-tested: Schleicher vs. Schleicher
Just as the U.S. is about to move away from over testing its students, PISA’s Andreas Schleicher says American students are not really over-tested: “The U.S. is not a country of heavy testing,” said Schleicher in a column published in the Hechingner Report. Schleicher drew the conclusion based on PISA…
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Continue reading →: Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job: Top 5 Mistakes in Ed Tech
Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job: Top 5 Mistakes in Ed Tech[1] First published in the Answer Sheet of Washington Post on October 6 2015 A few weeks ago, the OECD released a report[2] that essentially says investing in technology does not lead to better education outcomes,…
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Continue reading →: Outcome vs. Process: Different Incarnations of Personalization
There are different views of personalized learning. My advocacy for personalization has been occasionally misunderstood as supporting the narrow view of personalized learning driven by big data and learning analytics with technology or online learning in general. Below is an excerpt of a chapter from a book I coauthored with…
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Continue reading →: Lessons that Matter: What should we learn from Asia’s school systems?
Executive Summary [full report] Interest in learning from Asia’s high-performing education systems has grown rapidly in recent years. A flurry of research reports, media stories, and personal accounts of how Asia’s best education systems achieved their superb rankings on international league tables has been produced in the quest to improve…
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Continue reading →: The Dawn of a New Era: China’s College Entrance Exam Transformation
The year 2015 will be remembered as the beginning of a new era in Chinese education, according to some Chinese press[in Chinese]. It is the first year when a suite of policies aimed to transform the college entrance exam system or gaokao is to be implemented. The reforms are not…
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Continue reading →: A World at Risk: An Imperative for a Paradigm Shift to Cultivate 21st Century Learners[1]
*Published in Society 52(2), pp 129-135, April 2015, a special issue of the journal commemorating the 30th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. This is the submitted version. For the final published version please visit: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-015-9872-8 **In recognition of its significance and influence, I purposefully chose to emulate the style…
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Continue reading →: China Encourages College Students to Suspend Study and Become Entrepreneurs and Innovators
China Encourages College Students to Suspend Study and Become Entrepreneurs and Innovators “To foster a new engine of growth [in China], we need to encourage mass entrepreneurship and innovation, and mobilize the wisdom and power of the people,” said China’s Premier Li Keqiang said at the 2015 World Economic Forum…
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.
Selection of Books
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