In many ways, China's education system is quite different from systems of education in the West. Rich descriptions of school transformation, however, have revealed that the factors that fuelled transformation in schools in China are also evident in schools in Australia, England, Finland, Wales and the United States. This paper draws on an…

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyse the difference in nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets on boarding schools and boarding students in Shaanxi Province, a representative province in western…

The December 2008 release of China's new "Guidelines for health education in primary and secondary schools" by the Ministry of Education addressed many of the concerns arising from the academic and popular discourse on Chinese adolescent sexuality and sexuality education. The focus of this reform, common with similar reforms elsewhere in Asia and…

Human resource (HR) management is defined as the sum of activities employed by an organization to attract, develop, and retain people with the appropriate knowledge and skills for effectively and efficiently achieving organizational goals. An understanding of the HR practices in schools is important, as the assembly of a team of qualified and…

This study reports on the non-discursive aspects of the disciplinary enculturation experiences of five international doctoral students from East Asia in three Second Language studies graduate programmes in the United States. Based largely on interview data, this study examined how students participate in their graduate discourse communities and…

The rise of educational action research amongst schools in Singapore can be attributed to the government's belief that educational research and reform can improve school performance and help Singapore keep pace with the impact of globalization. However, against a backdrop of neo-liberal educational reform where efficiency, accountability and…

This study focuses on the knowledge exhibited by 30 elementary school in-service and pre-service teachers in solving non-routine mathematical problems and on their beliefs regarding these kinds of problems. Interviews were used to reveal teachers' knowledge and beliefs. The findings indicated that these teachers had difficulty in solving…

This study is an investigation of the effects of death education on children and their understanding of death. The participants of this study were eighty 5- and 6-year-olds who were enrolled in a suburban kindergarten in Korea. To examine the level of children's understanding of death, researchers interviewed each child in both the control and…

One component of the curriculum reform in Hong Kong focuses on the use of homework in consolidating learning, deepening understanding and constructing knowledge. This study examines the profile of Hong Kong primary school students' homework involvement, and investigates the relationships between time involvement and academic attributes, namely…

Elitism argues that the values and experiences of the political elite shape policy, while institutionalism contends that an individual's behaviour is constrained by institutional settings. This article shows that both perspectives work well overall, while offering persuasive arguments, but the former is dominated by the latter. This explains the…

This article builds on the author's earlier work, published in Vol. 28 No. 1 of this journal, that critiqued the Orientalist legacy in Anglo-American discussions of Japanese education. One of the manifestations of this legacy is the prevailing view among the Anglo-American observers of Japanese education that Japanese education is the "exception"…

The purpose of this study was to analyse Japanese physical education teachers' beliefs on teaching students with disabilities in integrated classes. The participants were five physical education teachers in Japan. Situated in planned behaviour theory developed by Icek Ajzen in 1985, the research method was descriptive-qualitative case study as…

This qualitative case study was designed to provide an understanding of the work experience of Chinese college students in South Korea. A growing number of Chinese students are coming to South Korea for college education, and their aspirations for better work materialize into work experiences in South Korean businesses. In-depth interviews were…

National identity is one of the most important forms of ideology that affects human behaviours. Yet, the issue of whether it influences history teachers' subject matter knowledge or teaching practice is overlooked most of the time. With regime change in Taiwan, history curriculum and textbooks are no longer dominated by a China-centred narrative;…

As New Zealand has become increasingly pluralistic, the teaching profession has become progressively less reflective of the wider population. This paper reviews the literature on impediments to teaching for minority students, and reports on a case study exploring factors that deter Asian New Zealanders from pursuing teaching as a career. The…