A view of Stanford University’s campus.
A recently published study called Supertest, which followed 30,000 undergraduates in the United States, Russia, China and India, found that the critical thinking and academic skills of mainland students declined rather than increased after college studies.
The Supertest study was co-sponsored by Stanford University, the Russian Higher School of Economics (HSE), the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and its partner universities in China and India, according to Phys.org, a U.K.-based science news site, and the results were published in the British journal The results were published in the British scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour.
A total of 30,000 computer science and electrical engineering students from the four countries were tested in physics, mathematics and critical thinking (dialectical thinking). The test was divided into three stages: when students entered university, at the end of their second year of university, and at the end of university.
The test results showed that the mainland Chinese students outperformed the Russian and Indian students in both academic and critical thinking skills when they entered the university, and the Russian students outperformed the Indian students in math skills when they entered the university. However, by the end of their second year of college, the gap between Russian and Chinese students’ academic ability was narrowing, with Indian students outperforming Russian students in math.
In terms of critical thinking, U.S. students had the best critical thinking skills at the beginning of their enrollment, while Russian students had better critical thinking than Indian students, but worse than Chinese students. However, over the course of their college studies, American students’ critical thinking skills strengthened, Russian and Indian students’ levels remained about the same, and Chinese students’ critical thinking skills declined significantly.
Another unexpected test result is that the academic skills of Chinese engineering students are also gradually declining.
Igor Chirikov is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliated researcher with the HSE Institute for Education. He believes this phenomenon may be related to the over-focus on fill-in-the-blank classroom education in undergraduate teaching in mainland China.
“Students at Chinese universities enter with a high level of skill, but that level declines over the course of their college studies. This applies to physics, math and critical thinking. We observed this at both major and general universities, just to different degrees.” Chirikov said.
“One possible explanation lies in the way undergraduate education is organized in China.” He further explained that faculty on the mainland do not encourage students to actively explore and think as much as faculty at Russian and Indian universities, resulting in a lack of motivation to learn. But these competencies are important in the international competition of the 21st century.
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