The Smartest Kids in the World (30 page)

We conducted an online survey of all AFS exchange students who were sent abroad from the United States or sent to the United States from other countries during the 2009-2010 academic year. (We chose that year in part because all the students would be over eighteen and able to participate without parental permission.)

The primary goal of the survey was to understand whether differences observed by the exchange students featured in this book were also noticed by a larger number of students. We also wanted to discover whether students’ opinions had changed since a previous survey was conducted in 2001 and 2002, before a decade of reforms to the U.S. education system. Last, we were curious to investigate, to the extent possible, whether differences in student experiences might be associated with differences in PISA performance.

Students have been shown to be highly reliable observers of their teachers and classroom environments.
The Measures of Effective Teaching Project, an effort by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to understand good teaching, has found that student ratings are consistent across different groups of students taught by the same teacher
and strongly related to gains in academic achievement. It only makes sense to ask students what they know.

To begin the survey, AFS-USA sent an email invitation to 242 U.S. students who had studied abroad in thirty-three countries, and AFS-International sent the invitation to 1,104 students who had traveled to the United States from nineteen different countries.

The survey included thirteen questions. (The full text appears at the end of this appendix.) Most questions evolved from dozens of conversations the author has had with other exchange students over the course of several years. Two questions, regarding the overall difficulty of school abroad and the importance of sports, were reconstructed from
the Brookings Institute surveys of international and U.S. students in 2001 and 2002. The survey also included two opportunities for open-ended responses to capture observations that might not otherwise have been drawn out by the close-ended survey questions. For privacy reasons, none of the questions collected identifying information about participants.

To analyze the responses, we divided them into two groups based on home country (United States versus international students) and, among international students, by high-achieving country (HAC) and lower-achieving country (LAC). Each sending country was categorized based on its average PISA math score rankings. We chose math because math performance is more easily comparable across countries and because
math skills tend to better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other subjects.

Countries with PISA math scores significantly above average for developed nations were classified as high-achieving countries; those with math scores not significantly different than average or significantly below average were classified as lower-achieving countries. Of the sending countries participating in this project, the high-achieving countries were Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iceland, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, and Switzerland. The lower-achieving countries were Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, France, Honduras, India, Italy, Latvia, Philippines, and Russia.

Of the 1,346 students invited, a total of 202 completed the survey (see Table 1), a response rate of 15 percent. There were various possible reasons why more students did not participate, including the fact that many had changed email addresses since AFS had last heard from them. Still, the response rate was high enough to form broad conclusions about students’ perceptions, with some caveats.

Of U.S. respondents, a significant number (19 percent) had studied in Italy. Of international respondents, a large group (37 percent) had come to the United States from Germany. Those ratios mirrored the distribution of AFS students generally, but the results should be considered with those biases in mind.

Germany, for example, was counted among the high-achieving countries because German teenagers scored above average in math on PISA. That meant that 54 percent of our international high-achieving sample came from Germany. However, Germany is not in the same league as Finland or Korea—two countries that perform at the very top of the world in math, reading, and science on the PISA test.

Moreover, international exchange students in general are not necessarily representative of their peers back home, of course. Some exchange students (though not all) come from higher-income families and from higher-achieving schools. They may also possess higher levels of motivation and adventurousness than those who did not participate in an exchange program. In their host countries, these students are not treated in the same way as their classmates; that distinction, combined with the obvious language barriers, may limit their abilities to assess other countries’ education systems and cultures.

Despite these caveats, the observations by these 202 students show intriguing patterns. They agreed more often than they disagreed. We are grateful to the students and to AFS for helping us collect wisdom from the one stakeholder group rarely consulted in education debates around the world—the students themselves.

*Excludes four student responses. Three students reported the U.S. as neither the home nor host country. One reported the U.S. as both the home and host country.

High-achieving countries that sent students to the U.S.

Lower-achieving countries that sent students to the U.S.

N
= the total number of students who were invited to participate in the survey.

n
= the total number of students who completed the survey.

Serbia and Canada also agreed to participate in the survey, but they sent no students to the U.S. via the relevant AFS program in the 2009–2010 academic year.

For clarity, we inverted the questions and answers for the different populations. For example, international students were asked: “Compared to school in your home country, how much technology (computers, laptops, digital white boards, etc.) did you see in use in your U.S. school?” U.S. students were asked the same question, phrased in the opposite way: “Compared to school in the United States, how much technology (computers, laptops, digital white boards, etc.) did you see in use in your school abroad?” In order to easily compare the results, however, we have expressed all responses in terms of students’ opinions of the U.S. education system vis-à-vis their experience abroad.

International and U.S. students agreed there was more technology in U.S. schools. In all, 70 percent of international students and 73 percent of U.S. students said so; though compared to international students, U.S. students were more likely to say there was a little more rather than much more technology (see
Chart 1
). Not one U.S. student said there was much less technology in U.S. schools.