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发帖数: 1648 | 1 Chinese students at top universities 'less creative than others'
New study adds to concerns over the weakness of Chinese university teaching
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/chinese-students-top-universities-
less-creative-others
German students are more likely to name artists as creative people; their
Chinese counterparts named politicians and scientists
Chinese students at top-ranking universities are less creative than those at
less prestigious institutions, a new study has found, with the authors
blaming China’s exam-dominated education culture and intense university
workload.
The research sheds further light on the long-running debate over whether
Chinese graduates lack creativity and critical thinking skills or if it is
simply a comforting Western stereotype about a rising rival economic power.
Assessing China’s academic orbit
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To measure creativity, two researchers from Kyungpook National University in
South Korea tested 400 business school students across 16 universities in
both China and Korea with a widely used creativity survey, which, for
example, asks participants to link different words and to answer a series of
questions about their attitudes, such as whether they “aim for stability”.
As expected, Korean students at top-ranked universities performed slightly
better than their counterparts at lower-ranked institutions.
But in China, the situation was the reverse: students at top-ranked
universities scored considerably worse than any other group in either China
or Korea.
“This result is quite different from our expectation,” remarks the paper,
"Analysis of University Students’ Creativity According to University Level
and Gender: Focusing on Business School", published in the Asia-pacific
Journal of Multimedia Services Convergent with Art, Humanities, and
Sociology.
The authors hypothesise that those students who won entry to high-ranking
universities through China’s brutal entrance exam, the gao kao – often
blamed for rewarding rote memorisation over original thinking – will have
already had their creativity killed.
“Chinese universities ranking among the top have a study environment with
fierce competition. Most students concentrate on dealing with examinations
and obtaining various certificates. University life becomes an extension of
[the] middle school stage,” the paper argues.
This latest study, although relatively small-scale, adds to concerns over
the teaching quality of some of China’s universities. Researchers at
Stanford University have found that computer science and engineering
students in China made almost no improvements in critical-thinking skills
after two years of university, while Russian and US counterparts made
sizeable gains, the New York Times reported in July.
But student creativity is difficult to define, let alone measure. A 2011
study that interviewed German and mainland Chinese undergraduates found that
the former identified philosophers, artists and writers as creative people,
whereas the latter were more likely to name politicians, scientists and
inventors (students in Hong Kong fell between the two groups).
This is because Chinese society sees creative people as those who have
worked towards a collective good, and have earned influence and recognition,
whereas Western society sees creativity as a more individualistic,
aesthetic endeavour, the authors argued.
However, some see criticisms of Asian students’ creativity as a mark of
Western stereotyping. Bertil Andersson, the Swedish president of Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore, has repeatedly made this argument,
telling a higher education conference last year that “we cannot keep hoping
that ‘yes, Asian students are good, but they are not creative’.”
“Maybe Asian students are risk-averse, but they are creative,” he said. |
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