True Story 1.09
Hong Kong students confound
a cultural expert’s prediction
The setting for this story
At the University of Hong Kong, faculty members tried evaluating students, not by testing, but by assessing student-assembled portfolios. Students were asked to prepare individual portfolios of their best work while collaborating in small groups. The story of this experiment is told by Neal, an expert on education across cultures whom the faculty had consulted.
A story of misaligned minds10
I told them that their experiment wouldn’t work. Individual portfolios are culturally inappropriate in East Asia, where students expect teachers to specify what to learn and how to learn it, then to administer an exam. In any culture of learning in which students rely on the teacher’s directives, they become anxious if cast adrift without authoritative guidance.
The faculty members went ahead. At first, my expectations proved correct. One student said:
- How am I supposed to do this well when I’m not exactly sure what my professor wants to see? I understand that he said we can include items that mean much to us, but how can I be sure that he will agree with the things I’ve chosen to include?
After the first meetings of the students’ collaborative groups, a session was held for group leaders to summarize the concerns of the members of their groups. Two leaders offered these comments:
- Our professor’s opinion isn’t clear, so my group can’t decide how to proceed.
- Our professor seems to accept every opinion that we put forward, seldom criticizing or offering a contrary idea. Are we really supposed to believe that all our ideas are correct?
Weeks later, after the portfolios had been handed in, I was astonished to find that the students’ comments were decidedly upbeat:
- This exercise led me to think about many things I had never thought of before! Our professors helped by throwing us lots of questions to stimulate our thinking.
- I understand now that our professors seldom disagreed with our opinions because there were no fixed answers. One really must find one’s own way.
Neal’s question
OK, I admit that I was wrong. But why?
Critique of story 1.09
Three factors help to explain why Neal was wrong.
- These were university students who knew they’d soon be filling practical, adult roles without professors’ telling them how to think and what to do.
- Although each portfolio was individually assembled, the students worked in collaborative groups, which helped make this assignment culturally acceptable.
- Faculty members didn’t just give this assignment and disappear. They carefully explained its parameters and responded patiently to students’ concerns.
Experts like Neal often say it rarely works to copy a teaching method from one society and paste it, unchanged, into another society’s school. But this method was not pasted unchanged.
For thought
This experience does not prove that the research findings Neal drew on are mistaken. Rather, it shows that situation-specific factors can render inapplicable a research-based generalization.
Related stories
Stories 1.03, 1.13, 4.03, 7.17, and 7.18 also describe cases in which a teaching approach from one society was brought into a different society’s schools. Story 10.19 is another cautionary tale about the potential hazards of relying on research-based generalizations to explain and predict.
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Endnotes:
10 Biggs, 302–03; quotes are lightly edited.
All full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.