This article discusses the relationship between policy, research and practice in the Singapore education landscape in response to Hargreaves and Shirley's arguments of Fourth Way principles of educational change. Examples of recent policy developments in Singapore are used to illustrate the interaction between judicial uses of research data and…

Policy makers are often looking for solutions to develop their educational systems in today's highly competitive knowledge-based economy. Hargreaves and Shirley's Fourth Way provides a useful approach in analysing policy trends, successes and pitfalls, based on an observation of practices and research evidences in the west, particularly, the USA…

In recent years, education systems around the world have been keeping a keen eye on rankings of student achievement as measured by internationally benchmarked tests. This has led to considerable attention being paid to teasing out success factors that may account for countries that have emerged top of the ranks or those that have shown the most…

This article has two main objectives. It first outlines the first three waves of change termed by Hargreaves and Shirley (The Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, "2009") as the First, Second and Third Way that defined global educational policy and practice since the 1960s. It then introduces…

The current emphasis of many mathematics education reform documents is on the need to change the environment of mathematics classrooms from the transmission of knowledge by the teacher to the transaction of knowledge between the teacher and the students which promotes mathematical investigation and exploration. In this article, we discuss the…

Internationalization becomes increasingly important in higher education in a globalized world. Exporting higher education services by recruiting overseas students is an integral facet of internationalization of higher education. It not only helps develop the place as an education hub but also facilitate internationalized environment of higher…

China is now facing significant challenges in funding its rapidly expanding higher education systems, though it has experienced enormous economic growth in recent years. Equity has become a serious concern in Chinese higher education system. This article tries to identify the causes and implications of under-representation of the rural-poor…

This article argues that a commonly neglected dimension in service-learning pedagogy is the consideration of community perspectives in developing these service-learning projects. Areas considered in this study were: (1) Community members' needs and problems, (2) Community members' perceived roles and participation, and (3) Community members'…

In 1983, after over 10 years of working on mathematics education reform in the Philippines, I wrote a paper for a Tokyo conference arguing that education reform in developing countries such as the Philippines should begin by working on macro-problems, namely the social, political, and economic environment of the schools, as a context for the…

By 2020 our world will have changed and with it the shape and role of education and of educational research. One cannot predict the future, but in this paper three possible scenarios are outlined reflecting alternative approaches of government to the economic, political, social and environmental challenges facing the Asia Pacific region. For each…

Differences and contradictions in understanding education policies such as "Teach Less, learn More" may cause confusion between the intended meaning and actual implementation. Approaches to understanding public policy, such as discourse analysis, are useful for highlighting such differences, but do not explain how these differences may be…

In contemplating about the quality of higher education needed for today, this paper reviews the changing concepts and expectations towards higher education. It does so by delineating the changing setting of the higher education sector, the changing understanding of scholarship, the changing economy that leads to the emergence of entrepreneurial…

This paper discusses the Refugee Action Support Partnership Project between the University of Western Sydney, The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and the NSW-Department of Education and Training (DET). The critical ethnographic method is used to evaluate the after-school homework tutoring centres as a vehicle of literacy development…

This article reports results derived from the national study of Grade 5 in Vietnamese primary schools in which teachers and pupils took tests in reading and mathematics. The test data were calibrated so that teacher and pupil results could be mapped onto the same continuum. Results showed that the overlapping tests for teachers and pupils were…

In 2004, Prime Minister Lee called teachers to"teach less" so that students might "learn more". In 2005, the Ministry of Education clarified this philosophical statement to mean transforming learning from quantity to quality--"more quality and less quantity" in education. This is in line with the national vision of "Thinking Schools, Learning…