Carlos C. Bautista, University of the Philippines: The study attempts to determine if there are characteristics of an education system that are distinctly East Asian, and which can be unambiguously differentiated from other systems that have been successfully used by other non–East Asian countries.
The study makes use of data obtained from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). It consolidates data from the survey by taking percentages of the relevant variables across countries and creates indices for use in the statistical analyses: exploratory factor analysis and a subsequent cluster analysis. There are 41 variables identified in the study that covers five latent variables describing five possible dimensions of an education system.
Exploratory factor analysis is used in the study only to reduce the number of variables and not to additionally verify a relationship among latent and observed variables, which can be done in confirmatory factor analysis. The resulting reduced...