Education in China, in its various forms and levels, is widely conceptualised as integrating the cultivation of "human souls" with the provision of students with knowledge. The English word "education" is "jiao yu" in Chinese, which means "teaching [and] cultivating". The analogy "shi nian shu mu, bai nian shu ren" (it takes ten years to grow…

The concept of self-efficacy is based on the triadic reciprocality model symbolising a relationship between: (a) personal factors i.e. cognition, emotion, and biological events (b) behaviour, and (c) environmental factors (Maddux, 1995). Cognition, emotion and behaviour are the domains of personality which form the basis of research in…

This study examined scores on second, third and fourth grade reading and mathematics tests to determine the effects of beginning school age on later school success. The analysis involved 352 participants in one rural school district in Western New York. Participants were divided into three groups: (a) age appropriate for entrance to school, (b)…

In recent years, organisations and institutions of higher learning have adopted group/team structures to facilitate learning and goal completion. A number of methods have been used to better understand and facilitate group learning. In this paper, I explore one such method: collaborative critical thinking, heretofore, a relatively unknown…

Even though a wide cross-section of society today has accepted Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as an entrenched characteristic of its culture, education has been slow to adopt it as an integral tool within the classroom (Cuban, 2001; Elliott, 2004). Many reasons for this lethargy have been purported in the literature, ranging from…

Three well-established issues for educational reform to insert middle schooling into the traditional primary-secondary tiers are (a) lack of preservice training of specialist middle school teachers, (b) the absence of clear positive educational outcomes linked to the promotion of middle schooling policy as a philosophy of teaching, and (c) the ad…

To enable teachers to become "transformative intellectuals" (Huckle, 1996), a critical form of educational inquiry that enables them to investigate their practice, is required (Robottom, 1987). Such an approach was used in developing assessment resources and materials "with" teachers, not "for" teachers. The important thing is to help teachers…

This paper reports on a study undertaken to investigate governance processes within particular school settings and the ideologies and values behind how these schools came to have their present governance forms. The results revealed several themes and changes in governance over thirty years. The governance discourse today is primarily about…

Further evidence is presented to demonstrate the validity of a new measure of emotional intelligence: Reactions to Teaching Situations (RTS). Using criterion-related groups of high and low scorers on the RTS, it is shown that high scorers give more responses coded as emotional intelligence in their answers to sentence completion tasks relating to…

Research ethics is not only a matter of doing no harm, or even abiding by the guidelines of the Ethics Review Board of the institution. While these matters are important and legal requirements, there is much more at stake in discussions of research ethics. Research ethics establish the foundation upon which research rests. Taking the social…

This paper discusses initial findings on teacher identity, as perceived and negotiated by four pre-service secondary-school teachers during an action research project at a regional university. Through systematic collaborative reflection, the group explored the dissonance between theory and practice in order to make sense of their emerging teacher…

Australian teacher educators and teachers are become increasingly familiar with the notion of "Productive Pedagogies", itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al. 2001). One of Productive Pedagogies' strengths has been its efficacy for teachers to use as a language to talk about…

This article explores the impact of market metaphors and mechanisms on higher education in Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon recent anthropological literature on the local meanings of market reforms in post-socialist contexts, as well as work in the field of educational policy that has focused attention on the "local spaces" in which curricular and…

This article deals with a particular "best practice" in Mongolia (boarding schools) that neither traveled elsewhere nor was rescued from the socialist past and adopted in the post-socialist present. The boarding schools accommodating children from nomadic herder families have experienced a long decade (1991-2003) of neglect. The boarding school…

An important subset of issues involved in describing the process of educational globalization emerges when considering the reception, response and/or rejection of international proposals, ideologies and agents by indigenous national and regional educators. This case study describes and discusses how foreign/Western education proposals and policies…