Jukupedia • Shadowing Education • 塾ペディア | Juku = supplementary education/tutoring in Japan

The センター試験 as the Linchpin of Educational Reform

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Julian Dierkes | 5 comments

An edited and more concise version of this post appeared as an editorial in the Japan Times on Friday, February 3, 2012, entitled “Stocking up on useless facts to pass an exam“.

I have been studying 学習塾 for over six years and have visited more than 50 individually-operated throughout Japan. I have been thrilled by the dedication of charismatic educators, and dismayed by the relentless focus on standardized test results and by the lack of a diversity of offerings beyond the narrow confines of the curriculum in an era of hypereducation.

Recently, thousands of students sat for the central university entrance examination (センター試験, see National Center for University Entrance Examinations). For ambitious students, the exam is merely a requirement to check off on their way to the entrance examinations for specific fields of study that follow later. For others, the exam is a convenient way to avoid multiple examinations if they are not opting for entrance to university via the increasingly common recommendation route (推薦). The exam is one of the ultimate goals that supplementary education through primary and secondary schooling focuses on.

When I read the exam questions that were reprinted in newspapers last week, I felt great dismay and a concern for Japan’s future. Despite the tremendous resources that the state, students, and parents invest in education, the linchpin of the education system tests knowledge that I – as a university professor – am not looking for in my students and that is unlikely to serve the Japanese nation and Japanese businesses in the postindustrial era.

Yes, for a student who will go on to a doctorate in literature, it is important to know whether Erasmus wrote before or after Cervantes and Petrarch (Q9 in the World History B portion of this year’s test). But this knowledge is only relevant in rare circumstances and does not speak to any kind of skill. The very nature of the exam – short answers selected from a list of options – pushes the education system towards a pursuit of only variously useful factual knowledge that is rarely linked to any communication and analysis skills. It is one of the great strengths of juku that they seem to prepare students well for this kind of exam. This may also be at the root of the consistently high ranking of Japanese students in international comparisons of educational achievement like PISA.

To make education more relevant to the skills of the 21^st century, the core of its content has to be reformed. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) should initiate an experiment with a limited essay format that requires students in social studies’ subjects, Japanese, and English to provide an analysis of a topic discussed in a short reading or through the presentation of specific data. This experiment should be announced ahead of its implementation initially without an impact on students’ results in the first two years.

During this period of experimentation, MEXT and the National Center for University Entrance Examinations might also consider various options to provide the labour to mark essays, a process that is highly labour intensive, even for a short essay. Given the number of out-of-work PhDs, perhaps there could be a system of fellowships at participating universities that required fellows to participate in the marking of the central examination. It should be noted that many universities already provide the labour to grade the university-specific entrance examinations that come after the central exam, and these often include essay formats.

After some tweaking of the essay format, this critical thinking skills portion of the exam could be gradually expanded to take its place alongside the current focus on knowledge acquisition. The English portion of the exam should be shifted from testing arcane grammatical knowledge (受験英語) to an emphasis on communication paralleling the introduction of an essay format. With a long-term plan in hand, current elementary students could be told that the central exam will have changed by the time they will sit for it and this will allow them, parents, teachers and even juku teachers to adjust their teaching methods accordingly.

Through such a gradual transition, the central exam as the linchpin of an exam-oriented Japanese educational system could be transformed from its current role as an enforcer of test-taking English, arcane knowledge, and cramming strategies into a meaningful test of relevant skills and knowledge.

5 Comments

Posted in Education, Higher Education, Juku in Japan, Media Coverage, Press and Media

Abacus Instruction in Vancouver

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Julian Dierkes | 1 comment

Following my recent post on abacus education in Japan, I feel like I have to report on my daughters’ (6 and 9 years old) encounter with the abacus here in Vancouver. They have been attending an abacus school here since September, going once a week. A very good friend of ours mentioned that her daughters were going to abacus and given my past experience with abacus schools in Japan, we were eager to try this out for our girls, especially the older one who is very keen on math.

They’ve taken to it like fish to water and go with great anticipation.

When I told my good friend in Japan who is quite involved in abacus education that the girls were going, he sent two “one-touch” abacus for the girls so that they’re all equipped now.

The school that they attend was recently at the centre of a story in the Globe & Mail.

Some of the things that I find fascinating largely based on my research on juku in Japan:

most of the students at the location that our girls attend are Japanese or Japanese-Canadian
they range in age from 4 to their teens with a concentration in the early primary grades (just as in Japan)
the classroom works just like juku classrooms that I’ve seen so often by now: There’s a head teacher who circulates and is assisted by a couple of younger teachers. One of the main activities that they undertake is まるつけ, i.e. the circling of correct answers, usually in red. When students missed a problem, they do it over until it is circled in red. This circling/correction is sometimes an occasion for instruction or explanation.
Instruction is always one-on-one (either by the main teacher or one of the assistants) allowing for a mixed classroom of beginners and more advanced students.
students progress on the basis of worksheets that require increasingly more difficult calculations, beginning with plus and minus, first single-digit numbers, then moving on to larger and more numbers to calculate.
some of the socialization roles that juku take on in Japan are also an element in the abacus juku. For example, some of the Japanese parents will remind their children to greet the teacher properly, to thank her and say good bye at the end of the lesson.

Interestingly, our teacher is the daughter of an abacus teacher. When I was doing research on juku in post-disaster Tohoku last week and mentioned that my girls were in abacus juku, some questions led to the observation that my interlocutor knows (of) our abacus teacher’s father. Small world.

An abacus juku that I visited in Sendai was a reminder of how astonishing abacus skills can be. Students there were doing something called “フラッシュ穴算”, i.e. flash calculations in their head. This is computer based and the program is pre-set to different levels of difficulty in the computations. A student will sit down and the program will flash a succession of numbers on the screen that the student adds, subtracts, multiplies or divides. For the younger students a series of four single-digit numbers might flash for a second each, while older students will be shown series of 10 3-digit numbers over a short time span. Amazing!

In her abacus article for the Globe and Mail, education reporter Kate Hammer picked up quite nicely on the amazing calculations, but also on the almost physical learning that the manipulation of beads seems to foster. I have found this a fascinating aspect of instruction in juku for some time and it is something that the correspondent for The Economist also picked up on in describing the rhythmic chanting of chemical elements at a juku he visited.

1 Comment

Posted in Abacus, Vancouver

Juku: It’s All About Perceptions

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Julian Dierkes | 2 comments

One of the most frequent question that is posed to me when I present my research on juku is: does supplementary education work? My two answers are: we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter for educational policy.

No Evidence of Efficacy of Supplementary Education

As to the first answer, we simply do not know whether various forms of supplementary education have any impact at all. There has been no careful and sustained research on this question that employs a credible scheme at controlling selection effects and we thus literally do not have an empirical clue.

Supplementary education advocates, especially if they are of the mind-set that the market and the introduction of market mechanisms “fix everything”, will respond that for-profit, fee-based supplementary education would not exist/continue to operate if it didn’t work.

That is not true, of course, and we might simply point to the large number of herbal and pharmaceutical remedies that lead a happy and profitable existence in the market place without any credible hints at their efficacy.

Just like health remedies, measurements of supplementary education generally only come after the fact. In the case of accelerated instruction, supplementary education is only tested at its very end point, often the sitting of a standardized examination. At that point in time, however, it is impossible to consider not having participated in supplementary education.

All the same arguments apply for specific tools, teaching aids, and pedagogies. While many of these are intuitively plausible (e.g., yes, I suspect that an engaged student learns more and faster, and retains more of the learned knowledge/skills), there is very limited research that employs control groups or proxies thereof in formal education research either.

Beyond the ethical questions of interventions in children’s education based on a randomized trial, the greatest hurdle would be that we consider so many different factors important in shaping education outcomes, that we would need very large samples that would be subject to very specific and well-defined supplementary education interventions to establish the beginning of a causal relationship.

Whether or Not Supplementary Education ‘Works’, Policy-Makers Should Take it Into Account

But whether or not supplementary education “works”, the fact of its global growth is based on a wide-spread belief in its efficacy. Japanese parents do not seem to go through much trouble in informing themselves about a particular juku beyond word-of-mouth and trial lessons, as far as I can tell from my interviews with juku operators. Word-of-mouth and trial lessons obviously only provide an indication of efficacy, but no real measure thereof. Nevertheless, parents and their children are clearly willing to take a leap of faith and believe that these kinds of tutoring “work”, or more plausible, they are simply too insecure and nervous to question the perceived efficacy when they see all their neighbours believe in efficacy claims and do not want little Takeshi or Yumiko to fall behind.

The large-scale participation of students in supplementary education clearly has an impact on the education system. Whether this impact is primarily in skewing access to education, a distortion in classroom dynamics, or an introduction of quasi-streaming, the impact is very real in many countries that have entered into an era of hypereducation. For policy-makers who are concerned about the impact that supplementary education is having (and concern can obviously range from outrage to encouragement) the fact that supplementary education may or may not “work” is therefore irrelevant.

2 Comments

Posted in Efficacy, General, Hypereducation, Juku in Japan, Supplementary Education

New Entrant in Vancouver Supplementary Education Field

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Julian Dierkes | Leave a comment

A Facebook ad – of all things – recently pointed me toward the website of a seemingly new juku in Vancouver. It’s difficult to reproduce elements of the website without identifying the site itself, but the opening paragraph of the website’s “An Introduction” reads as follows:

Research has shown that life and work have changed, not just technologically, but also in the way we do things. It is no longer enough to have expertise in one skill area; rather, companies expect employees to be knowledgeable and capable in a variety of skills and subject matters. Current educational methods do not meet the needs of either the economy or the children they serve. Children leave school and university lacking the skills they need to be successful and contribute to the growth of Canada’s economy.

This is certainly one of the nicest-looking and most extensive websites for Canadian juku. Pretty, clear design, extensive content including a moderately active blog.

Interestingly, the content and methodology offered is somewhat original – a rarity in the supplementary education field in my experience. The claim at least is that this juku is integrating various subjects around specific themes and offering collaborative learning that parallels BC schools, but focuses on specific themes. It’s not clear at first glance whether this is meant to be remedial, supplementary or accelerated instruction. However, the frequent claim at newness and 21st-century-ness suggests that it is something between supplementary and accelerated instruction.

Unusually for a Vancouver juku, this seems to be neither a tutoring broker, nor is catering specifically to an ESL or immigrant audience. The location is close to Kitsilano Secondary in a neighbourhood that is less dense in juku than many other neighbourhoods.

Further Life of Economist Article

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Julian Dierkes | Leave a comment

Some of the arguments in the article “Japan’s cramming schools – A controversial institution has some surprising merits” in The Economist are being picked up elsewhere.

Liz Dwyer, education editor for GOOD, in her post asks, “Could ‘Cram Schools’ Be on Their Way to America?” and refers directly back to the article in The Economist.

I posted a reply:

Yes, juku-style “cram schools” are appearing in the U.S. Never mind SAT prep outfits like Kaplan, etc., but NCLB provides funding for tutoring services for students in schools that consistently underperform. It’s too early to tell whether these tutoring services will emerge as large juku corporations (local and state-specific registration seems to prevent this).

Note that supplementary education is not just booming in places where it is long-established (like Japan, but also Brazil, Egypt, Greece, Turkey for non-Asian examples), but in settings like France and Germany where it may be less associated with “cramming”. For now, this boom is focused on remedial tutoring, rather than accelerated instruction.

Note also that reliance on supplementary education is migrating with families.

[Note that I’ve added small parts of my reply that I had to cut to comply with the <1,000 chars req on their website]

I would add that I’ve previously posted about the curious fascination with juku-like institutions in Manhattan and elsewhere in the U.S.

Another place that the article is being commented on is by Roger Soder (apparently) on the “Education and Community” blog. This post takes the original article to task for its – supposedly – too rosy outlook on aspects of juku. While I would generally share the view that The Economist takes too positive a view of for-profit initiatives and the market (no surprise at this assessment and my agreement, I presume), in this case, I believe that this rosiness is due to the brevity of the article not necessarily an editorial stance.

I do always like to stress that juku should not be rejected as mere “cram schools”, but that there are many aspects of teaching in juku that are very attractive (some of the charismatic educators that run some of the smaller juku, for example), while other aspects are much less attractive.

The Economist on Supplementary Education

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Julian Dierkes | 4 comments

The week, The Economist’s Kenneth Cukier published an article entitled “Japan’s cramming schools – Testing times: A controversial institution has some surprising merits”. I was thrilled, of course, that he quoted me in the article as a “rare expert on juku”.

Great to see the 塾 character in the accompanying cartoon as well.

As is almost always the case with press and media accounts, the article is relatively short and thus has to gloss over some of the complexities of the phenomenon of supplementary education in Japan and elsewhere. I’ve been struggling with this myself all along in that there are some relatively simple (and thus short) messages I like to offer as conclusions from my research on 塾, but even these are necessarily simplifications (see the categories on the right to explore some of my research on hypereducation in Japan). The Economist’s Japan correspondent also picked up on some of these message, for example by referring to the variety of different juku that exist. While this is not the kind of variety that proponents of the privatization or liberalization often expect (i.e. a flowering of pedagogies and pedagogical innovations), some of the “immobilist politics” in Japanese educational policy (Len Shoppa of the Univ of Virginia used this term in a book on Nakasone educational reforms) is being unsettled by innovations in the supplementary education industry.

The scene Kenn recalls from Seiran Gakuin in his article is one that I have witnessed in many of the almost 50 juku that I’ve visited in Japan. Seiran Gakuin happens to be one of my favourites and is led by 林政夫 who is one of the great examples of charismatic educators in the juku world.

When Kenn refers to surveys in Japan that attribute juku attendance to shortcomings in education systems (an element of the article that has been picked up by some Twitter reactions to it already), I would offer a qualification – an important qualification, I think – that it is perceptions of shortcomings in Japanese education that seem to be driving parents and students to juku. Whether such shortcomings exist in an empirically demonstrable way is much less clear, and it is always interesting to note that it is not only perceived shortcomings in public education, but in private schools as well. Private school students in Japan also attend juku in large numbers after all.

The Economist on hagwon

Note that The Economist ran an article about supplementary education in Korea in its Christmas special. I have previously written about South Korea as the paragon of hypereducation.

Much of what this article writes about Korea is also true of Japan, of course.

Japan is also a “one-shot” society in that there are few alternative educational or career transition tracks other than graduate from high school, sit entrance examinations, repeat with intensive preparatory study if necessary, graduate from university, apply for jobs during recruitment season, live happily ever after.

While the school-to-work transition is not as smooth as it was in high-flying economic times (I’m currently reading Mary Brinton’s “Lost in Transition” on just this topic), there still are very few re-entry students or alternative routes to higher education in Japan.

The discussion about the costs of the university entrance exam focus in Korea are mirrored more or less in Japan, though the concern with equity via for-profit supplementary education (hagwon) has historically been much greater in South Korea. Unlike the article on Japan (which ends with a note about broken government systems), the article on Korea ends on a more hopeful note focusing on young Koreans as a generation that might bring about/force change. There is little of such a dynamic visible in Japan…

4 Comments

Posted in Diversity of Offerings, Hypereducation, Inequality, Intensity, Juku in Japan, Media Coverage, Press and Media, South Korea, Supplementary Education

My 2011 in Social Media

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Julian Dierkes | Leave a comment

This past year, I got blogging and tweeting more seriously. This has had me become more and more interested in the professional use of social media, i.e. for research, publication and advocacy.

Not surprisingly, my social media efforts are focused primarily on supplementary education, Japan, and Mongolia.

My Facebook Author Page

First though, bridging traditional publishing and social media, my book author Facebook page is liked by more than 100 of you (thanks!). If you all were book buyers (of my book, that is) that would represent about 1/4 of sales.

Twitter

I forget when exactly I set up my Twitter account, but I initially lurked primarily and found Twitter an interesting way to follow some foreign correspondents, primarily in Asia, recognizing that most of them publish a fraction of the stories they come across, but that they’re increasingly tweeting about stories.

Asia Pacific Memo

Some of this realization also led us at the Institute of Asian Research to create the Asia Pacific Memo in July 2010 as an attempt to change the culture of academic publishing, but supplementing important traditional channels like peer-reviewed journals, with forms of communication that are aimed more explicitly at an interested public. With Asia Pacific Memo we do this through very short written pieces (<350 words) or brief video interviews. I’ve been involved in this process from the beginning, have written some Memos and continue to be very interested in how to make Asia Pacific Memo more present in social media (FB, Twitter, YouTube). Interestingly, one of my very early Memos continues to have one of the longest lives of any Memo with more than 50 pageviews per month more than a year after publication. Part of the “success” of this Memo appears to be the use of the term “hypereducation” in this Memo which I have adopted for the Jukupedia blog as well. A lesson about academic branding in social media?

This year, I was involved directly in the following Memos:

Back to twitter…

On March 11, Japan was struck by a massive earthquake that caused a tsunami and triggered a nuclear crisis. At the time, I was teaching at the University of Toulouse as a visiting professor and felt quite cut off from news other than the sensationalist news channels. Fortunately, Japanese news channels were streaming on-line. Largely as a form of therapy for myself to combat the feeling of helplessness in the face of such a disaster in Japan, I started translating little bits of Japanese news announcements on Twitter. Soon enough, a couple of news organizations (Mark Mackinnon of the Globe & Mail may have been first) listed me as tweets to follow and my number of followers shot up from the around 100 where it had hovered for quite a while, to over 500 where it sits now. British journalist Kate Bussmann published “A Year in Twitter” at the end of the year and included a couple of my #JPQuake tweets in that collection.

Interestingly, few people who followed me during the #JPQuake seem to be unfollowing even when my tweets are a mix of observations, news, pointers on Japan and Mongolia.

At year end I have tweeted more than 900 times and have nearly 600 followers.

MAAPPS Twitter

For the entire year, we’ve also been tweeting about the MA Asia Pacific Policy Studies that I direct. It has been mostly me and program assistant, Kerry, who have been tweeting though the students occasionally chirp in as well. We’ve intended this graduate program tweet to give prospective applicants a sense of the daily goings-on in the program and some of the highlights in a more informal way than static web pages provide. At this point nearly 80 people are following the account, though that includes a number of institutional UBC accounts and current/former students.

We’ve also experimented with virtual office hours for prospective applicants this fall, giving interested students a chance to ask questions about the program and get very quick, to-the-point responses. This has been mildly successful, though I’ve certainly enjoyed it.

Jukupedia Blog

Sometime in April, I started blogging about supplementary education (https://blogs.ubc.ca/jukupedia). I started this blog after and during attending large conferences this Spring (AAS and CIES) and recognizing that a) I always have lots to say about juku in Japan and supplementary education more broadly, and b) not all of what I have to say fits into traditional publication outlets.

That desire to ruminate, share information, discuss supplementary education has led to 80 posts and over 1,300 visitors to the Jukupedia.

Spikes in traffic occurred especially when I commented on newspaper pieces and linked my comments to a more extensive blog post.

So far, the existence of the blog has also led some researchers and graduate students to contact me about related topics they’re interested in to conduct research on.

The most widely read blog posts are a group of mixed topics with some where it is clear why they received a lot of traffic (incoming links/referrals from colleagues/contacts), while others have less obvious explanations.

Mongolia Blog

This year I have been delighted to have Byamba visiting from the Univ of Hokkaido. He used the desk in front of my office and combined with the presence of Mendee who was finishing up the MAAPPS program and now started graduate work in Political Science, this provided many opportunities to talk about current developments in Mongolia. Finally, we decided that we should record/share our discussions and started the Mongolia Today blog.

Since August, we’ve already had over 2,000 visitors to that blog and I very much hope to be able to continue to write even after Byamba has returned to Japan and as we head into the 2012 parliamentary election campaign.

Juku as Engines of Post-Disaster Recovery?

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Julian Dierkes | 1 comment

My geography colleague, friend, and predecessor as director of the Centre for Japanese Research at UBC, David Edgington, has put together a group of researchers at UBC who will conduct research on post-disaster recover in Tohoku leading up to a March 2012 workshop. Under David’s leadership, we have received a grant from the Japan Foundation under its “Critical Issues Emanating from Japan’s March 11th Disasters” funding envelope.

Our group includes David, the Institute ‘s Stephanie Chang, and Journalism student Jamie Williams.

Given my experience in Fukushima and Miyagi this summer, naturally my main interest in the post-disaster situation in Tohoku involves education.

Thus I am planning a trip to Japan in January and hope to spend about a week on Tohoku’s coast. I’m hoping to meet juku operators there who have re-opened their juku, and also others who have not done so.

Why talk to juku operators? Well, juku are a business with virtually no capital needs other than a room or building. No machinery, no fridges, no subscriptions to pay. Even in a post-disaster situation – as long as some buildings remain and a juku operator has access to them -, a juku could reopen very quickly after a disaster.

The reopening of various public facilities was seen as a significant milestone in many Tohoku communities, whether it was the return to normal train schedules or the closing of emergency shelters. Can a service industry with low capital needs serve as an anchor of social and economic recovery?

The complicating factor for the Tohoku coast (as opposed to Sendai, for example) is that many of the coastal communities were already facing a social and economic decline before the Tsunami struck. As many people perished in coastal communities and many people who survived left the area, especially in greater proximity to the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, the potential customer base for supplementary education services may have disappeared. Remaining inhabitants may also not have the funds to pay for juku while juku operators are unlikely to be in a business position to offer significant discounts. While conventional schools may be receiving a variety of donations and other support (possibly even from here in BC, see an Natural Resources Canada announcement to this effect), there is unlikely to be very much support for for-profit juku and their customers.

The social decline certainly extended to the supplementary education industry as well, as I have observed in Shimane Prefecture where the de-industrialization and de-population dynamic was comparable to pre-3/11 Tohoku.

Looking for contacts in Affected Areas of Tohoku

If you know anyone who operated a juku pre-3/11 in Sendai or in coastal communities, I would be very grateful if you could put me in touch with such people, whether they have re-opened their businesses (if they were directly, i.e. physically affected by the Tsunami or not), or not. julian{dot}dierkes|at|ubc(dot)ca

1 Comment

Posted in Juku in Japan, Neighbourhoods and Social Setting, 東日本大震災

Jukupedia • Shadowing Education • 塾ペディア

The センター試験 as the Linchpin of Educational Reform

Abacus Instruction in Vancouver

Juku: It’s All About Perceptions

No Evidence of Efficacy of Supplementary Education

Whether or Not Supplementary Education ‘Works’, Policy-Makers Should Take it Into Account

New Entrant in Vancouver Supplementary Education Field

The Economist on Supplementary Education

The Economist on hagwon

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