Inspired by complex system theory, this study adopts a multilevel piecewise regression model to examine the relationship between homework time and the development of students in different grades using a large-scale testing database in China. The results indicate that the relationship between homework time and students' performance is positive when…

Recent policy changes to the regulation of international schooling for Chinese nationals in China have seen restrictions on curriculum, admissions and ownership. While there is evidence of the impact of these changes at the institutional level, it is not clear how recent regulation has impacted the actors at the phenomenological level. In order to…

Over the past 2 years, the world has been living through the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Children have had to adapt to online classrooms and lessons of some sort, and many parents have been forced to work from home while supervising their child's home learning activities. We used participatory visual methods to understand how children and…

This study presents some of the current methodological issues regarding the analysis and comprehension of educational policy transfer, with particular emphasis on the issue of structure and agency. It suggests some shortcomings of current educational policy transfer research in dealing with the complex interaction between structure and agency. To…

Using data from China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study aims to investigate the association between perceived appearance, body shape and adolescent academic achievement, elucidate underlying mechanisms, and examine the heterogeneous relationships across different groups. The results suggest that there is an ugliness penalty rather than a…

Considering the rising tide of international student return mobility, the UK needs to pay attention to the long-term circulation and development of international student returnees. This study analyses the mobility, variations and pathways of the transnational in-between identity of Chinese student returnees from the UK, an under-researched group…

Education and parenting are popular topics on social media. In China, it is now common practice for parents to discuss and share education-related information in WeChat, a premier Chinese social media app. In order to understand parents' educational aspirations in WeChat and the way parents fulfil their parenting responsibilities, this research…

Decades of research have been conducted on the factors [i.e. family socioeconomic status (SES), urban-rural divide (household registration) and high-school type] associated with higher education selection. However, few studies have disentangled the relationship between each factor and the mechanisms of inequality among these factors in higher…

The term "neijuan" (in English 'involution') has captured feelings of perpetual competition and anxiety among university students in China preparing for their post-graduation careers. In this article, we develop a neo-Weberian reading of "neijuan" to construct a framework using positional conflict theory and the concept of…

Although the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic in terms of school closure and the sudden shift to online learning has started to be explored, little has so far been written about the impact on teachers. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on the first author's autoethnographic experiences of working in the growing body of…

This article reports the findings of a study on the intercultural dimension of internationalisation at two universities, located in China and Canada, as evidenced through their visiting scholar (VS) programme. Andreotti and her research team identified three articulations of internationalisation in higher education that are located in a…

This study seeks to understand the emotional connection of teachers' academically productive talk (APT) with student learning from the students' perspective. Using a sample of 2,225 students (N[subscript 7th grade] = 1,146 and N[subscript 8th grade] = 1,079) from 16 middle schools in a city of China, we investigate the relationship between…