A strong culture of accountability among parents, students and other stakeholders in the education system in Asia led to stellar performance in international assessments, a new report has revealed.
Asian countries - led by South Korea, followed by Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong - came out top in the Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment, published in the Learning Curve 2014 report, compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit and published by global learning company Pearson, which compares the educational attainment of 39 countries.
Finland dropped to 5th from the top spot mainly because of decreases in its reported reading, maths and science literacy. Britain, Canada and the Netherlands are also among the top 10 in the index based on countries' scores in four major assessments: the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study; the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study; the Programme for International Student Assessment and the initial output from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which looks at cognitive skill levels across the population.
Indonesia was ranked bottom in the index, preceded by Mexico and Brazil.
Andreas Schleicher, OECD's deputy director for education, is quoted as saying that the testing regimes in Asia help shape a system in which "there is a clear understanding of what counts".
"The clarity of goalposts and alignment of the instructional system with them is more important than high-stakes testing, and something we can learn from the Asian systems."