This article provides a comparative analysis on the evolution of the distribution of responsibilities--the authority of deciding over a particular domain--at the national, regional, and local levels in the European Union educational systems. After explaining common trends in the institutional arrangements through the role of evaluation, the…

The creation of a European education space has been extensively discussed in Europe. Many scholars are concerned about the way in which the emergence of "global governmentality," such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has produced a "soft…

The purpose of this article is to explore the extent to which European Union (EU) policies impact upon the activities of associations such as the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and the experiences of emerging researchers aligned to such associations. In essence, the authors explore potential tensions between policy and the lived…

Helping students to acquire specific competences is nowadays one of the basic pillars of university teaching; therefore its evaluation and accreditation is of key importance. As of late, rubrics and in particular electronic rubrics (e-rubrics) have become an important resource to assess competences and guide students in their learning processes.…

New forms of activities now shape and govern the Swedish education system, based on governance through comparison. The focus on comparison can be regarded as soft governance and different types of (self-) evaluations and valuations are, at present, deeply embedded keystones in the decentralised education system. Recently this has, together with…

The research dimension of higher education programmes is usually discussed in association with doctoral studies. Against a background of scarce literature investigating research in a Master's degree, this article aims to analyse the place of research in Master's qualifications, first, as envisaged by official European and national documents acting…

The article discusses an East/West divide in Europe in university knowledge production. It argues that the communist and post-communist legacies in the four major Central European economies studied (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic) matter substantially for educational and research systems. The differences in university…

This article presents findings from a comparative study of sources of educational disadvantage of immigrant children across 18 OECD countries, which is based the data from the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The findings show that disadvantaged family background and lack of host-country-specific cultural capital account…

This article analyses educational inequalities related to socioeconomic status (SES) in 12 Eastern European countries that participated in the International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2006. Economies and educational systems of these countries have undergone critical transformations since the fall of communism. The authors' analyses, using data…

The curriculum is a governance technology of knowledge production and is also itself governed by complex dynamics within European education policy space. This article focuses on how the curriculum is governed by comparative knowledge; in particular, it identifies how this facet of governance has manifested itself within the policy space of…

This article compares discourses on "Europe" in Greek-Cypriot policy, curricula and textbooks over approximately the last twenty years, from the early 1990s, when Cyprus applied for European Union (EU) membership, until 2011-12, the school year during which the recently revised curricula were gradually introduced to schools for implementation.…

This article develops the idea that the sciences of the design perspective offer a more adequate solution for bridging the gap between explanations and prescriptions in educational research. This idea is developed over the following steps: first, the scope of the analysis and the problem of the relationship between explanations and prescription…

This article presents the results from a mainly statistical and comparative analysis regarding the communicative competences and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) of German exchange students. The data was extracted from two exhaustive, rigorous and methodical questionnaires related to communicative and ICT competences,…

Whilst the notion of children's rights and an entitlement to express their views and participate as global citizens is threaded throughout the international policy field, children's perspectives on the near ubiquitous practice of homework, and its effects on their daily lives and learner subjectivities, remain under-researched. Drawing on the…

Failure in higher education (HE) is the outcome of multiple time-dependent determinants. Interruptions in students' individual school trajectories are one of them, and that is why research on this topic has been attracting much attention these days. From an individual point of view, it is expected that interruptions in school trajectory, whatever…