Chinese education isn't everything, I agree, but we should strive for their math standards. We should emulate the levels of critical thinking found in those high-level questions and inculcate them in our students, along with maintaining a good number sense (developed through arithmetic). This may require an hour longer per day to have a double math block, but I think it would be a lot better without the sheer craziness of some aspects of the Chinese model.
Critical thinking is what the Chinese do not inculcate in their students. I have taught or advised a number of Chinese students at the undergraduate and graduate level. On the whole they are way ahead of their American counterparts in their computation skills. When faced with a problem that can be directly reduced to solving an equation or applying an algorithm they rock. When faced with a situation that requires the open-ended design of a question or experiment they are stuck. They require a higher degree of oversight than Americans in projects that require initiative since they tend to wait for guidance towards a specific question, and when they solve it they just wait for new input rather than explore related questions.
Even in math? I admit that's a little surprising, at least for Shanghai.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/
Shanghai students do rather well on the problem solving test and are absolute rockstars on the math test. It seems the problem solving test would look at "critical thinking" skills not directly drilled into them, considering the way they were formatted into an application-style problem. Is there a difference between students in Shanghai/Macau and the rest of China in this domain?
At least to me, it seems the "problem solving section" would be a decent gauge of critical thinking in mathematics domains to me.
The issue isn't solving "math problems". They find equations to solve it and that's it.
The issue is when facing real life problems or doing research. If they have a chemical reaction to do and than it doesn't work, they don't do further investigations, they freeze and wait until their profressor gives them clear guidance on what to do.
They struggle very much with open-ended questions or research.
They are wonderful for computing data, do algorithms, but when it's open-ended or needing more creative problem-solving, it's more complicated. Their system is too ridig to allow them to create researchers.
