Study) is a standardized math and science test given every four years to
kids around the world.
After each test, researchers slice and dice the
results, comparing the performance of students from different countries;
Asian countries such as Korea, Singapore, Japan, and Taiwan
consistently rank at the top of the list. In 1995, for example, the first
year the TIMSS was given, Korea, Singapore, and Japan had the world’s
highest average middle-school math scores and were among the top four
worldwide in science. In 2007, when researchers
measured how many
students in a given country reached the Advanced International
Benchmark—a kind of superstar status for math students—they found
that most of the standouts were clustered in just a few Asian countries.
About 40 percent of fourth graders in Singapore and Hong Kong reached
or surpassed the Advanced Benchmark, and about 40 to 45 percent of
eighth graders in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore pulled it off. Worldwide,
the median percentage of students reaching the Advanced Benchmark
was only 5 percent at the fourth grade and 2 percent at the eighth grade.
How to explain these sensational performance gaps between Asia and
the rest of the world? Consider this interesting wrinkle in the TIMSS
exam. Students taking the test are also asked to answer a tedious series
of questions about themselves, ranging
from how much they enjoy
science to whether there are enough books in their home to fill three or
more bookcases. The questionnaire takes a long time to complete, and
since it doesn’t count toward the final grade, many students leave a lot
of questions blank. You’d have to be pretty persistent to answer every
single one. But it turns out, according to a study by education professor
Erling Boe, that the nations whose students fill out more of the
questionnaire also tend to have students who do well on the TIMSS test.
In other words, excellent students seem not only to possess the cognitive
ability to solve math and science problems, but also to have a useful
personality characteristic: quiet persistence.
Other studies have also found unusual levels of persistence in even
very young Asian children. For example, the cross-cultural psychologist
Priscilla Blinco gave Japanese and American first graders an unsolvable
puzzle to work on in solitude, without the help of other children or a
teacher, and compared how long they tried before giving up. The
Japanese children spent an average of 13.93
minutes on the puzzle
before calling it quits, whereas the American kids spent only 9.47
minutes. Fewer than 27 percent of the American students persisted as
long as the average Japanese student—and only 10 percent of the
Japanese students gave up as quickly as the average American. Blinco
attributes these results to the Japanese quality of persistence.
The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is
not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first
trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound
high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving
to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met,
Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college. She
told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet
new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else
would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.
Now Tiffany was a worldly and sophisticated college senior. She had
studied abroad in Spain. She signed her notes with a continental touch:
“Abrazos, Tiffany.” In her Facebook picture, the childlike look was gone,
replaced with a smile that was still soft and friendly but also knowing.
Tiffany was on her way to realizing
her dream of becoming a
journalist, having just been elected editor-in-chief of the college
newspaper. She still described herself as shy—she feels a heat rush on
her face when she first speaks in public or picks up the phone to call a
stranger—but had become more comfortable speaking up. She believed
that her “quiet traits,” as she called them, had
helped
her become editor-
in-chief. For Tiffany, soft power meant listening attentively, taking
thorough notes, and doing deep research
on her interview subjects
before meeting them face-to-face. “This process has contributed to my
success as a journalist,” she wrote to me. Tiffany had come to embrace
the power of quiet.
When I first met Mike Wei, the Stanford student who wished he was as
uninhibited as his classmates, he said that there was no such thing as a
quiet leader. “How can you let people know you have conviction if
you’re quiet about it?” he asked. I reassured him that this wasn’t so, but
Mike had so much quiet conviction about the inability of quiet people to
