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This book explores the value that Asian countries place on test-based curriculum and its effects on teaching learning and the lives of young people. Describes the challenge of developing new approaches focused on the needs of students and not on exam results.

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This book critically explores why some Asian nations are on top of the world in students´ achievement tests in reading and literacy, yet governments and industry in these nations are anxious about a crisis in education.

Why are governments anxious about the capabilities and skills of school and university graduates in a global economy when there is a Asian economic boom? The authors explore questions about how the Asian countries value test-based examination curriculum and its influence on the practices of teaching learning and the lives of young people in Asia. The authors describe the challenge of change for East Asian nations to develop more relevant approaches to literacy and language and more inclusive societies focussed on the needs of young people and not exam results.

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Acknowledgements

Introduction
What is literacy and why is it important?
High Stakes Testing, Literacy Wars, Globalisation and Asia
League Tables and the Politics of Ranking
Global Testing: PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS
International Testing: The Global Education Space Race?
Schooling, national development and growth in Asia
The "East Asian Miracle" economies, inequalities and schooling
Literacy and workforce capabilities
The New Dynamic and shifting approaches literacy and language in East Asia

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"It is a fresh and original piece of work and particularly insightful in terms of regarding the approaches of literacy including policy in education as being connected in some ways as well as disconnected to a series of interrelated dynamics and perspectives that are located beyond the classroom, beyond schools and are wider than the school systems. These approaches and policies are about the reform of the social conditions and economic arrangements that characterise the experience of people in parts of East Asia. It is this challenge to create the conditions for wider changes at a societal level that comprises the discussion in the final chapter in this book. The problematisation of the autonomous model of literacy underpinning the dominant privileging of international type testing and comparision has been well deconstructed in relation to the East Asian context."
- Yew Lie Koo, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Malaysia

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