What Explains Vietnam's Exceptional Performance in Education Relative to Other Countries? Analysis of the 2012, 2015, and 2018 PISA Data

Hai-Anh Dang (), Paul Glewwe, Jongwook Lee and Khoa Vu

Economics of Education Review, 2023, vol. 96, issue C

Abstract: Despite being the poorest or second poorest participant, Vietnam outperformed all other developing countries, and many wealthier countries, on the 2012, 2015, and 2018 PISA assessments. We investigate Vietnam's strong performance, evaluating several possible explanations for this apparent exemplary achievement. After correcting for potentially non-representative PISA samples, including bias from Vietnam's large out-of-school population, Vietnam remains a large positive outlier conditional on its income. Possible higher motivation of, and coaching given to, Vietnamese students can at most only partly explain Vietnam's performance. The child-, household- and school-level variables in the PISA data explain little of Vietnam's strong PISA performance relative to its income level. At most, they explain about 30% of Vietnam's exceptional performance in math and reading. Further research is needed to understand the exceptional performance of Vietnamese students.

Keywords: education; student learning; test scores; enrollment; PISA; Vietnam (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I25 O15 P36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:96:y:2023:i:c:s027277572300081x

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2023.102434

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