To motivate learners to engage in writing courses and help to improve their writing performance, a mobile-game-based collaborative prewriting approach was proposed in this study. A quasi-experiment was implemented by recruiting two classes of non-English major students from a university in northeastern China. Class 1 learned to write under the…

This paper provides an analysis of Australia's legal provisions and policies regarding truancy. We examine how low frequency truants feature in Australia's truancy law and policy and highlight similarities and differences in the cultural-legal context between Australian states and territories. Similarities include requirements to attend school…

Educational systems endemic of demotivation might signify a stagnating rather than nurturing ecology of learning, due in part to an obstruction in the loops of shared information between the organisms within these systems, i.e., teachers, educational researchers, teacher educators, school administrators, and educational policymakers. Working…

This paper explores a key dilemma of the Chinese middle class as it appears in their apparent adherence to official language policy despite their lack of direct knowledge of that policy. Using fieldwork data from Hangzhou, I show that a group of middle-class parents worked together to build an "Ancient Way Academy" for their children to…

Language policies in Japan have been mainly discussed in the context of national provisions and regulations regarding the Japanese language, or foreign language education. This paper examines the possible emergence of a new national language policy, embedded in a bilateral economic partnership agreement (EPA) signed between Japan and Southeast…

Positive education is the application of positive psychology principles to the education domain. Relative to positive psychology, positive education has not received a great deal of theoretical and empirical attention. In addition, there is a significant dearth of positive education theory and research focusing on students in the Asian region.…

This article looks at high-performing education systems in Asia through the lens of leadership and leadership development. It proposes that the top-performing education systems systematically build the leadership capacity for improvement and that this is part of an implementation science geared to maximizing performance. Drawing upon initial…

Driven by the impetus for the school system as a whole to actualize deep twenty-first century learning, innovation diffusion has become increasingly an important vehicle for isolated pockets of successes to proliferate beyond the locale of the individual schools to form connected clusters of improvement at a greater scale. This paper articulates…

'Equity and Quality' is an emerging terminology that focuses on the quality of education rather than on 'excellence.' The global policy discourse is turning towards levelling up educational quality "for all." The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 2012 report entitled "Equity and Quality in Education:…

Korea faces a unique and complicated situation in becoming multicultural. Modern Korean education has changed several times in response to the contextual shifts which have occurred in the country's demographic composition. Given the complex social circumstances which exist in Korean society, this paper explores how the social ideologies of…

This paper examines the development of multicultural curriculum in Hong Kong and Taiwan over the last two few decades. Though both societies are broadly Chinese cultural contexts, differences in their political histories, cultures, and demographics nonetheless reflect disparate approaches to the development of multiculturalism in curriculum…

Over the past few decades, Korea has made great accomplishments in the quality of its education as well as the quantitative expansion of education in spite of many obstacles. Facing the new challenges of globalization and social polarization, Korea has prepared to make a road to the second leap toward "world class" education. However,…

It has been nearly two decades since the education reform movement initiated in Taiwan in 1994. As a consequence of the lift of martial law, this wave of education reform exceeds previous reforms in terms of scale, initiatives, and impacts. Although the performance of Taiwanese students has been in the leading group of various international…

This paper intends to discuss English language policies in senior secondary schools in Mainland China and Hong Kong. First, we will focus on Mainland China in tracing the development of English language planning and policy in senior secondary education in terms of English syllabus, and analyzing the pros and cons of the latest English syllabus.…

The seeming dearth of computer literacy skills amongst Japanese university students has caused much academic interest recently (see for example Lockley, "JALT CALL J," 7(1):93-103, 2011a; Williams, "Stud Humanit Cult," 14:78-91, 2011; Taynton, "Teach English Technol," 12(1):3-19, 2012). One thing all these studies…