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This brief discusses cases of neo-nationalist violations of academic freedom in Hungary and Poland. The most prominent case of neo-nationalist violation of academic freedom in Hungary is the fate of the Central European University (CEU). The circumstances of CEU's forced move out of Hungary came before the European Court of Justice regarding it a possible violation of EU law. The Court cited the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) under one of the three pillars of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) 1994 agreement, free trade, and the determination that CEU was a form of international educational services that should not be denied to the people of Hungary. Poland has a similar hostile environment to academics and academic freedom, although with a glimmer of hope following recent elections. The brief also discusses how such open breaches of academic freedom as in Hungary or Poland, in which politicians directly try to exert influence on research institutions and professors, are fortunately rather rare in Germany. However, a confluence of factors perhaps obscures the differences between "academic freedom" and the "freedom of opinion." In Germany, academic freedom includes the search for topics, rigorous methodical investigation, and professional norms to express findings and competent opinions, whereas the free speech is outside of these professional norms. The brief concludes with a discussion of the role of universities and the future of democracy in the context of ensuring a space for free and open debate.

This research paper is one in a series produced as part of the Cedefop project The changing nature and role of VET (2016-18). The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of how CVET is conceptualised in various international level policy documents and how it is referred to across countries. It discusses national conceptions of CVET, the providers, participation by IVET graduates in non-formal education and training (NFE), and participation of adults in VET education institutions in European Union Member States, Iceland and Norway. The paper describes how the provision of CVET by different types of provider has changed over the past two decades, discussing the main drivers of this change and speculating about possible future trends. One of the main findings is that there are many dominant conceptions of CVET across Europe and the use of this term is not consistent, sometimes not even within countries. [The research was carried out by a consortium led by 3s Unternehmensberatung GmbH, led by Dr Jorg Markowitch; the consortium includes the Danish Technological Institute, the Institute of Employment Research (University of Warwick), the Institute of International and Social Studies (Tallinn University) and Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini. The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in Germany is supporting the project as a subcontractor.]

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the first to assess consistency of results by agency. We find results vary by agent, but consistent with Flynn effects, gains are larger in math than reading, except for the most recent period. Non-whites progress at a faster pace. Socio-economically disadvantaged white, black, and Hispanic students make greater progress when tested in elementary school, but that advantage attenuates and reverses itself as students age. We discuss potential moderators.

Validation and guidance help individuals, organisations and Member States adapt to career challenges and create successful lifelong learning systems. However, little is known about how they are linked in practice and how this connection can be made more efficient. Building on Cedefop's expertise in the two areas, this study -- based on analysis of 13 practices from 12 countries -- explores how coordination between career guidance and validation of non-formal and informal learning can be improved. Results point to three factors: (a) comprehensiveness: provision of adequate information and guidance before a decision to undergo validation is taken, throughout the entire validation process, as well as after it; (b) coherence: use of common qualifications or competence standards, occupational standards or other reference frameworks in all the stages of the practice to identify, document and assess skills; and (c) quality of staff, resources, competences, and tools used. The study concludes with policy recommendations on how to improve the link between guidance and validation.

Effective education at the tertiary level is one of the key conditions for the development of modern economies; it also has a substantial impact on social development. Nowadays, higher education institutions all over the world are facing numerous challenges, some of them global (e.g. funding), others local (e.g. demographic trends). Universities are seeking new ways of dealing with the challenges; however, they often resort to methods that seem to do more harm than good by moving the emphasis from long-term objectives to short-term ones. In marketing literature, a new concept of Service-Dominant Logic (SDL) is proposed as an alternative approach to traditional and outdated marketing theories applied to the higher education sector. Its foundational premise of value co-creation seems to be of particular relevance here as it assumes that various groups of actors jointly create the academic experience. This paper focuses on the higher education sector in Poland and investigates the attitudes of Polish students towards value co-creation and their consequences for the academic experience. The study leads to the identification of value co-creation styles among students reflected by five segments: Maximalists, Minimalists, the Scrupulous, the Networking-Oriented and the Intellectuals and presents their detailed characteristics.

This research paper is the fifth in a series produced as part of the Cedefop project The changing nature and role of VET (2016-18). Based on comparative analysis of labour force survey data from 2014, the report analyses the vocational effect on labour market and education outcomes, asking whether any advantages conferred by vocational qualifications in early career would be offset by disadvantages later in life. The report explores the functioning of the safety net and the diversion effects across countries, demonstrating how these vary considerably with the specific institutional structure of schooling and work-based training. The results indicate that VET graduates are potentially sacrificing the longer-term gains associated with further education in favour of short-term benefits. [This research was carried out by a consortium led by 3s Unternehmensberatung GmbH and including the Danish Technological Institute, the Institute of Employment Research (University of Warwick), the Institute of International and Social Studies (Tallinn University) and Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini. The Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB) in Germany is supporting the project as a subcontractor.]

Returns to education have received much attention from scholars as well as policy makers and the media. It is a well-established fact that educational attainment improves employability and wages and that university graduates better than their less educated counterparts. However, the educational expansion rises the importance of the horizontal dimension in explaining social stratification. The field of study has proved to be an important factor for graduates' labor market performance in many countries. This paper discusses the differences in the labor market outcomes in early careers of graduates of various disciplines in Poland where the topic has been hotly debated for many years but remained under researched. We use data from the second measurement of the recently established Polish National Graduate Tracking System (ELA). The system uses administrative data exported from the national register of students and graduates as well as monthly records on employment status and earnings fetched from the Social Insurance Institution registers. The data cover entire population of recent higher education graduates in Poland and enables tracking for twenty-one months after graduation. We focus particularly on the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics which are presumed to lead to the best labor market positions. We demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, only some of the STEM disciplines give their graduates an edge on the labor market while the rest struggle to achieve results comparable with those of graduates of Humanities and Social Sciences.

In a highly competitive global landscape, occupations are transformed, new jobs are created and the skills needed for the labour market are constantly changing. European countries are looking at redefining VET [vocational education and training] to respond promptly to such challenges and take advantage of the opportunities ahead. They are reforming to modernise their VET systems and strengthen the relevance of their national qualifications in an international context. This publication explores national responses to globalisation in 15 countries and five economic sectors. It aims to understand how European and international initiatives help VET renewal across Europe. It shows how countries' reactions are embedded in their national traditions but also depend on their interactions with European, sectoral and multinational players that provide training and award qualifications. [The research was carried out by a consortium led by IBE Educational research institute and 3s Unternehmensberatung GmbH.]

Differences in teacher quality are commonly cited as a key determinant of the huge international student performance gaps. However, convincing evidence on this relationship is still lacking, in part because it is unclear how to measure teacher quality consistently across countries. We use unique international assessment data to investigate the role of teacher cognitive skills as one main dimension of teacher quality in explaining student outcomes. Our main identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in teacher cognitive skills attributable to international differences in relative wages of nonteacher public sector employees. Using student-level test score data, we find that teacher cognitive skills are an important determinant of international differences in student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation that uses within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills.

A strong VET system is increasingly seen as essential to overcoming the current economic crisis in Europe. VET is seen as a powerful tool to assist in balancing labour market inefficiencies, increasing youth employment possibilities, and reducing skills mismatch. Its inherent flexibility and closeness to the labour market place VET in a good position to contribute to a faster economic recovery and long-term sustainable development. However, crucial for this role is continuous and systematic VET renewal that assures its relevance for the labour market. This publication explores 15 European national approaches to feedback mechanisms between VET and the labour market. It illustrates the diversity of solutions currently applied across Europe and how they are embedded in national traditions and education philosophy. The study asks three fundamental questions: how inclusive are national mechanisms for feedback between the VET system and the labour market; how responsive are existing mechanisms; and how transparent? Three annexes provide: (1) Case Studies; (2) List of interviewees; and (3) List of experts responsible for the country overviews. Bibliography and references are included. [This paper is the result of a team effort reflecting the work of a research consortium led by Jörg Markowitsch from 3s Research Laboratory who together with Tanja Bacher, Carol Costley, David Etherington, Gerhard Geiger, Günter Hefler, Jelena Helemäe, Triin Roosalu, Ellu Saar, Auni Tamm, and Odd Bjørn Ure conducted the research and fieldwork and drafted the report. This work was carried out under Cedefop's service contract No 2011-0161/AO/ECVL/JB-IPS/Cooperation Labour market--VET/007/11.]

A survey was undertaken in ten countries to assess several aspects of education in multicultural societies: the attitudes of elementary teachers in training concerning different cultural groups, attitudes about separation of cultural groups for teaching purposes, and the fit between teacher attitudes and the system's provisions. In addition, a questionnaire was developed to measure these factors. The questionnaire was administered in ten countries: Bolivia; Spain; Mauritius; Jordan; Lebanon; Mexico; Pakistan; Poland; Senegal; and the Czech Republic. Monographs have been published separately for each country; comparisons are reported here. The first section of the report presents a brief literature review, and the second describes the study's methodology, including difficulties encountered with it. The third part summarizes results concerning the schools' objectives, the teacher's role, teachers' reasons for choosing their career, and the solutions they envision for schooling problems. After this, findings concerning teaching facilities, attribution of causes for teaching problems, and awareness of cultural distance between groups are reported. The final section offers a summary and discussion of findings. Contains 37 references. (MSE)

This study is a comparative analysis that addresses the question: to what extent has the relationship between parental socioeconomic characteristics and educational opportunities changed over time and why? The document suggests six hypotheses regarding change in the effects of social origins on education transitions: (1) modernization hypothesis: the effects of social origin on all transitions decline; (2) reproduction hypothesis: the effects of social origins decline on earlier transitions but not on later transitions; (3) hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality: the effects will only decline at those transitions for which the attendance rates of the privileged classes are saturated; (4) socialist transformation hypothesis: socialist transformations brought about an initial reduction in the effects, that will then be followed by increased effects; (5) life course hypothesis: the effects decline across transitions but are stable across cohorts; and (6) differential selection hypothesis: the effects decline across cohorts, but the effects on later transitions increase across cohorts. The 13 industrialized countries included in the study may be classified according to their basic cultural and economic systems into three major groups: (1) western capitalistic countries: United States of America, (former) Federal Republic of Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Israel; (2) non-Western capitalistic countries: Japan and Taiwan; and (3) western socialistic countries: Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Study results show that educational expansion facilitates the persistence of inequalities in educational opportunity. Tables summarize the major findings with respect to educational expansion and attainment, change in the effects of social origins on highest education attained, and cohort differences. (DK)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Tag Questions, Transformational Grammar and Pragmatics" (Wolfram Bublitz); "Toward Contrasting Styles" (Karol Janicki); "Some More Remarks on the Pedagogical Uses of Contrastive Studies" (Waldemar Marton); "Stress in Polish--With Some Comparisons to English Stress" (James L. Fidelholtz); "Some Remarks on the Stability of Lexical Stress in Polish and English" (Grzegorz Dogil); "Lexical Entries for Verbs in a Contrastive Lexicon English-German" (Hans Ulrich Boas); "Focus Constructions--Cleft Sentences in English and Their Counterparts in Polish" (Aleksandra Mieszek); "Some Aspects of Typology of Relative Clauses in English and Polish" (Elzbieta Muskat-Tabakowska); "How Factive are SEE, HEAR and FEEL and their Polish Counterparts" (Barbara Kryk); "Lexical Realization of Benefactive and Beneficiary in Polish and English" (Henry Niedzielski); "A Contrastive Semantic Analysis of Colour Adjectives in Polish and English" (Stanislaw Duczmal); and "French-English Contrastive Linguistics at the Universite Catholique de Louvain" (J. van Roey). (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "On Some Assumptions and Principles of Contrastive Grammar Illustrated from the Area of Reflexivity in Danish and English" (Torben Thrane); "Deletion in Coordinated Structures in English and Dutch" (Robert R. van Oirsouw); "Methods and Goals of Comparative Systematics" (Georges Garnier); "Color Words in English and Portuguese: A Contrastive Semantic Analysis" (John Robert Schmitz); "Those Relatives that Should Stack that Don't" (Elzbieta Tabakowska); "Towards a Pedagogical Grammar of Determiners: A Contrastive Approach" (Paul Robberecht); "Some Differences Between Arabic and English Comparative Structures" (Mohammad Anani); "Some Remarks About Translation and Style" (Hanne Martinet); "On the Relationship Between Communication Strategies and Learning Strategies" (Rolf Palmberg); "Comparing Sound Patterns" (Kari Suomi); "Contrastive Studies of Norwegian and Other Languages: A Bibliography" (Ernst Hakon Jahr). Reviews of the books, "Contrastive Analysis," by C. James and "Gramatyka Angielska dla Polakaw," by T.P. Krzeszowski, are also included. (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Contrastive Patholinguistics: The Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphemes by German Dyslexics in a Foreign-Language Teaching Context" (Udo O. H. Jung); "Contrastive Pragmatics" (Marie-Louise Liebe-Harkort); "On Questions in English and Swedish" (Kay Wikberg); "On Contrasting the Sentence Stress" (Aleksander Szwedek); "At--A Typically English Preposition" (Hubert Cuyckens); "A Contrastive Analysis of English 'Some' and 'Any' and Their Hungarian Equivalents" (Eva H. Stephanides); "Parameters of Linguistic Stress: An Experimental Contrastive Study" (Wieslaw Awedyk); "The Use of Ergative Verbs by German Learners of English. A Pilot Study into Interlanguage" (Werner Hullen); and "English in Speech and Writing: A Project Report" (Anna-Brita Stenstrom). (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Note on Semantic Representation of Lexical Items and on Lexical Gaps" (Maria Grzegorek); "Some Remarks on Case Grammars as Bases for Contrastive Studies" (Hans U. Boas); "Are Exclusively Attributive Adjectives 'Transpositional'?--Some Comments on the Nature of Lexical Rules as Opposed to Syntactic Transformations" (Barbara Fedorowicz-Bacz); "Epenthesis or Deletion--I Could Do" (John W. Dewees); "A Contrastive Description of Deixis in Danish and English" (Claus Faerch); "Deceptive Words. A Study in the Contrastive Lexicon of Polish and English" (Jerzy Welna); "Some Aspects of Style in the Source and the Target Language" (Moira Linnarud); "Tags in English and Equivalent Constructions in Polish" (Wieslaw Oleksy); "Definiteness in Finnish" (Andrew Chesterman); "Testing and Contrastive Analysis" (Naum R. Dimitrijevic); "Problems and Implications of Contrastive Analysis of Vocabulary and Culture" (Naum R. Dimitrijevic); "Towards an Erasure Principle for German and English Infinitive Complements" (Rudolf Thiem); and "Some Aspects of Modification in English and Polish--Pedagogical Implications" (Elzbieta Muskat-Tabakowska). A bibliography of English-Polish contrastive studies is also included. (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "Some Problems of YES-NO Answers" (Aleksander Szwedek); "Danish versus Russian. A Short Analysis of the Verb" (Christian Hougaard); "Polish SIE Constructions and Their English Counterparts" (Wojciech Kubinski); "More on the Time Reference and the Analysis of Tense" (Michael Sharwood Smith); "On Performatives" (Zenon Jaranowski); "Problems of Raised Constructions in English and Polish" (Alina Boniewicz); "Subject- and Topic-Prominence in Polish and English" (Wlodzimierz Rybarkiewicz); "Some Remarks on Multiple Negation in English and Polish" (Anna Charezinska); and "The Perception and Imitation of the British English [Phonemes--'TH'] by Polish Speakers" (Danuta Wolfram-Romanowska). A bibliography of English-Polish contrastive studies in Poland (Barbara Plocinska) is appended. (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "A Question of Imperatives" (Tom Wachtel); "Contrastive Sociolinguistics--Some Methodological Considerations" (Karol Janicki); "How to Describe Phonological Variation" (Thomas Herok, Livia Tonelli); "Towards a Contrastive Pragmalinguistics" (Philip Riley); "The Perception and Imitation of Aspiration by Polish Speakers" (Danuta Wolfram-Romanowska); "Some Aspects of the So-Called Verbal Deletion in English and Polish" (Malgorzata Gorna); "The Transfer of Communicative Competence" (Carl James); "Equivalence in Phonology: The Case of Finnish Stops vs. English Stops" (Kari Suomi); "Towards a Pedagogical Contrastive Phonology" (Wieslaw Awedyk); and "Contrastive Studies and Interlanguage" (Janusz Arabski). (MSE)

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "The Impersonal Sentence in Russian and Romanian" (Suzanne Whalen); "Differential Identity Between Languages--A Study of Assertion and Interrogation in French and English" (William A. Bennett); "The Use of the Article in English and Hungarian: A Contrastive Analysis" (Eva A. Stephanides); "A Semantic Analysis of WHO, WHAT, WHOSE, and WHICH and their Counterparts in Polish" (Wieslaw Oleksy); "Some Remarks on the Verbs of Perception in English and Polish" (Barbara Kryk); and "What Differences Are There Between Finns and Swedish-Speaking Finns Learning English?" (Hakan Ringbom). (MSE)

This paper describes briefly general characteristics of the higher educational system in Poland and in Eastern Europe with emphasis on the features and characteristic elements that determine the organization and goals of higher education. Discussion also includes the functions, goals, and tasks of higher education; access to higher education; the system of adult education; the professoriate; and management and administration. (MJM)

This volume contains ten articles and a book review. Josef Vachek talks about "Vilem Mathesius as Forerunner of Contrastive Linguistic Studies." In "Contrastive Generative Grammar and the Psycholinguistic Fallacy," Andrew Chesterman discusses methods for accounting for simplification in foreign language learning. Michael Post compares "English 'the-the' Constructions and Their Polish Equivalents," saying that despite different surface structures, they have identical semantic structures. A contrastive analysis of "The Generic Noun Phrase in English and Polish" is done by Janina Smolska and Jan Rusiecki. Ossi Ihalainen's "Some Remarks on Word Order and Definiteness in Finnish and English" discusses passive syntax. Also included are: "Similarities and Differences between Notional Passive Sentences in English and Polish," by Ireneusz Bobrowski; "Non-Typical Cases of Plural Nouns in English and Polish," by Barbara Dancygier; "Lexical Cohesion in Text Analysis," by Aleksander Szwedek; "An Investigation of Thai Interference in Selected American English Phonemes," by Eugene J. Briere and Colonel Sinuan Chiachanpong; and "Some Remarks about the Pragmatics of Negation in Polish and English," by Maria Kawinska. The review is "Phonology and Resonants: Some Remarks on Biedrzycki's 'Fonologica Angielskieh i polskich rezonantow,'" by Edmund Gussman. (PJM)