Many Children 'Don't Succeed At Basic Levels' In Thai Schools

[webfact]

Many children 'don't succeed at basic levels'

By The Nation

Student-achievement levels in Thai schools have declined, according to data presented at a recent United Nations seminar in Bangkok, entitled "Quality Education: For some, or For All?"

Figures from a study conducted in 2009 by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that the learning level of 15-year-old Thai children was ranked at 50th for reading, 50th for mathematics and 49th for science, out of 65 participating countries.

Thailand Education Council secretary-general Professor Tongthong Chandransu told the seminar: "The Thai education system reflects itself in a dual image: it moves towards the universalisation of 15 years of basic education for all, but falls short on its quality improvement."

The acting UN resident coordinator in Thailand, Tomoo Hozumi, said that as many as 43 per cent in reading and science and 53 per cent in mathematics, of Thai children who participated in PISA 2009, were at the lowest performance category of 'level one or below' in the overall scale of level one to level six.

" 'Level one or below' shows that children are learning very little. What PISA measures is not a mere accumulation of information and knowledge, but how children apply themselves to solve issues they are likely to face in the real world," he said.

According to the PISA 2009 report, students proficient at level one have such limited scientific knowledge that it can only be applied to a few familiar situations.

"Students performing below level one usually do not succeed at the most basic levels of science that PISA measures. Such students will face serious difficulties in using sciences to benefit from further learning opportunities or to participate in life situations related to science and technology."

A committee member of Education Reform in the Second Decade, Chainarong Intarameesap, said the achievements of Thailand's famous schools were about the same level as international standards, but the country's overall performance was flat.

"Thai education is obviously for some, not for all," he said. "Education today has not been able to catch up with change. We need to admit it and change education to match the 21st Century."

A recent graduate from Singhaburi Agricultural Vocational College, Peerapong Sudsangauan, said Thai children didn't have goals or directions.

"They receive 15 years of free education but they do not know what they study for. They study according to trends and family pressure for master's and doctoral degrees. They complete a bachelor's degree just to become an administrator."

The UN's Hozumi said the classroom was both the entry point and the finishing line for improvement of quality education.

"We need to first look inside the 'black box' of the classroom and carefully observe and analyse what is going on, in terms of student-teacher interaction and real teaching and learning, and then come up with measures to facilitate positive changes."

The seminar was held by the Office of the Education Council and the United Nations country team. It was jointly organised by Unesco ahead of proposed government strategies to enhance teaching levels and ensure a quality education for all Thai children.

-- The Nation 2011-09-23

[culicine]

My colleagues and I have also made similar observations over the past 10 years. Some friends who work in universities here also agree that the standard of student performance has dropped noticeably over the last decade of us teaching here. PISA measures mostly application of math/science skills to solving problems. This is the main reason why they have perfomed so poorly on this exam. Once the MoE changes its policies to de-emphasise rote learning and puts more emphasis on application, analysis and synthesis skills, then their scores might improve. The kinds of tasks are rarely addressed in regular classrooms in Thailand.

Edited September 23, 2011 by Tywais
Changed font for better readability

[mca]

"We need to first look inside the 'black box' of the classroom and carefully observe and analyse what is going on, in terms of student-teacher interaction and real teaching and learning, and then come up with measures to facilitate positive changes."

How about starting with less than 50-60 students per class. With those figures I'm amazed that the poor little buggers manage to learn anything whatsoever.

[jonclark]

^{My colleagues and I have also made similar observations over the past 10 years. Some friends who work in universities here also agree that the standard of student performance has dropped noticeably over the last decade of us teaching here. PISA measures mostly application of math/science skills to solving problems. This is the main reason why they have perfomed so poorly on this exam. Once the MoE changes its policies to de-emphasise rote learning and puts more emphasis on application, analysis and synthesis skills, then their scores might improve. The kinds of tasks are rarely addressed in regular classrooms in Thailand.}

I agree with you, but changing the teaching and learning style requires re-educating the teachers; in most Thai schools the teachers are an aging population , nearing or starting to think about retirement and I don't fancy many of them enthusiastically embracing new learning methods as many are set in their ways, (rote teaching is all they know). Also what is needed is changing the system of 'school directiors' . In many governemnt school the director changes every two - three years and their arrival is always heralded with a sweeping superficial facelift of the school. They implement their policy for their tenure. This needs to change

What is needed is new enthusiastic graduates, properly trained, with a decent pay packet to stop the private sector snapping them up.

The alternative is to give all students a PC tablet and let them 'learn' on their own!

Fixing the Thai education system is a long term project and I honestly don't think many of the current politicians have the foresight to start this, as the rewards will be reaped by a government 5, 10 , 15 years down the line.

Edited September 23, 2011 by jonclark

[AbdulJabaar01]

Most of us would agree to the U.N's findings.

Older teachers who are not efficent should be put out to pasture / retired. Never will happen.

There needs to be a cooperation between Asian and Western educators on Education requirements for the different subject areas: Never will happen.

Asian and westerners need to work together in developing the curriculum and tools to better teach. Never will happen.

Thai citizens need to decide for themselves what road they want to take. Get communities involved in curriculum development and tell MOE to step aside.

Give an enima to the entire Education system. Starting from the top.

Edited September 23, 2011 by AbdulJabaar01

[Payboy]

Figures from a study conducted in 2009 by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that the learning level of 15-year-old Thai children was ranked at 50th for reading, 50th for mathematics and 49th for science, out of 65 participating countries.

But they're sure as hell winning a lot of medals at international maths & science olympiads.

[folium]

Figures from a study conducted in 2009 by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) showed that the learning level of 15-year-old Thai children was ranked at 50th for reading, 50th for mathematics and 49th for science, out of 65 participating countries.

But they're sure as hell winning a lot of medals at international maths & science olympiads.

But how many kids win medals? Sadly it's only a tiny fraction of the total student population.

As per the OP the problem here is that decent, worthwhile education is only enjoyed by a tiny minority.

Callously you could say that this is of little consequence if you only need low-paid, low-skilled workers, but the Thai economy has (increasingly) moved on from this and to remain competitive in the region the education system desperately needs addressing. The problem is vested interests in the education industry, the expense and the long term nature of the payback. None of which are appealing to short term focused politicians.

[bushwacker]

No surprise in this news story. Thai teachers are effective baby sitters. :jap:

[dudopode]

As long as teachers are not allowed to fail Thai students... there is no point to start any debate...

Thai kids CANT be failed... they all pass to the next level... 100% ...why shall they study????

it cost nothing to implement that policy

the no fail policy fails students!... but then they will have to learn on how to loose face

Edited September 23, 2011 by dudopode

[daninthai]

No surprise in this news story. Thai teachers are effective baby sitters. :jap:

I disagree. They are not effective baby sitters, when you get all the inter-school violence.

They are EFFECTIVELY baby sitters, but certainly not effective.

The only way to improve the quality of the students is to improve the quality of the teachers.

The only way to improve the quality of the teachers is to improve the quality of university lecturers.

The only way to get quality lecturers is to get people who have been taught in a quality system... i.e. NOT Thailand.

Foreign lecturers are needed to train new Thai teachers for about 20 years before Thais can take over for themselves.

It's a pity this country wasn't colonised by the British. The people would be a lot better off.

[Nowhereman60]

How can they learn when:

50 students in a class.

classrooms have no fan, air or windows

50% is passing grade.

you can't fail a student or it's the teacher fault.

if you don't pass the finals you take it over and over again until you pass.

No wonder the teachers don;'t give a dam_n anymore.

[jimbeam1]

But there is still ample opportunity for them to reach the top. Have you read the post Chao Phraya: Flood Crisis

jb1

[Ashoka]

Another interesting story along those lines.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-12-07-us-students-international-ranking_N.htm

Seems the USA is in the same position.

Maybe if teachers actually had to have degrees in the area they teach the students may have a chance.

[YellowFeverCAD]

Fixing the Thai education system is a long term project and I honestly don't think many of the current politicians have the foresight to start this, as the rewards will be reaped by a government 5, 10 , 15 years down the line.

It would appear the powers that be don't want to fix it, why bother? It allows them a steady stream of under educated pawns to use in whatever fashion they want. It's all part and parcel of the way this society has evolved (or devolved) into what it is today every person for themselves at whatever the cost to those around them. If you have the right name or can make the right phone call do whatever you want. If not tough titties. There is NO will to change the education system which is why it will never happen. Those troublesome farang that think they know a better way to run the education system will simply be ignored or worse gotten rid of.. amazing Thailand indeed

[SICHONSTEVE]

"We need to first look inside the 'black box' of the classroom and carefully observe and analyse what is going on, in terms of student-teacher interaction and real teaching and learning, and then come up with measures to facilitate positive changes."

How about starting with less than 50-60 students per class. With those figures I'm amazed that the poor little buggers manage to learn anything whatsoever.

We have been instructed by our Education Authority that maximum class sizes are 35 so how can this be?? Any more than this means that there should be 2 teachers attending in lessons.

Edited September 23, 2011 by SICHONSTEVE

[SICHONSTEVE]

Most of us would agree to the U.N's findings.

Older teachers who are not efficent should be put out to pasture / retired. Never will happen.

There needs to be a cooperation between Asian and Western educators on Education requirements for the different subject areas: Never will happen.

Asian and westerners need to work together in developing the curriculum and tools to better teach. Never will happen.

Thai citizens need to decide for themselves what road they want to take. Get communities involved in curriculum development and tell MOE to step aside.

Give an enima to the entire Education system. Starting from the top.

I hope that you are NOT teaching English in Thai schools or practicing medicine!!!

[svenivan]

I found this in the PISA documentation:

In 2000, with PISA reading performance at 525 score points, Korea was already performing above the OECD

average. At that time, several countries had similar or even higher performance levels, including Australia,

Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand and Finland, the highest-performing country that year. Nine years later,

Finland has retained its top performance level, but Korea now outperforms all of the other abovementioned

countries. Korea’s experience demonstrates that even at the highest performance level further improvements

are possible.

Despite the country’s strong performance in PISA 2000, Korean policy makers considered that students’ skills

needed further improvement to meet the changing demands of an internationally competitive labour market.

One approach was to shift the focus of the Korean Language Arts Curriculum from proficiency in grammar and

literature to skills and strategies needed for creative and critical understanding and representation, along the

lines of the approach underlying PISA. Diverse teaching methods and materials that reflected those changes

were developed, including investments in related digital and Internet infrastructure.

Recognising reading as a key competence in the 21st century, the government also developed and implemented

reading-related policies. Schools were requested to spend a fixed share of their budgets on reading education.

Training programmes for reading teachers were developed and distributed. Parents were encouraged to

participate more in school activities. They were also given information on how to support their children’s

schoolwork. In addition to that, socio-economically disadvantaged students were given support through various

after-school reading, writing and mathematics courses that had been put in place at the end of the 1990s.

Here a link: PISA

[djlest]

Why would Thai's need to succeed at anything above basic levels if the country itself does not need any brains...

Taksin thinks for them - and the chinese/Thais run the businesses and control the Gov

Thats exactly how they want it to be... They dont want anyone to threaten that!

[bushman1666]

Is it only me who finds the likeness between PISA and pisser amusing?

OK, so just me then!

[bushman1666]

Why would Thai's need to succeed at anything above basic levels if the country itself does not need any brains...

Taksin thinks for them - and the chinese/Thais run the businesses and control the Gov

Thats exactly how they want it to be... They dont want anyone to threaten that!

Yeah! And if they get too well educated then where will all the bar girls come from?

[JurgenG]

What Do Test Scores Tell Us?

Negative test results should never be presented as reasons for immediate and drastic action. When our students fail standardized tests, we need to work through many further difficult steps before concluding what, if anything, needs to be done. There is a long argumentative path from bad tests results to a justified call to arms. ....

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/what-do-test-scores-tell-us/

[SICHONSTEVE]

Why would Thai's need to succeed at anything above basic levels if the country itself does not need any brains...

Taksin thinks for them - and the chinese/Thais run the businesses and control the Gov

Thats exactly how they want it to be... They dont want anyone to threaten that!

Yeah! And if they get too well educated then where will all the bar girls come from?

Even serious topics can degenerate (morph) themselves into strings involving bar girls!!! No holding them back, clearly .

[bushman1666]

Why would Thai's need to succeed at anything above basic levels if the country itself does not need any brains...

Taksin thinks for them - and the chinese/Thais run the businesses and control the Gov

Thats exactly how they want it to be... They dont want anyone to threaten that!

Yeah! And if they get too well educated then where will all the bar girls come from?

Even serious topics can degenerate (morph) themselves into strings involving bar girls!!! No holding them back, clearly .

Many a true word spoken in jest.

The mafia/politicians/police/senior governmental persons that own and control the bars and clubs of Pattaya, Phuket, Bangkok need a constant supply of ill educated young women lacking any aspirations to feed the insatiable appetite of the cash-rich sex tourists from all over the world.

There, I morphed that back to a serious subject even with bar girls in there!

Edited September 23, 2011 by bushman1666

[JurgenG]

An other question is, are teachers who have been educated in the past century the best persons to decide what young people should learn ? The following article demonstrate that the skils needed to succeed in the future are not those that we considered mandatory to succeed in the past.

Online Gamers Solve a Tricky AIDS Puzzle

Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the

crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular

replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game

Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein. Remarkably,

Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality

for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure

determination. The refined structure provides new insights for

the design of antiretroviral drugs.

"The critical role of Foldit players in the solution of the M-PMV PR structure shows the power of online games to channel human intuition and three-dimensional pattern-matching skills to solve challenging scientific problems."

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf

[bluebluewater]

I've got about a dozen school age kids here on my soi. They are from 5 to 15 years old. Probably half of them are no more "learned" than the day they were born. They call all read and do some math but I doubt they can do much more.

When they play "school" the teacher carries some sort of weapon and lightly smacks one of the others from time to time. One thing they are good at, particulary the boys, is screaming at each other as that is what they do in class while they do their endless rote learning activities.

They are good kids and I enjoy them very much.

[SICHONSTEVE]

Why would Thai's need to succeed at anything above basic levels if the country itself does not need any brains...

Taksin thinks for them - and the chinese/Thais run the businesses and control the Gov

Thats exactly how they want it to be... They dont want anyone to threaten that!

Yeah! And if they get too well educated then where will all the bar girls come from?

Even serious topics can degenerate (morph) themselves into strings involving bar girls!!! No holding them back, clearly .

Many a true word spoken in jest.

The mafia/politicians/police/senior governmental persons that own and control the bars and clubs of Pattaya, Phuket, Bangkok need a constant supply of ill educated young women lacking any aspirations to feed the insatiable appetite of the cash-rich sex tourists from all over the world.

There, I morphed that back to a serious subject even with bar girls in there!

Did you not notice that I never actually disagreed with you. I even avoided the mention of bar girls!! dam_n and blast, I've just blown it.......!!!

Edited September 23, 2011 by SICHONSTEVE

[rkidlad]

I've got about a dozen school age kids here on my soi. They are from 5 to 15 years old. Probably half of them are no more "learned" than the day they were born. They call all read and do some math but I doubt they can do much more.

When they play "school" the teacher carries some sort of weapon and lightly smacks one of the others from time to time. One thing they are good at, particulary the boys, is screaming at each other as that is what they do in class while they do their endless rote learning activities.

They are good kids and I enjoy them very much.

Remember we're in Thailand. You really could have worded that sentence better.

[ROMANOBA]

Once I went to a school in Roi Et, I met an english teacher and... he did not speak ONE WORD of english.A few other teachers I met spoke english at a level my daughter of 6 years would be ashamed of. So if this applies to other subjects the explanation of the low standard of thai student is really really SIMPLE.

iT'S NOT THEIR FAULT, it's the fault of the sub-sub standard of the ones who are supposed to teach them, period.

My colleagues and I have also made similar observations over the past 10 years. Some friends who work in universities here also agree that the standard of student performance has dropped noticeably over the last decade of us teaching here. PISA measures mostly application of math/science skills to solving problems. This is the main reason why they have perfomed so poorly on this exam. Once the MoE changes its policies to de-emphasise rote learning and puts more emphasis on application, analysis and synthesis skills, then their scores might improve. The kinds of tasks are rarely addressed in regular classrooms in Thailand.

[pacovl46]

Why am I not surprised? Do away with the no-failure policy, let all the students that do fail repeat the entire year, stop sucking up to the parents and tell them what's really going on instead of letting them save face, stop treating education like a business by cramping 55 students in a tiny classroom so that as much money as possible can be raked in, expel the bottom 30% in any given year and finally do away with the mai pen rai attitude towards students that are not doing their homework and/or are misbehaving and this will all stop in no time! Oh, I almost forgot, multiple choice would have to go to. Back to creative thinking and writing

Edited September 23, 2011 by pacovl46

[pacovl46]

Once I went to a school in Roi Et, I met an english teacher and... he did not speak ONE WORD of english.A few other teachers I met spoke english at a level my daughter of 6 years would be ashamed of. So if this applies to other subjects the explanation of the low standard of thai student is really really SIMPLE.

iT'S NOT THEIR FAULT, it's the fault of the sub-sub standard of the ones who are supposed to teach them, period.

My colleagues and I have also made similar observations over the past 10 years. Some friends who work in universities here also agree that the standard of student performance has dropped noticeably over the last decade of us teaching here. PISA measures mostly application of math/science skills to solving problems. This is the main reason why they have perfomed so poorly on this exam. Once the MoE changes its policies to de-emphasise rote learning and puts more emphasis on application, analysis and synthesis skills, then their scores might improve. The kinds of tasks are rarely addressed in regular classrooms in Thailand.

I've been at several schools and the problem is not the teachers, not in general anyway. The main problem is that students can't fail here and they know it. So naturally a lot of them develop a I-don't-have-to-do-anything attitude. Most schools suck up to the parents, especially if it's a private school. It's all about the benjamins and if you as a falang teacher complain about it to the school and/or the parents too often, you will either have to back down or you'll get the boot so the parents and the school can save their faces.

The next problem is that in a lot of cases both parents have to go to work in order to make enough money. This leaves the kids to be raised either by their grandparents or someone else. A lot of grandparents have a tendency to spoil their grandkids or aren't physically able to keep up with them and let them have their way because it's easier. The result is a bunch of spoilt brats that think they can do whatever they want.

I had classes with up to 55 students and 50 of them never did their homework, never paid attention or showed any interest whatsoever. They were just physically there. I complained about this a million times and always got the same answer: "That's the way it is. We can't change it. We have to be nice to them because the parents pay a lot of money for their kids to be educated at this school, bla bla bla". At the end of the second term parents were asking: "How come my kid can't speak English, yet, when there's 33 falang teachers at this school?" It was really ridiculous, so I left. But there's also schools were it's such a pleasure to work because the kids are diligent and genuinely want to study, and if you get one of those you will really enjoy going to work. Most often these kids are working class kids whose parents look after them, teach them manners and to be respectful towards their teachers. The way Thai kids are supposed to be. That new generation of spoilt undisciplined brats that spends every possible second in an online game shop will all end up in factories or bars because they're no good for anything else.