While the Chinese government is in full force to narrow the gap between its rural and urban areas in all facets of development, it has been suggested that there are disparities in teacher quality in the two dichotomous territories, especially in terms of promoting children's cognitive trajectory. To unpack specifically the differences of the two…

Under current test-driven educational accountability policies, there has been a debate about school effectiveness. As conventionally measured by test scores in academic subjects, school effectiveness is often limited and potentially biased. With increasing emphasis on preparing students with both cognitive and noncognitive competencies,…

This research investigated followers' expectations of their heads of departments (HoDs) and how they felt about the fulfilment of the expectations within the context of Ghanaian higher education. It further explored the nature of the challenges the HoDs faced as they tried to meet followers' expectations. The research used a phenomenological…

Globally, education improvement aims to address the critical area of quality teaching and learning. A common emphasis on quality tends to create a binary of 'active' teaching methods and rote learning, while the teaching and learning processes have remained a black box in many contexts. This study explores teaching practices in natural classroom…

This study examined whether there are significant differences between effective, average, and ineffective urban schools with regard to (a) students' classroom behavior and (b) students' perceptions of their classroom learning environment. Students from four effective, average, and ineffective urban elementary schools that served predominantly…

This paper presents the findings of an exploratory research project that examines what aspiring principals in Singapore think a good principal is, based on a framework of personal, interpersonal, and organizational dimensions of school leadership. According to the findings, a good principal has a moral purpose centered on personal values, a humble…

This research aims to investigate democratic environments offered to children in Turkey at school, in the home, and in society. A mixed method is a general type of research where qualitative and quantitative methods are used together. The researcher first collects quantitative and then the qualitative data. The study group in the research…

This study explores the different ways in which the notion of multiculturalism in Japan has been influenced by various social and historical trajectories. Since the Japanese government started to promote "internationalization" in the 1980's, slogans such as "international exchange," "cultural exchange," and…

Decentralization in the education system has become a trend in many developing countries. However, it is not a solution to the many problems in education faced by these countries. One of the adverse effects of decentralization is disparity between regions or schools in terms of educational achievement. This paper offers a justification for such a…

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 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…

This paper first reviews the literature on school-university partnerships to evaluate and describe challenges and paradigms of Japanese approaches to school-university partnerships in theory and practice. Secondly, it clarifies the role of three-year school-university partnership between the Nagoya University and the Tokai City Board of Education…