This study focuses on the policy issues generated by the reintroduction of Liberal Studies and evaluates the predicted effectiveness of the proposed curriculum in Hong Kong (HK) secondary schools. Theorised by Ball (1992) "policy cycle", approximately 200 newspaper articles and 30 government documents were collected to identify the issues in the…

Capacity building is now mentioned synonymously with school improvement in much of the literature with an absence of debate on the implications of political, social and economic trends. This article explores capacity building in one low decile, multicultural, New Zealand primary school. The research, positioned within an interpretivist paradigm,…

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…

Two developments have contributed to the convergence of views about the benefits of real-life and inquiry-based pedagogies in mathematics learning. First, the mathematics teaching community is increasingly focused on the learning of mathematics that involves the transfer of prior knowledge to novel problem-solving situations, a key element in…

In this study, the authors employed a multilevel analysis procedure to examine the key pupil- and school-level factors that influenced reading and mathematics achievement among Grade 5 primary school pupils in Laos. The data for this study were collected in 2007 as part of a major project (known as Laos Grade 5 Survey) that sought to examine the…

Based on the data collected from focus groups and individual interviews with secondary school students and civic education teachers, this article explores how young people are transformed to become active and participatory citizens. The findings show that the roles and personal beliefs of civic education teachers are of critical significance at…

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…

In the multiracial Malaysian society, a new school redesign model called "Vision School" has been initiated as yet another measure to foster racial harmony. In this model, the ethnicity-based schools with the medium of instruction in the respective native languages are located within a common compound to share common facilities and jointly…

This is a normative study to investigate the transferability of norms from western-based intelligence tests to Filipino students. More than 2,700 Filipino sixth graders were sampled across the country and administered the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT). Scores were then compared to the US normative sample. The results showed no significant…

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 response to several major curriculum reforms in Hong Kong since 2000, schools were required to initiate policies that catered for learner diversity. As well academic achievement, the reforms also emphasized the affective and social outcomes of the learning experience. A whole-school approach to learner diversity includes students with low…

Considering that today's students feel extremely more comfortable with computers than did earlier generations of students vis-a-vis the notion that, as a social category, they have become one of the most interesting topics in research papers and journals in the field of behavioral and social sciences since the 1950s (Batan 2002), their individual…

In the past, many Australian state schools avoided teaching about values explicitly. However, the Australian government released Australia's first official values education policy in 2005: the "National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools" (NFVEAS). This framework represents a local manifestation of the recent international values…

This article provides an analysis of survey data on perceptions of student misconduct, perceived respect for teachers, and support for corporal punishment among school teachers in South Korea. The data were gathered from a survey of 110 middle and high school teachers in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. Descriptive, chi square, logistic regression,…

The aim of this study is to investigate the formation of student teachers' teacher identity from pre-service to the end of the initial year in teaching. We explored why student teachers in Singapore have chosen to enter teaching and tracked changes in their attitudes and beliefs towards teaching at three time points: entry and exit of the initial…