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The fragmentation of academic work and its uneven distribution among academic staff have produced particular challenges for new entrants to teaching in Higher Education, Early Career Teachers [ECTs]. In this paper, documentary analysis of the narratives of fourteen ECTs, who worked across six different continents, was undertaken. The findings highlight the diverse forms of precarity that ECTs face, which cut across migratory, identitarian, economic, and ideological dimensions. It discusses ECTs' reflections on their expectations of teaching and their adaptation to the demands of neoliberal Higher Education. Drawing from their narratives and Sevil Sümer's theories of differentiated academic citizenship, ECTs are recognised as 'precarious academic citizens'. This has important implications for revealing the unique circumstances of this group, thereby opening further questions as regards their mentoring and support to enable them to be situated more equally as citizens of the academy.

This paper is a critical systematic literature review of empirical work on creative pedagogies from 1990 to 2018. It responds to the increased international attention being afforded creativity and creative pedagogies in research, policy and practice and examines the evidence regarding creative pedagogical practices and the potential impact of these on students' creativity. The methodology encompassed four stages. Firstly, an educational database keyword search was undertaken and 801 papers identified, manual searches added 12 further papers. Secondly, through applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 89 papers were identified for closer scrutiny; these papers focused on students aged 0-18 years in formal educational settings and were peer-reviewed reports of empirical work. Thirdly, these papers were subjected to in-depth review and rating, this reduced the included selection to 35 papers. Finally, these papers were subject to further analysis and synthesis. The findings reveal that seven interrelated features characterise creative pedagogical practice, namely generating and exploring ideas; encouraging autonomy and agency; playfulness; problem-solving; risk-taking; co-constructing and collaborating; and teacher creativity. The paper also reveals that the evidence for the impact of these pedagogical practices on students' creativity is inconclusive. It highlights the complexities and challenges of documenting creative pedagogies in the years of formal schooling and concludes with key recommendations and implications for research, policy and practice.

The purpose of this review study was to conduct a thematic exploration of prior studies related to the transition between primary and secondary school. The aim of the paper was to discover (1) the extent of earlier research, (2) how earlier research thematises social and emotional issues, and (3) suggestions of those studies concerning how to improve schools. Searches were conducted across four international databases of peer-reviewed research to identify articles published in the last decade on the topic 'transition between primary and secondary school'. Articles related to social and emotional issues were further selected, and thematic analysis was conducted on the selected 29 articles to identify the topical focus. This review study draws attention to the importance of understanding challenges related to the transition between primary and secondary school. Overall, the analysed studies indicate that this is an important focus for educational research. Key issues related to support and wellbeing/bullying have emerged, which clarify the importance of further research in this field. The present study may also contribute to increasing awareness among policy makers and school leaders of the challenges related to the transition between primary and secondary school.

This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding crises, including the COVID-19 global pandemic, catastrophic climate change and ecological collapse, political upheaval, and growing social and economic inequality. What emerges is a wide-ranging set of reflections that engage with these complexities and challenges in a considered and hopeful way.

In this study, the variables having impact on the student motivation have been analyzed based on the articles, conference papers, master's theses and doctoral dissertations published in the years 2000-2017. A total of 165 research papers were selected for the research material and the data were collected through qualitative research techniques through document review and content analysis. According to the research results, the most important factors affecting student motivation are the fields of teacher, teachers' classroom management skills and their teaching methods. In this research, factors having less influence on the student motivation are parental communication, student characteristics and study fields. In addition, relational search type was used more than others, mostly students were selected as the study group and most researches were conducted in USA and Turkey.

Seamless learning has a significance that has been increasing in recent years, and an increasing number of studies on the subject in the literature draws attention. This study aimed to examine the research on seamless learning between 1996 and 2020 with the bibliometric analysis method. The Scopus database was used in the collection of the data. After various screening processes, a total of 389 publications were included in the analysis. Descriptive analysis and bibliometric analysis were used in the analysis of the data. The distribution of publications by years, types of publications, sources, and languages were analyzed in the research. Additionally, visual maps were created with analyses of co-author, cocitation, and co-word. At the end of the study, it was seen that there has been an increase in the number of publications from the past to the present, articles and papers were predominant, and that most of the studies were carried out in English. As a result of bibliometric analysis, it was concluded that the most efficient countries in seamless learning were the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore. Also, it has been determined that the National Institute of Education, Center for International Education and Exchange, and Kyushu University institutions are dominant. The most frequently mentioned authors cited in studies in many different fields are M. Sharples, L.-H. Wong, and H. Ogata. According to the co-word analysis, the keywords seamless learning, mobile learning, ubiquitous learning, and mobile-assisted language learning stand out in the field of seamless learning.

This article maps the scientific production and the contents associated with the sustainable development goals and their integration with universities during the past 21 years. Although many of the topics related to sustainable development goals (SDGs) have been addressed in different studies for decades, it is since 2015 onwards that they gained greater prominence due to the inclusion of higher education as an important actor in the fulfillment of the 2030 agenda and the United Nations SDGs. For the purpose of this paper, a bibliometric analysis of 871 papers, 535 documents in Scopus, and 336 in Web of Science (WoS) from 1998 to 2019 was performed, and the Bibliometrix analysis tool was used. The objective of this mapping is to answer the following research question: Is the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals and Universities a field of study? An analysis of the network of collaborators and trend topics in Scopus and WoS allows us to identify the concurrence and relationships of some keywords, such as sustainable development, sustainability and planning, and some background words, such as humans and global health. In another analysis, the word "higher education" is related to change. This article suggests that the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals in Universities is becoming a field of study under exploration, with a peak of production in 2016 and that has remained stable in the last three years, but thanks to the leading role assigned to Universities, intellectual production should increase in the following years.

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009-2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery. This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small-scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable.

This paper presents a compilation of personal reflections from 66 contributors on the impact of, and responses to, COVID-19 in accounting education in 45 different countries around the world. It reveals a commonality of issues, and a variability in responses, many positive outcomes, including the creation of opportunities to realign learning and teaching strategies away from the comfort of traditional formats, but many more that are negative, primarily relating to the impact on faculty and student health and well-being, and the accompanying stress. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the recovery and redesign stages of the management of this crisis, and it sets a new research agenda for studies in accounting education.

Student learning outcomes assessment examines whether programs cover the material stated in their learning goals, whether students are learning the material, and the impact on student retention, graduation, post-graduation outcomes, and institutional accreditation, with the aim of providing faculty with data that can be used to help programs evolve or improve. While there is a plethora of research regarding effective methods of assessment used in the United States, little has been written regarding cross-national comparisons of assessment methodologies. This paper examines the current state of assessment in several nations and regions, and draws parallels in practices across countries. A literature search using the term "outcomes assessment" yielded 228 articles, of which, only 35 described practices outside the United States. Generally, searches on the terms "outcomes assessment" and "global" tend to return studies of outcomes assessment of teaching about global issues as it is practiced in the United States, rather than results about outcomes assessment practices used in other countries.

This paper discusses the noticeable nervousness of many US-based financial statement issuers in adopting IFRS. For contextual purposes, the paper provides an overview of the FASB/IFRS convergence so far and its probable future. A detailed review of convergence in accounting standards is explained through the respective standards for "Pensions and Other Post-Employment Benefits". The paper concludes by suggesting that, while one set of global steps is a noble goal, it might not achieve the desired goal of comparability.

The article examines current trends in the development of the national models of higher education in Russia and European countries. The paper reveals the key problems of their functioning in the context of the processes of globalization, standardization, and integration into the pan-European and global educational space. These processes are described through the prism of the national interests of the states. Emerging from the comparative description, content presentation and qualitative analysis, the article assesses the level of development of the national models of higher education, i.e., Russian, European and American. This allowed identifying key similarities, as well as the most important differences, which mainly stem from the difference in the state regulation of national educational systems. It is the role of the state that is leading in the formation of national educational systems and the creation of high-quality models of higher education. The state is also responsible for the transformation and adaptation of these models. The models target providing the national and world labor market with highly professional human resources. Based on the comparative aspects outlined in the article, as well as on the qualitative analysis data, the authors have come to the following main conclusions regarding the trends and prospects for the development of the Russian higher education sector: a) Firstly, the Russian model of higher education was built during an accelerated transition from a one-level to a multilevel education. The result of this shift is the labor market disbalance, which nowadays does not allow the formation of the adequate perception of specialists holding a "bachelor's degree" which is unfamiliar and obscure to many employers; b) Secondly, the Russian educational system, and the higher education model, replicate the Western European and American approaches without considering the realities of the national educational market and the labor market. Therefore, the high proportion of the population with higher education cannot provide the necessary socio-economic development potential of the country; c) Thirdly, the reform of the Russian model of higher education should continue but not in terms of accelerating the processes of its integration into the world educational system. There is much evidence that the correct direction lies within the domain of creating incentives and conditions that will ensure the training of highly skilled professionals correlating with the market demand.

In the past decades, income inequality has risen in most developed countries. There is growing interest among economists in international comparisons of economic and educational mobility. This is aided by the availability of internationally comparable, large-scale data. The present paper aims to make three contributions. First, we introduce the Japan Child Panel Survey (JCPS), the first longitudinal survey of school-age children that includes cognitive and non-cognitive measures, and plentiful household information. The JCPS was developed to measure dynamic inter-relationships among children's academic and social outcomes, their family background, and local policy and environment, in a way that allows comparison of the results with international data. Second, based on JCPS data, we present selected results of the dynamics of inequality in multiple indicators of children's educational and behavioral outcomes. We found that changes in cognitive achievement across parental income groups, the degree of mobility of cognitive test scores, and the correlation between the difficulty score and parental education in Japan are similar to those of other countries, such as the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. Finally we discuss issues underlying the globalization of education research based on our experiences with the JCPS. We discuss reasons and strategies for further globalization of education research in Japan, and propose suggestions as to how Japanese education research can move toward better international collaboration, particularly in research on economic and educational mobility.

Cross-border higher education institutions are considered a main way to fulfill the educational internalization in Mainland China; to some extent they represent the attitude of entering the international market. In this paper, the history, status quo, and future of Chinese-foreign cooperatively-run schools are analyzed and discussed. Cross-border higher education institutions in Mainland China have experienced the process from accidental and disorder to a systematic and quality orientation.

This paper provides a synthesis of the pedagogical practices of e-learning teacher experts into a four-part framework of approaches: out-of-class, blended language practice, blended Web 2.0 projects, and online. Examples of each approach are illustrated with short extracts from case studies of the participant teachers. It is hoped that these four approaches will be useful as a means for an individual teacher or institution to objectively assess the level of integration of technology within their teaching context and might also serve as a framework for technology-minded language teachers to communicate with other teachers or administrators who might not share a similar mindset.

This systematic review is built on the seminal work by the New London Group in 1996. Few endeavours have synthesized findings of empirical studies pertaining to the effects and challenges of multiliteracies practices in various schooling and geographical contexts. Through a five-point Likert scale and a deductive and inductive thematic analysis, we conducted a systematic review of 66 multiliteracies articles from the ProQuest® database. These studies were empirical, qualitative/mixed-method, and ranged from 2006 to 2015. Findings show a burgeoning number of multiliteracies studies occurring in 15 countries, with Canada being the most prominently involved. Our evaluation of the reviewed studies was generally favourable with strengths identified in researchers' articulation of pertinent theoretical frameworks and connections to existent literature. Our findings refer to insufficient information of data collection and data analysis in a certain number of papers. We also elaborate on major affordances, challenges, and oversights of the multiliteracies practices as reported by the reviewed studies and discuss implications for future multiliteracies research, policies on literacy education, and teacher education in diverse contexts.

This paper focuses "interest in science" as one of the attitudinal aspects of scientific literacy. Large-scale data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 are analysed in order to describe student interest more precisely. So far the analyses have provided a general indicator of interest, aggregated over all contexts and contents in the science test. With its innovative approach PISA embeds interest items within the cognitive test unit and its contents and contexts. The main difference from conventional interest measures is that in most questionnaires, a relatively small number of interest items cover broad fields of contents and contexts. The science units represent a number of systematically differentiated scientific contexts and contents. The units' stimulus texts allow for concrete descriptions of relevant content aspects, applications, and contexts. In the analyses, multidimensional item response models are applied in order to disentangle student interest. The results indicate that multidimensional models fit the data. A two-dimensional model separating interest into two different "knowledge of science dimensions" described in the PISA science framework is further analysed with respect to gender, performance differences, and country. The findings give a comprehensive description of students' interest in science. The paper deals with methodological problems and describes requirements of the test construction for further assessments. The results are discussed with regard to their significance for science education. (Contains 5 tables and 6 figures.)

The following offers an overview of what it means for cities to be "smart." It draws the supporting definitions and critical insights into smart cities from a series of papers presented at the 2009 Trans-national Conference on Creating Smart(er) Cities. What the papers all have in common is their desire to overcome the all too often self-congratulatory nature of the claims cities make to be smart and their over-reliance on a distinctively entrepreneurial route to smart cities. Individually, they serve to highlight the major challenges cities face in their drive to become smart. Collectively they begin to uncover what it means for cities to be smart. Together the papers offer an alternative route to smart cities laid down by those advocating a more neo-liberal roadmap, rooted in a critically aware knowledge-base and more realistic understanding of what it means for cities to be smart(er). (Contains 1 note and 1 figure.)

The Changing Academic Profession (CAP) international survey was designed in part to consider the effects of globalization on the work context and activities of academics in 19 countries or regions around the world. This paper draws from a subset of these data to explore the extent to which academics are globally connected in their research and teaching, and the ways this connectedness relates to global migration. Across multiple measures, immigrant academics (i.e., academics working in countries where they were not born and did not receive their first degree) were more globally connected than national academics (i.e., those working in the countries of their birth and first degree). Global migration by academic staff is clearly a major contributor to the internationalization of higher education institutions, yet there was no evidence these contributions led to enhanced career progress or job satisfaction for immigrant academics relative to national academics. The international expertise and experience of immigrant academics may not be sufficiently recognized and valued by their institutions.

This paper reports on a questionnaire survey of 16 national libraries designed to clarify how national libraries attempt to justify their web archiving activities. Results indicate they envisage that a) the benefits brought about by their initiatives are greater than the overall costs, b) the costs imposed on libraries are greater than the costs imposed on stakeholders, and c) all of them are making efforts to respond to legal risks in various ways (e.g. legislation, contracting and opt-out policies) although there are trade-off relations in terms of costs for negotiation, scope of access and size and scope of the web archive. The paper discusses whether a basic logic for justification of their web archiving is valid from the perspective of balancing cost-benefit. Further, it highlights the potential, underlying premises of the logic that motivates the intervention of national libraries as public sector organizations. (Contains 3 tables and 2 figures.)

Higher Education is experiencing an increasingly diverse student population. Students bring a range of skills and experiences to their courses; they have different backgrounds and different needs. This fluidity requires an approach to teaching that encompasses the social aspects of learning. It has been suggested that authentic approaches to teaching and learning can assist in offering a perspective on learning which views learning as "enabling participation in knowing". We propose that the authentic learning practices developed in The Gift design project, discussed in this paper, constituted approaches which acknowledged that students' interests and experience are intrinsically bound up with motivation and engagement and, as such, have a major influence on the ways in which learning is constituted and developed. The Gift project has developed a range of innovative formative strategies which have provided both students and tutors with opportunities to become involved in peer assessment and review, peer feedback and reflection on learning outcomes. This re-conceptualisation of the assessment process has provided valuable insights into the development of learning skills such as problem solving, critical analysis, and the development of creativity and learner autonomy.

Background: Media education is the study of the media with the aim of cultivating people's media literacy. In the past four decades, media education has rapidly developed in school systems and communities all over the world. Each country has its own developmental trajectory. With the rise of the interactive new media, media education is going to have a paradigm shift, bringing media education study into a new era. Goals: This paper discusses the rationales, definitions and approaches of media education. It also provides an overview about the global development of media literacy training. Results: Although different countries define media education in different ways, they share the common goal of training media literate people to deal with the media in an intelligent and responsible way. Media education has been well developed in the West but in recent years Asia regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and Japan are gaining their momentum. With the emergence of various new media devices, media education is regarded as playing a more important role in cultivating wise prosumers in the 21st century.

East Asian dominance in international large-scale assessments is widely known. This is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, exam-oriented education systems in East Asia, wherein students partake in a fierce competition for limited college entrance. Although achievement scores may be comparatively higher, the argument goes, the relative success comes at a steep price, with the emphasis on high-stakes tests heightening student stress and anxiety. In this paper we refute this persistent and out-dated stereotype by focusing on changes in Japanese education over the past several decades. The two original studies we report herein show that not only do Japanese students feel less school-related anxiety and stress than they once did, but these levels are now comparable to students in America, Australia, and the United Kingdom. In showing that stereotypes do not match empirical realities, we seek to open a richer discussion around East Asian student achievement. We conclude by extending the discussion to recent changes in China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We then raise the possibility that fundamentally different outlooks on the learning process explain both differences in achievement and the persistence of the West's distorted images of Japanese and East Asian education.

Background: Data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) revealed that countries systematically differ in their respondents' literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments skills; skill levels also vary by gender, age, level of education or migration background. Similarly, systematic differences have been documented with respect to adults' participation in education, which can be considered as a means to develop and maintain skills. From a psychological perspective, motivation to learn is considered a key factor associated with both skill development and participation in (further) education. In order to account for motivation when analyzing PIAAC data, four items from the PIAAC background questionnaire were recently compiled into a motivation-to-learn scale. This scale has been found to be invariant (i.e., showing full weak and partial strong measurement invariance) across 21 countries. Methods: This paper presents further analyses using multiple-group graded response models to scrutinize the validity of the motivation-to-learn scale for group comparisons. Results: Results indicate at least partial strong measurement invariance across gender, age groups, level of education, and migration background in most countries under study (all CFI > 0.95, all RMSEA < 0.08). Thus, the scale is suitable for comparing both means and associations across these groups. Conclusions:Results are discussed in light of country characteristics, challenges of measurement invariance testing, and potential future research using PIAAC data.

Background: The Project Yi Jin (PYJ), an alternative pathway for secondary school leavers and adults to further their education, has been receiving full support from the government, the Federation for Continuing Education in Tertiary Institutions (FCE) in Hong Kong and the public. Graduates of PYJ have the equivalent academic status of their counterparts in the main stream education. It was first implemented in 2000/01 by the FCE and has been offered to more than 35,000 students by 2006/07. With the success of the programme as a safety-net for a mass education system, it should continue to function more vigorously as new reforms are being implemented in the Hong Kong education scene in the future. The Chief Executive in his 2004 Policy Address has set out the direction to develop a new secondary and university system, i.e., (3+3) for secondary + 4 (tertiary) [the old one is (3+2+2)+3], to be launched in 2010/11, that will effectively prepare the next generation to cope with the challenges of the 21st century and the demands of the rapidly developing knowledge-based society. The new system, together with substantial modified curricula including the newly developed applied learning courses (ApL), is supposed to be able to look after all secondary students. Aims and focus of discussion: This paper aims to argue the necessity of launching a new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ) concurrently together with the new 3+3+4 academic system. In light of the contemporary global educational systems as compared to that of Hong Kong, it is postulated that the launching of nPYJ as a continuation of the successful PYJ is both legitimate and indispensable with regard to the carefully observed current global fashion of lifelong learning and continuing education in which diversity, equity, and flexibility are highly valued. Method: A comprehensive comparative review was carried out on eleven selected oriental and occidental countries and regions, namely, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, United Kingdom, United States, China, Taiwan, Singapore and Macao, focusing on the worldwide trend of constant high school drop-out rate as well as the mentioned countries' respective senior secondary schooling articulation policy leading to higher education, in particular shedding light on the establishment of alternative pathways towards tertiary education alongside the conventional educational track. Conclusion: With the literature backdrop and empirical support, it is shown that high school drop-outs are inevitable no matter how well-defined an education system may be. Thus this is where the "safety-net" contingency plan is found essential. A new version of Project Yi Jin (nPYJ), to be offered in parallel with the Hong Kong's new 3+3+4 secondary academic curricula, is indispensable to the new educational structure in the territory which fundamentally helps transform the conventionally somewhat segregated and elite educational system into a mass one. Regarding the curricular design, both PYJ and nPYJ will focus on generic skills and a wide range of electives will be offered as well to arouse students' interest of study. (Contains 1 figure, 1 table and 5 footnotes.)

The paper looks at part-time higher educational services for students in the educational systems of Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. A comparative examination of the nature and importance of part-time higher education is then presented. (DB)

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech research. To overcome this problem, a novel proxy for high-tech research investment--the supercomputer capacity--is proposed. Empirical evidence strongly supports this choice of variable. It is also found that academic R&D exerts a larger growth effect on high-tech output than its industry and government counterparts, but only the impact differential between academic and government R&D is statistically significant.

This paper suggests that as university missions have adapted to accommodate major developments associated with, for instance, mass higher education and internationalisation agendas, university workforces have diversified. They now, for instance, incorporate practitioners in areas such as health and social care, and professional staff who support activities as diverse as widening participation, e-learning, and business partnership. This in turn has implications for higher education governance and management structures and processes. Consideration is given to variables likely to affect institutional responses to such changes, and some suggestions are made as to possible ways forward in addressing the interests of an expanding range of professional groupings and stakeholders, as well as those of institutions as a whole. These are likely to involve the development of more flexible organisational frameworks in relation to, for instance, reward and incentive mechanisms and career pathways. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)

This self-reflexive essay teases out the predicaments that I have encountered through my past publishing experience, while situating them in a critical review of the existing English-language studies of Japanese education. Drawing on postcolonial theoretical insights and recent critical sociology of academic knowledge production, I use my personal experience as a starting point to identify the particular discursive structure of comparative education that constrains the articulation of "other" education in the field. My critical review of comparative studies of Japanese education demonstrates that many of them, including my own, unreflexively accept the subject positions offered by this discursive condition and thus further constrain space for those who write in English about "other" education and Japanese education in particular. In conclusion, I discuss recent studies of Japanese education that partially address the dilemmas raised in this paper and the wider implications of this study for the field of comparative education. (Contains 12 notes.)

At least one-third of the 72 million children currently missing out on primary education are estimated to be disabled. With just five years remaining to achieve the Millennium Development and Education for All (EFA) goals, global efforts to ensure all children complete a full cycle of primary education by 2015 will fail if bilateral and multilateral donor support for education does not prioritise the inclusion of disabled children. This paper reviews the commitments and practices of key EFA Fast Track Initiative (FTI) donors in relation to early childhood and primary education for disabled children between 2005 and 2008/9. The review highlights that, while a number of FTI donor partners are beginning to pay greater attention to the inclusion of disabled children in education through their international development cooperation and policy commitments, this has not been accompanied by sustained and systematic action. Weak political will and continued marginalisation of the issue of education for disabled children from the mainstream EFA agenda threatens to impede current efforts towards "education for all". (Contains 9 notes and 1 table.)

Although studies have begun to shed light on medical students' attitudes towards peer physical examination (PPE), they have been conducted at single sites, and have generally not examined changes in medical students' attitudes over time. Employing both cross-sectional and longitudinal designs, the current study examines medical students' attitudes towards PPE at schools from different geographical and cultural regions and assess changes in their attitudes over their first year of medical study. Students at six schools (Peninsula, UK; Durham, UK; Auckland, New Zealand; Flinders, Australia; Sapporo, Japan and Li Ka Shing, Hong Kong) completed the Examining Fellow Students (EFS) questionnaire near the start of their academic year (T1), and students at four schools (Peninsula, Durham, Auckland and Flinders) completed the EFS for a second time, around the end of their academic year (T2). Univariate and multivariate analyses revealed a high level of acceptance for PPE of non-intimate body regions amongst medical students from all schools (greater than 83%, hips, at T1 and 94.5%, hips and upper body, at T2). At T1 and T2, students' willingness to engage in PPE was associated with their gender, ethnicity, religiosity and school. Typically, students least comfortable with PPE at T1 and T2 were female, non-white, religious and studying at Auckland. Although students' attitudes towards PPE were reasonably stable over their first year of study, and after exposure to PPE, we did find some statistically significant differences in attitudes between T1 and T2. Interestingly, attitude changes were consistently predicted by gender, even when controlling for school. While male students' attitudes towards PPE were relatively stable over time, females' attitudes were changeable. In this paper, we discuss our findings in light of existing research and theory, and discuss their implications for educational practice and further research.

The "Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior" was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is women. Other changes in the journal include having its own website for more than a decade and now publishing online as well as on paper. A recent connection with PubMed Central of the National Library of Medicine has made possible the completely free electronic presentation of the entire archive of about 3,800 articles. (Contains 5 tables and 3 figures.)

The evaluation of government-financed research has become increasingly important in the last few decades in terms of increasing the quality of, and payoff from, the research that is done, reducing the cost of doing it, and lending public credibility to the manner in which research is funded. But there are very large differences throughout the world in the extent to which systems used promote these results. This paper briefly presents the dimensional results of a study designed to comparatively evaluate the national-level research evaluation models in sixteen countries on five merit-defining dimensions. (Contains 6 figures.)

In recent years, a number of analyses assessments used in different countries have appeared. Analyses emerging from international comparisons such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) have focused on what might be termed "cross-sectional" comparisons; examining the differences between the assessments in different national systems for students of the same age. Other studies have focused on the study of systems of assessments within a single country, looking at the articulation between the various assessments taken by students at the same ages (another form of cross-sectional analysis within a single system), and by the sequence of assessments taken by an individual over the course of their schooling (a longitudinal focus within a single system). The purpose of this paper is to try to combine both approaches, through the comparison of assessment "systems". The authors' aim is to look at the differences in assessment systems in different countries in order to try to identify the critical design issues. In this context, design issues are not just the features that are designed into the system by its architects. Design issues also include those features of the system that emerge unplanned, but might have panned out differently if different decisions had been taken in the development of the system (good examples of this latter category are the issue of the rate of increase of spread of attainment in the cohort over time, or sex differences in performance). (Contains 4 figures and 4 footnotes.)

Based on data from 700 companies in 20 countries, this paper records the research that investigates the contribution of organisational and technological practices to speed up New Product Development (NPD). The organisational practice is found positively correlated with the speed of NPD. However, no significant direct relationship was found between technology practice and the speed of NPD. The organisational and technological practices are found to be in balance, which may be a new input to explain how technology helps NPD. The implication is that organisational practices such as team, continuous improvement and Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy are needed in order to implement technologies successfully. This result supports the simultaneous theory on innovation, which is especially important in developing countries. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

The authors summarize the presentations and discussions contributed to the symposium "International Perspectives on Career Development" by members of Group 5, who considered the topic of the structure and organization of career development programs in different nations. A capsule picture of the national setting, primary goals, components, objectives, and implementation strategies is presented. Papers fell largely into 4 categories: (1) national programs with several components; (2) large, but more specific programs, serving a national population; (3) smaller programs serving diverse populations; and (4) focused programs. One theme emerged strongly from virtually every presentation: There is a gap, often profound, between policy or vision and reality. Although every nation about which participants heard had laudable policies and had made genuine attempts to assist its people with life career development, many individuals do not have access to quality, or even any, services.

Includes "Empowering Case Management Clients" (Rose); "Case Management in Rural Japan" (Maeda, Takahashi); "Coordinated-Care Teams" (Brodsky, Sobol); "Comparing Practice in the United States and the United Kingdom" (Sturges); "Business of Case Management Flourishing in the U.S." (Cress); and "Community Options Bring Change to Long-Term Care in Australia" (Ozanne). (JOW)