Raising Thinkers

Throughout my eight years in Singapore I worked with executives in various companies across different industries on the subject of critical thinking, behavioural finance and decision making in leadership. In 2009 I began working with the Monetary Authority of Singapore – Singapore’s central bank where I created and taught an MBA-style programme on critical thinking and decision making for their staff. For part of that time I taught critical thinking at an international business school with students hailing from 21 different countries across the East and West, North and South. They had different accents, experiences and ways of thinking and being from different national values, beliefs and school systems.

It has long been thought that different people learn in different ways. Some students learn better from visuals, others from stories while some prefer facts and data. What I didn’t expect to find was that achievement in my subject seemed to be influenced as much by nationality as individual strengths and weaknesses. What was even more interesting was that students’ achievement in my critical thinking classes seemed uncorrelated with their grades in other subjects, especially technical subjects. This was by no means a rigorous study but it was backed up by my experience in the corporate sector as well.

After a decade in Asia I had discovered a consistency in how students and course participants from different countries used their thinking tools and approached problems. For example, Japanese students would often gather so much data that they ran out of time to make conclusions. My Indian students usually had their hands up first and were very comfortable with offering answers even if they didn’t have enough data to fully substantiate them – to many of them, a hunch was data too. To be clear this wasn’t a reflection of intelligence or work ethic – smart, hardworking individuals and the opposite were found across all nationalities. This was about people conforming to nationalistic frames in their thinking about subjects that didn’t touch on tradition, religion or nationalism. Of course there were exceptions, but they were just that.

I grew increasingly curious about how this systemic phenomenon occurred and why. This curiosity led me to look a little closer at the various school systems that produced such consistent thinking across national cohorts. Even between Asian countries the spectrum of thinking styles was substantially diverse yet specific enough to each nationality to be noticed. It puzzled me – a lot. Were there nationalities that were better critical and lateral thinkers than others? It certainly seemed so from my own sampling over a reasonable time frame. Who were they? I’ll give you a hint, they hailed from countries where innovation is high and maths and science scores in the PISA tests aren’t.

PISA? Not that of the Leaning Tower fame but the Program for International Student Assessment conducted by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development who you may know as the OECD. Every three years they assess the math, science and reading ability of more than half a million 15-and 16- year-old students in 65 countries and cities, representing 80% of the world economy. Shanghai, China has been at the very top of the tables since 2009 when it began participating. Results published in December 2013 were that of the 2012 testing series focusing on maths with Singapore coming in 2nd and Hong Kong 3rd for math behind Shanghai (China) in pole position. All top performers were of Chinese, also known as Confucian, heritage. Confucian heritage countries are those heavily influenced by traditional Chinese culture and include China, Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The US came in at 36th and the UK at 26^th (near the OECD average) out of 65 in maths.

So, I had been working in an education superpower, a country hailed as having produced one of the top three education system in the world as far as maths, science and reading go. Yet in my experience I found that basic lateral and critical thinking challenged my Confucian heritage, and especially Singaporean, students to the brink of giving up.

Surely one of the best education systems in the world would be producing innovative and agile thinkers en masse?

Smart they were, exceptionally smart. Technically they ran cognitive rings around the Australian, British, American and even mainland Chinese students in my lectures. They scoffed at my feeble math challenges. But when it came to turning problems upside down, reframing data, innovating or purposefully engaging metacognition, they grew quiet. Waiting for me to offer more framework or more instruction on what tools or methodologies they were meant to use. They were bursting with technical data and models yet I was looking for something else entirely.

Here’s an example of an introductory problem that many of my students struggled with. It is also the first exercise we do in the very first class before we even get to know each other.

You and three colleagues run a small IT start-up in Singapore, with huge potential to grow. You have just pitched prototype technology to a new, and potentially, very large client – RIM (Research in Motion). RIM is looking for an Asian partner to produce innovative parts for a new smartphone. The presentation goes well and the client seems very eager to move on to price negotiations as their time in Singapore is limited. After your presentation they request a 30-minute break. After the break they would like to continue and discuss pricing, exclusivity, deliverables and time frames. Your team is not prepared for this as the product is not in mass production yet. You would need at least a month to investigate and gather this information after funding is secured.

The less experienced members of your team start to panic. You feel that winning this account is crucial to the success of your start-up.

Task: In 10 minutes, decide what you will do with the 30 minutes allotted to you? Use any tools and information accessible to you.

What would you do? You may well have found yourself in a similar situation with colleagues or clients. It seems unreasonable, but it happens. Both MBA students and more seasoned corporate leaders usually acted on this information in similar ways.

Because time was short, the dominant voice in the group would usually tell everyone else what had to be done. Delivery time frames had to be ascertained by calling part suppliers and manufacturers. Pricing had to be finalised by doing some nifty calculations on the fly. Many would call their office to get figures that were waiting for them there. You get the picture. Most of them got busy and did the every best that they could to meet the client’s demands. Because most of them assumed that this is what I, the lecturer, was looking for.

Only very few participants would sit back and ask themselves why would such a large handset manufacturer put them (a really small start-up) under such pressure to determine deliverables and prices for an unproven product? Should the scenario itself be questioned? A few of these doubtful individuals even jumped onto Google to have a look at the state of RIMs financials. RIM was hardly in a good financial position, it hadn’t been for years and really couldn’t afford to back speculative technology. Given this, exclusivity clauses should have been out of the question. Very few students concluded that they didn’t want the business and would rather walk away than cut a speedy deal with an unsound partner.

The majority of students never actually questioned the deal or the client. They wanted to make the deal happen and tried to show me that they were capable of making it work. They assumed this is what was expected of them. If you look at the question carefully, you will see that they were the ones who thought the deal was important, not me. I wanted to see them question their own motivation and mental frames and that of the RIM executives. Why are they being pushed into such a small corner by such a large manufacturer? Would their start-up even benefit from such a deal? The students that jumped right in to serve the client and wrap up the deal displayed goal-orientated behaviour and I saw it again and again in my Confucian heritage students. Yet, a few others were able to sit back and ponder the bigger picture. These students already showed a spark of the critical in their thinking and proved to be the process-orientated ones in my programmes.

I know, I tossed them into the deep end in the first hour of the course. Students either loved or hated me thereafter. Some swam but most of them sank like stones. At school, these students had been taught to calculate a solution from within the constraints presented. Not to question the constraints. My job was a tough one, to reprogramme much of the mental conditioning that had been done at schools or in their workplace. They had developed an outcome- or goal-orientation to ensure that they achieve assessable results to definable problems. For almost all of them, their academic success was defined by their test scores. School had taught them what to think to beat the test. How else would you get the best math score in a class of the world’s brightest? But critical thinking is the ability to think about one’s thinking; how to think, not what to think.

Confucian heritage societies have been outcome-orientated since the 10^th century. By passing imperial China’s imperial examinations anyone, from any walk of life or trade, could become a government official. Position and ranking would be based on test scores alone. Later, through the Song Dynasty, achievement in formal tests became the only way to advance in one’s career. This system of being able to clearly define and measure someone’s aptitude based on explicit metrics seems to have stuck. In a country of 1.3 billion people with cities like Shanghai at 23 million strong, heaving under 9,700 inhabitants per square mile, perhaps this is not surprising at all.

Globally, PISA ranking are a great big deal. Attractive enough to encourage power players from “poorer performing” school systems around the world to visit the top scorers. Armed with iPads and notepads, under the influence of jet lag, men and women from the West visit in the hope of bottling the magic formula that makes these Asian children the smartest in the world ¹ and carrying it back to their institutions in the US and Europe. Two months after PISA results were released in December 2013, representatives from the UK department of Education, jetted off to Shanghai on a fact finding mission with plans to adjust the UK’s education policy based on their findings.

The 2013/2014 PISA test was presented by commentators as a test of critical thinking.² As proud as Asia is of their results (and so they should be) I do look around me and wonder where all these thousands of critical thinking children are when they become adults? In Singapore it is a cliché that students cannot think outside the box because they spend so much time (almost all of their school career) being taught to navigate the box itself. I wanted to understand this conundrum and unravel the mystery of the missing critical thinkers. The best place to start was the PISA test itself.

Am I smarter than a 15-year-old? This is what I was wondering as I sat to answer the 26 maths questions released by PISA from their test.³ To be honest, I was merely hoping to qualify as being as smart as a 15-year-old. It’s been a while since I had to do times tables, or anything for that matter, in my head. Taking the test alone, with no clock ticking already put me at an advantage, but I still felt a little nervous as I thumbed through the question sheet. “My students will never know my result,” I reminded myself and cracked a wicked grin as I popped on my critical thinking hat and turned the first page.

But it soon became clear that I didn’t need my special hat at all. Question 1 asked me the best way of calculating the floor area of a pretty standard apartment. Not the actual floor area, just how to do it. The next tested my understanding of formulas involving fractions (what happens to the answer if one variable in the numerator changes). It certainly helped that my son’s homework that week had been fractions. I nailed that one without a blink (the PISA equation, not my son’s homework, of course). I cruised along through questions about sailing ships using wind power to cut costs and the progress of Ferris wheel passengers.

Just as I was thinking, “gosh, I’m good”, I hit a snag at question 8 – determining the length of one side of a triangle based on the length of the other two sides. Uh? Time for a coffee break and a sneaky peak at Wikipedia to search for the name of the chap that came up with the formula to calculate the length of the longest side of a triangle. You know, the side opposite the right angle? The hypotenuse. Hello Pythagoras. This was the only theorem that the 26 questions called for. The rest of the sample questions were much the same and followed a pretty predictable approach:

I couldn’t help but wonder where the critical thinking component was. Or was my definition of critical thinking a little too narrow?

Make no mistake, it was a refreshing challenge, like a brisk morning walk through the snow barefoot. But at no point did I feel the need to get out the shovel and uncover some facts for myself or examine the problem from multiple angles. Everything I needed was handed to me. Here are examples of the questions that the OECD singled out to illustrate the various levels of difficulty they tested at. To respect their copyright, I have paraphrased them using alternative objects and variables but the methods and level of difficulty remain the same. Here is an example of the Level 5 (second hardest level) question. See if you can work it out?

Mount Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan. There are several trails that lead up to the summit. Gotemba trail is 9 km to the summit. Hikers are required to return to the start of the trail before sunset at 7pm. Thea is about to hike this trail and estimates that she can walk up at 2 km per hour and down at twice that speed inclusive of breaks. What is the latest time she must start walking the 18 km trail so that she is back at base before sunset?

Not too hard, is it? Did you need abstract reasoning? Critical thinking skills? Nope, you didn’t.

(No, the answer isn’t in the back of this book, you’ll need to work it out solo.)

At the heart of critical thinking lies reasoning, judgement and metacognition which is thinking about one’s thinking process. Critical thinking involves the following abilities:

I know that this is a great deal for any 15-year-old to master. But these skills weren’t required to complete this Level 5 question. What was needed was the ability to abstract real-world data and create a mathematical problem to solve using basic math – all essential life skills. Did you need to understand context and frames? How about assumptions? Gathering evidence? Nope. OK, maybe a Level 5 question is not where the critical thinking came in. Let’s try a Level 6 example question, the highest level. Got your pen, paper and critical thinking hat ready?

Araj has a new bicycle. It took Araj 9 minutes to pedal to the mall which is 4 km away. He returned home via a shortcut of only 3 km which took him 6 minutes. What was his average speed for the trip to the mall and back?

You tell me, is this a critical thinking question? Again, the ability to extract and link information tied to real-world problems is essential. Students would have had to develop a strategy for approaching it logically, but after that, it’s basic math again. After going through all their representative questions the light bulb flickered and I started understanding why teens from Confucian heritage societies were doing so well.

The highest percentage of students who attained Level 6 were from Shanghai (31%) followed by 19% of Singaporean students. The OECD average was 3% as was the UK score whilst only 2% of US students tested attained Level 6. The top seven countries were all Asian countries. As evidenced by the level of attainment, this maths paper is a real challenge for any 15-year-old. However, it is not a test of critical thinking but an application of previously learnt methods to problems one would encounter in the “real-world”.

Singapore and China are both Confucian heritage societies with similar school systems. From primary school onwards children are moved and placed according to test results only. Remember the imperial examination system? This makes sense in a system that regularly loads one teacher with 40 pupils. Students are wise to focus on attaining the best test results from a very early age.⁴ Historically, Confucianism has fostered personal effort and discipline as the building blocks of success, not innate ability, with the belief that any child can be at the top of their class; if they work harder than their classmates. The opposite is also true, if a child is not at the top of their class, they aren’t working hard enough. Parental involvement is high at home but not at school. In Singapore, parents regularly take math classes so that they can give their kids an edge in exams. In Shanghai, at the time of writing this, teachers are incentivised with bonuses based on their students’ test scores alone.

It’s no surprise then that these students can spend seven days a week on study, revision and homework, learning test techniques and practicing papers. This phenomenon is further fuelled by the general acceptance that tutoring is an integral part of education. These children are not being trained to be future visionaries, entrepreneurs or researchers but rather exceptionally hard workers who can navigate and work the testing system better than most.

Given incentivisation structures, high teacher/student ratios and fierce academic competition there remains much political and parental pressure on schools and teachers to provide testing that can be reliably and uncontroversially graded. This advocates closed or multiple choice questions. Neither of which encourage creative or critical thinking.⁵

But what happens after their rigorous schooling? It seems that many go off to study abroad. In fact, China is the world’s largest exporter of students. The number of Asian students studying at American tertiary institutions is currently up by more then 20% year on year.⁶ This growth is expected to taper off as more options open up for them at home as American and European universities take advantage of an obvious revenue stream by setting up campus on Asian shores.

When is a goldfish not dead?

I was fortunate to interview Judy,⁷ a Singapore-based British expatriate and education consultant who is in the uncommon position of having her son schooled first at an international school in Singapore and then at a local state school. This is rather rare as special permission must be obtained for expatriate children to study in local schools. The same goes for Singaporean children who wish to study at international schools. She retells the tale of a child’s attempt at answering an English comprehension test at a Singaporean school at Primary 2 level (at the age of 7 to 8). It went like this:

Surely a most natural conclusion to being eaten by a cat, written in a satisfactory full sentence. Yet this answer was marked as incorrect by the English teacher. Naturally, the student’s mother asked for clarity. The correct answer, she was told, was that the fish was eaten by the cat. Death was implied when in fact there was no proof of it. Thus there could only be one correct answer.

With PISA 2012’s focus on math, it’s little wonder Asian schools are at the top of the charts. If you plant apple seeds, water, prune and protect them, then you are going to get beautiful apples. But only apples. If education has such a narrow definition of excellence do we not lose our visionaries, our dreamers? The ones who are going to break the moulds so that something new and better can be developed (and coded by the very smart kids with perfect math scores)?

China itself has recognised the need to reform their school system. A government document ⁸ iss ued in 2001 called for schools to move away from pure knowledge transmission using repetitive and mechanistic rote-learning towards increased student participation in a more relevant, real-world curriculum. They also recognised the need to de-emphasise the screening and selective functions of assessments and instead to emphasise their formative and constructive functions. This is a herculean task because real change in this system requires defiance of centuries of Confucian heritage programming re-enforced by enviable and clearly measurable results.

If children raised in Confucian heritage countries are leaving school with a high level of technical proficiency and a disciplined goal-orientation but a lack of critical and creative thinking skills, what are children in other major centres such as the USA and UK taking with them as they leave mission control at high school?

Additional resources

The Negative Influences of Exam-Oriented Education on Chinese High School Students: Backwash from Classroom to Child ROBERT KIRKPATRICK Shinawatra International University, Thailand YUEBING ZANG Thailand, Language Testing in Asia Volume one, Issue three October 2011

__________

1 See The Smartest Kids in the World and How the Got That Way by Amanda Ripley. Published by Simon and Schuster 2013

2 Alliance for Excellent Education. PISA 101 Interview with Robert Rothman, By Cyndi Waite 27/11/2013.

3 The PISA test material is copyright and cannot be reproduced here. However, for a little catch up with high school math and let’s not forget old Pythagoras, it’s worth a trip to http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/pisa2012-2006-rel-items-maths-ENG.pdf

4 Emma Vanbergen, Shanghai based study abroad director for BE education, a company that places Chinese Schools in British education from the Telegraph 04/12/2013

5 Testing to productive student learning: Implementing Formative Assessment in Confucian Heritage Settings by Prof David Carless, The University of Hong Kong. Routledge, 2011

6 Institute of International Educations’ Open Doors 2013 report available at http://www.iie.org/

7 Not her real name.

8 Framework for the Curriculum Reform of Basic Education - The Trial Version published by the Ministry of Education of The PRC, 2001

3.2 COMPARING APPLES AND PEARS

According to PISA, American scholars leave with very little that will prepare them for life in the unknown. Students in the United States have particular strengths in cognitively less-demanding mathematical skills and abilities, such as extracting single values from diagrams or handling well-structured formulae. They have particular weaknesses in items with higher cognitive demands, such as taking real-world situations, translating them into mathematical terms, and interpreting mathematical aspects in real-world problems.¹ The US spends more education dollars per student than most countries yet this does not translate into better performance. The Slovak Republic, which spends around $53,000 per student, performed at the same level as the United States, which spends over $115,000 per student.

The full findings for the US paint a pretty gloomy report, one that would have had a Shanghainese student sat behind shame curtains for a week. It reports that the United States has a below-average share of top performers in mathematics. These are students that can develop and work with models for complex situations and work strategically using broad, well-developed thinking and reasoning skills. Only 2% of students in the United States reach the highest level (Level 6) of performance in mathematics, compared with an OECD average of 3% and 31% of students in Shanghai, China. The proportions of top performers in reading and science in the US are both around the OECD average.

Despite wide ranging reforms, US results in math, science and reading haven’t changed significantly since 2006. Yet America’s ability to drive innovation and contribute to various scientific fields remains robust. The US contributes 6 of the top 10 companies and 24 of the top 50 on the 2014 Forbes ² list of most innovative companies. China owns none in the top 10 and only 6 of the top 50. Of course there are many metrics and even more surveys that slice and dice innovation data differently. There are even metrics that measure a country’s contribution to science directly such as the rather sensible – though not free of criticism – H-Index; a ranking that reflects not only the quantity of articles published by a country’s scientists or scholars but also the number of times they were cited by researchers. Citations are considered a measure of quality and usefulness. China ranks 17^th in the H-Index. The top 10 spots are populated by countries whose school children largely muddle around the OECD average in science. Interesting, isn’t it?

So let’s compare apples with pears and look at the scientific contributions of a nation’s adults with the current PISA rankings of their teenagers. Here is the 2015 H-Index rankings ³ for all subjects with the 2012 overall PISA ranking in brackets next to it.

H-RANKING	(PISA RANKING)
1. USA	(36th)
2. UK	(26th)
3. Germany	(16th)
4. France	(26th)
5. Canada	(13th)
6. Japan	(7th)
7. Italy	(32nd)
8. Netherlands	(10th)
9. Switzerland	(9th)
10. Australia	(19th)

Singapore came in at 25^th on the H-Index and Hong Kong at 26^th with China (not Shanghai alone) creeping up the ranks at 14^th.

China, Singapore and Hong Kong are glaringly absent from the top 10 H-Rankings. The bottom line is that schools get ranked on results that can be measured in any academic year for a specific cohort. It is overwhelmingly logical that students and teachers maximise these results. Are US, UK and German schools superior? I have no metrics to support such a claim. If we can’t claim any school system is superior over the long haul then what can we can take away from this data? Firstly, that no school system is perfect. Secondly, it becomes clear that we can’t leave it to any school system to raise our children with a complete and competent skill set.

Around the world parents have very little influence over the policies that will shape their children’s academic future. Maybe you are a parent in Hong Kong who would like to see more diversity in the curriculum, or a British parent who wants to see Mandarin instead of French in the syllabus or an immigrant American parent who desperately wants his child to learn resilience and the ability to wrestle with real-world problems using critical analysis. If so, you are not alone and you are not powerless over your child’s outcomes.

If you and I are stuck with government school systems from China to the US it may well be up to us to fill in the glaring gaps in what and how our children are being taught. To equip them with skills to navigate an uncertain future and use their mental superpowers to their fullest. Fortunately, teaching them how to think while they learn what to think is easier than you think.

TIPS AND TAKEAWAYS FROM CHAPTER 3

1. Try not to get overly distraught or elated about your country’s PISA ranking. The proof of the PISA pudding is whether an education system can foster the skills needed to innovate and maintain economic growth in the medium to long term. These are skills not currently measured by PISA.

2. If your child’s school is not able to teach her high-level thinking and behavioural skills (you know what these are by now) then you’ll have to do it yourself, mom or dad, if you want her to be successful in her chosen pursuits.

3. A fish will in fact die if it’s eaten by a cat.

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1 PISA 2012 US

2 http://www.forbes.com/innovative-companies/list/

3 Rankings taken for all subjects from the SJR (Scimago Journal Rank) available at http://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank

3.1

SCHOOLS IN THE LAND OF PISA

When is a goldfish not dead?

Additional resources

3.2

COMPARING APPLES AND PEARS