It doesn’t necessarily bother me. I know that there are some biases in the Nobels (iirc, Literature has a bias towards Scandinavian authors), and there are plenty of other explanations. Perhaps Finland simply has an atrocious higher education system, which may not reflect in PISA scores. Perhaps Finland and Sweden are similar and some of Finland’s better scores come from it being smaller and more susceptible to variation (kind of like the smaller school effect). Perhaps their techniques improve the average but squash extreme variation—like potential Nobelists. Without knowing more, I take the PISA at face value.
Now, what would bother me a lot is if a country had very low PISA scores but very many per capita Nobels. (The other way around only bothers me a little.)
The BBC article that you cited suggests precisely that Finland has flattened the extremes. They’re proud of this on one end but acknowledge that they need to quit this on the other end.
The Finnish system supports very much those pupils who have learning difficulties but we have to pay more attention also to those pupils who are very talented. Now we have started a pilot project about how to support those pupils who are very gifted in certain areas.
It doesn’t necessarily bother me. I know that there are some biases in the Nobels (iirc, Literature has a bias towards Scandinavian authors), and there are plenty of other explanations. Perhaps Finland simply has an atrocious higher education system, which may not reflect in PISA scores. Perhaps Finland and Sweden are similar and some of Finland’s better scores come from it being smaller and more susceptible to variation (kind of like the smaller school effect). Perhaps their techniques improve the average but squash extreme variation—like potential Nobelists. Without knowing more, I take the PISA at face value.
Now, what would bother me a lot is if a country had very low PISA scores but very many per capita Nobels. (The other way around only bothers me a little.)
The BBC article that you cited suggests precisely that Finland has flattened the extremes. They’re proud of this on one end but acknowledge that they need to quit this on the other end.
D’oh! Perhaps I should re-read references before I link them.