In 1999 Thailand passed an ambitious national educational law that paved the way for major reforms in teaching, learning and school management. Despite the ambitious vision of reform embedded in this law, recent studies suggest that implementation progress has been slow, uneven, and lacking deep penetration onto classrooms. Carried out ten years…

This study provides new and more accurate information about private rates of return to education (RORE) in Malaysia. Most of the prior studies on RORE have not addressed selectivity bias, and those that have are based on an older data set. The findings suggest that for both males and females, the average private returns to education are highest at…

This study surveys 200 Malay students enrolled in three Chinese primary schools in relation to three issues, i.e., parental choice of schooling, learning processes and inter-ethnic friendship patterns. The three issues are explored through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methodologies. Parental expectations for their…

This paper examines the labor market outcomes of two different forms of cross-border higher education degree programs (i.e., study abroad vs. twinning) between Malaysia and Japan. Based on a new graduate survey, it examines whether there are differences in the labor market outcomes between the two programs and what other factors have significant…

This paper contests the proposal that learner-centred education (LCE) may simply be a western construct, irrelevant to the current educational needs of developing countries, by arguing that its specific forms will be more effective when introduced through small-scale institutional relationships than through large-scale contracts with national…

As governments, donors and implementation organisations re-focus Education for All Goals in terms of quality of education, increasing concerns have been raised over low literacy levels in developing countries. This paper provides key learning from the application of an early reading intervention applied in post-conflict Liberia, which included a…

Poor people are most likely to be disabled, and the exclusion of disabled people from education means that they are also more likely to remain poor. Despite calls for better data to inform the extension of education for disabled children, data in this field remain weak. This paper asks whether a national survey of disability prevalence is the best…

This article presents a model for research on the effects of school organizational heath factors on primary school academic achievement in Trinidad and Tobago. The model can be applicable for evaluating schools in other developing countries. As proposed, the model hypothesizes relationships between external factors (exogenous variables),…

This paper explores changing patterns of access to basic education in six Sub-Saharan Africa countries using data from Demographic and Health Surveys at two points in time. In general the analysis confirms that participation of children in schooling has increased over the last decade. However, access to education remains strongly associated with…

In this paper we consider why students in poor and rural regions of China are dropping out of school in numbers that may be greater than official statistics admit. With questions about education quality among the most intractable in Education for All initiatives across the developing world, we sketch a portrait of education in a remote mountain…

This paper estimates the distribution of educational returns by gender for India. While previous studies focus on mean returns, the variance of educational returns has important implications for policy-making and micro-level decision making with respect to education. If the variance of educational returns is large, it can leave large sections of…

It is widely acknowledged that in order to improve the quality of education in primary schools in developing countries there is a need to place pedagogy and its training implications at the centre of teacher education reform. Like many countries in Eastern and Southern Africa, Tanzania has introduced various initiatives and reforms to improve the…

This study explores the effectiveness of a game-based mobile learning model for children living in underdeveloped regions with significant contextual variations. Data for this study came from a total of 210 children between the ages of 6-14 years old from six marginalized communities in India. The findings reveal that children with little or no…

Primary education is essential for the economic development in any country. Most studies give more emphasis to the final output (such as literacy, enrolment etc.) rather than the delivery of the entire primary education system. In this paper, we study the school level data from an Indian district, collected under the official DISE statistics. We…

By sampling extreme cases (five high-performing schools and five low-performing ones), the researcher revealed the differences in the teachers' motivation (Mattar, 2010) as well as the extent to which Principals adopted the instructional leadership style (Mattar, 2012) in the two sets of schools. Here, she looked for additional issues, within the…