Shanghai students may have topped a recent global survey, but educators in China are not rejoicing, saying the country has a long way to go before rote learning and test-taking turn into innovation.

The 500 Shanghai students who participated in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study released last month outperformed the rest of the world in reading, science and mathematics.

It was the first time Chinese mainland students had taken part in the Programme for International Student Assessment, a study carried out every three years that benchmarks 470,000 15-year-old pupils in 65 economies.

But while the OECD results sparked alarm overseas as further evidence of China gaining on the rest of the world, Chinese educators are hardly triumphant and say different skills are needed to compete in a global knowledge economy.

"Since China opened up to the world, we found children in foreign countries were relatively more creative and better at solving problems in real life," said Ding Yi, vice-principal at Shanghai's Jing'an Education College Affiliated School.

"We're constantly thinking about this problem," said Ding, whose students took the test.

In the United States and Europe, the findings triggered fears of falling behind China. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called it a "wake-up call".

Chester Finn, who served in former US president Ronald Reagan's Department of Education, likened China's scores to "Sputnik" - the Soviet satellite launched in 1957 that startled America into action in the space race.

But Yong Zhao, the University of Oregon's associate dean for global education, drew a simpler conclusion.

"When you spend all your time preparing for tests, and when students are selected based on their test-taking abilities, you get outstanding test scores," Yong said.

The two-hour test features a mix of multiple-choice and open-answer questions based on written passages describing real-life situations.

A sample math question asks students which pizza is better value: one that is 30 centimeters in diameter and costs 30 "zeds" or a 40-cm pizza costing 40 "zeds". Students must show their reasoning.

In China, where national achievements are typically loudly trumpeted, the rankings barely made a ripple.

Ding said they showed merely that the country's education reforms and investments to improve schools were bearing fruit.

China's spending on education has been rising steadily from a World Bank estimate of 2.9 percent of GDP in 2001 to four percent for 2012.

"We are really concerned about the situation here and want to see real improvement," said Tao Hongkai, who heads an education research institute at Huazhong Normal University in the central city of Wuhan.

"We won't be complacent about this superficial data."

Schools in Shanghai, China's gleaming commercial hub, also are not considered representative of those in the country as a whole. Vast, poor, inland regions are far less well-funded and struggle to attract good teachers.