Year 8 and 9 Vietnamese students' mathematics commitment: Academic learning time and motivations

Abstract

VIETNAM IS AN EMERGING NATION that has achieved, relatively recently, the political stability to conduct systematic nationwide reform in education. In 2012, 15-year-old Vietnamese students first partjcipated in the Programme for International Student Assessmeilt (PISA). They performed a little better in a test of mathematical literacy than their peers in much richer Western nations. In this paper we document Vietnamese Year 8 and 9 students reporting on their commitment to studying mathe­matics, how long and how hard they study mathematics, what factors they reported motivate or hh1der their learning and how they feel about classroom discourse. Data were collected using a survey instrument and classroom observations. The time commitment to mathematics study reported by most Vietnamese students was much higher than for their Western peers, particularly in regard to out-of-school study. Vietnamese students reported that they were motivated by cultural expecta­tions and by competitive pressures to succeed in order to gain access to higher-ranked educational institutions. In the main, the students expressed satisfaction with the teacher-centred regulatory discourse and the esoteric focus on the discipline of mathematics.