School accountability is such a familiar concept in many education systems that questions about what it actually means and entails are rather uncommon, especially to busy practitioners on the ground. This paper reports a research that examines each of the questions of what and to whom Singapore schools are accountable, from the point of…

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) is in the process of initiating major education reform designed to improve schools. Parental involvement in support of student learning ranks high on the reform agenda. This study explores managerial aspects of implementing home-school relationships in seven primary Public Private Partnership (PPP) schools in…

Taiwanese vocational high schools (VHSs) deliver general English courses. This paper explores the extent to which these courses are perceived to be appropriately vocationally orientated. This focus gives rise to two main research questions: what are VHS students' expectations from their English courses, and to what extent are they being met? The…

Increasing teacher quality is a major objective of recent Cambodian education policy. In mathematics education literature, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has emerged as a critical component of teacher quality that is strongly linked to student achievement. In this study I use data from a large survey of Cambodian schools to investigate the…

Circumscribed by the culture of collectivist and Confucian traditions, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) education in China has defaulted to an impersonalized provision and delivery. Much of teaching and learning is to assimilate individuals into a group identity. This epistemological model can be detected in learning outcomes, e.g.,…

This study examined the individual, class, and school level variability of the students' science achievement. It was hypothesized that there are school or teacher effects which contribute toward explaining achievement differences, besides the student level differences. Owing to the nested structure of the data in Trends in International…

This article is concerned with the learning style adopted by Asian students who come from a Confucian heritage culture (CHC) such countries as China, Vietnam, Singapore, Korea and Japan are considered countries with Confucian heritage culture (Phuong-Mai et al. 2005). These students are generally viewed as typically passive, unwilling to ask…

Constructivist instruction has been implemented in the current instructional innovation in Singapore. Large scale survey study was conducted to examine the roles of teacher efficacy in implementing the innovative constructivist instruction. The results showed that the positive correlation between teacher efficacy and constructivist instruction was…

Alternative assessment is an increasingly common and popular discourse in education. The potential value and benefit of alternative assessment practices are premised on significant changes in assessment practices. Many alternative assessment practices seek and promise alternatives to tests and examinations. However, labelling a practice as…

In 2006, the Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia, recommended that all public institutions of higher learning in the country incorporate soft skills formation into their curricula. This qualitative study aimed to explore Malaysian students' expectations of university education with a special focus on the acquisition of soft skills and to…

The Taiwan Government launched the Hand-in-Hand After-School Care Program in 2006 with several goals: In addition to providing disadvantaged students with supplemental learning opportunities, this highly ambitious government program hopes to provide increased employment opportunities for substitute teachers and low-income college students, and…

This evaluative-exploratory case study reports pedagogical experiences with using mobiles phones, wikis, and other mobile learning approaches such as podcasts and walking tours as educational tools in the context of an undergraduate course on Chinese Entrepreneurship and Asian Business Networks taught at a university in Singapore. Conceptualized…

This study is to investigate the reflective learning in a group of secondary school students who participated in an educational tour to Liannan, which is located in a rural area in Guangdong Province, Mainland China. The specific aim is to develop a framework to describe the learning in an educational tour. For this purpose, data were collected…

Sultanate of Oman is one out of many developing countries around the world which have valued English as a very important international language and a tool for achieving multiple purposes. When His Majesty the Sultan came to power in 1970, the government accepted English as the only official foreign language and allocated huge budgets and resources…

This study examined the levels of pedagogical knowledge and skills as perceived by student teachers who were enrolled in the Post Graduate Diploma in Education program at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, from the beginning of their initial teacher preparation program to the end of their first year of teaching. Their perceptions were…