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Yahoo! My Yahoo! Mail More Yahoo! Services Account Options New User? Sign Up Sign In Help Yahoo! Search web search Home Singapore Asia Pacific World Business Entertainment Sports Technology Weekend Edition Australia China India Indonesia Japan Malaysia Philippines Thailand Vietnam Improved school curriculums help Asians excel: OECD AFP - 1 hour 45 minutes ago Send IM Story Print TOKYO (AFP) - – Improved school curriculums and teacher training in major Asian economies helped the region's students score top marks in an international survey of academic success released Tuesday, researchers said. Students in Shanghai city outperformed their peers around the world in reading, mathematics and science, according to the new survey from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. South Korea, Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong also ranked in the top 10, thanks partly to educational reforms and improving study habits of students, the OECD said. The Paris-based body surveyed the academic performance of 15-year-old students in its 34 member nations and 41 partner economies in 2009 for the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. "Shanghai is the pioneer in education reforms in China," OECD researcher Miyako Ikeda said in Tokyo, adding that more specific social, economic and cultural factors explaining Asian success would be explored in future. She stressed that the results from Shanghai did not represent China in general, which is not an OECD member, making direct comparison difficult as other members participated as countries. But the result proved that low national income "is not incompatible with strong educational performance", the study found. Having changed its school curriculums to give students more choice in what they study, Shanghai also regularly sends teachers from high-achieving schools to lower scoring ones to improve the overall quality of education, Ikeda said. The city also reformed college entrance exams to shift emphasis away from rote learning to instead focus on students' ability to summarise information, evaluate and to solve problems, the researcher said. "Shanghai used to put the emphasis on the amount of knowledge gained. But the new curriculum focuses on how you use the knowledge," Ikeda told reporters. But Tao Hongkai, director of the Quality-Oriented Education Research Institute of Huazhong Normal University in Wuhan, central China, said deep-seated issues remain in Chinese education despite progress in Shanghai. "Grades remain the sole criteria to gauge the performance of a child or student," he told AFP in Beijing. "The criteria for a good student are obedience and high grades, which restrict the thinking and children's capability to use knowledge." South Korea was the only country to improve on above-average test scores in the previous survey in 2000, taking second place in this year's ranking. But South Korea has seen the gap between high and low achievers widen, said Ikeda. Analysts say that South Korea spends the most among OECD member nations on private education. But it spends relatively little on public education, which they warn could widen an educational gap in society. Yoon Eugene, senior researcher at Sungkyunkwan University's Korea Private Education Research Center, said the high marks do not necessarily reflect a love of learning among South Korean teenagers. "Korean students tend to participate in the PISA test thinking that their result represents Korea as a whole, thus they need to get good results," she said. Japanese students have also consistently scored better than the OECD average. But the academic gap among schools, as well as students in the same school, has expanded in recent years, Ikeda said, adding that more studies are needed to assess whether Japanese teens are improving overall academic achievement. 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