ABSTRACT
Our research group at the University of Michigan in collaboration with colleagues in other universities and research centres has been conducting a series of comparative studies of students’ academic achievement since the early 1980s. In the course of conducting this research we have compared elementary and secondary students of East Asia with their counterparts in the United States. We have been especially interested in these comparisons because, in a barrage of cross-cultural studies, East Asian students have consistently outperformed students in the West in areas such as mathematics and science. For example, in the recent reports of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study of eighth-grade students, the top four of the 41 participating countries in mathematics and three of the top four countries in science were from East Asia (Peak, 1996).
