Did the Shift to Computer-Based Testing in PISA 2015 Affect Reading Scores? A View from East Asia

In this Forum article, Komatsu and Rappleye report that the results of PISA 2015 released December 2016 revealed a major oddity: reading scores in several of the "leading" East Asian countries had apparently plummeted. An interesting point is that Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Hong Kong are among the most advanced technological societies in the world and the highest scoring in international tests, but yet computers and the Internet are virtually absent from their classrooms. Against this apparent paradox, Komatsu and Rappleye intend in this short piece to explore three reasoning's. First, they seek to empirically confirm the casual observations of Ministry officials and media around East Asia. Second, they use these results to spotlight the implicit ideologies and obvious contradictions embedded in the work of the OECD. And third, they seek to show that the "view from East Asia" is crucially important to help scholars locate their own implicit assumptions about education.