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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.

This paper compared technical/vocational education in: Germany, Australia, Finland, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Nigeria, and found that technical/vocational education was given proper attention in countries considered except Nigeria, where it was handled with laissez faire attitude. Set-Up of Technical/Vocational Schooling, Curriculum, Mode of Training and Conduct of Final Examination, Financing and Motivating Factor was the basis for comparison, and Nigeria lagged behind in these. Amongst the lessons for Nigeria's technical/vocational education sector are that her technical/vocational education sector be dual, while students should be appropriately motivated. Schools should collaborate with registered organizations (work-integrated learning) to train the students. The paper recommended that there should be national conference strictly on the status of technical/vocational education in Nigeria, so that necessary solutions could be proffered to the problems facing this part of the education sector. Finally, manufacturing organizations, etc. should be involved in the drafting of curriculum of the technical/vocational education in the country, while taking into consideration peculiarities of Nigeria as a sovereign nation.

This paper reports on research conducted as part of the International Instructional System Study that explored five subject areas across nine jurisdictions in six high-performing countries. The Study's overall aim was to understand what, if anything, there is in common in the curricula and assessment arrangements among the high-performing jurisdictions to see if there are aspects of instructional system design that might account, in part, for high performance. This paper focuses on social studies which in most jurisdictions includes elements of history, geography and citizenship and highlights a number of emerging issues. These include the advantages and disadvantages of teaching history and geography separately or within a social studies programme; the extent to which key concepts are embedded within the social studies/history/geography curricula; whether the level of demand should be considered in terms of a generic taxonomy or in terms of subject specific models; how progression might be defined and considerations of an appropriate balance between teacher assessment and external assessment.

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.

Interpretive frameworks may be helpful to understand narratives, yet they also risk displacing unique information of the research context. In this paper, we argue that such is the case in narrative inquiry studies of English language teaching set in the Asian context, perhaps due to the pressure to use familiar interpretive frameworks that are sanctioned by scholars. Through meta-ethnography, we examined recent narrative inquiry studies set in Asia. It was observed that the research findings do not offer any critical insights about the context of the study; instead, they add to the prevalence of broad constructs of English language education, such as the components of identity. For future narrative inquiry research, we recommend researchers to consider utilizing local meanings pertinent to the study context as an analytical lens, as a means to Asianize the field.

Drawing on data gathered from British Council seminars in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Dubai on "Absent Talent: Women in Research and Academic Leadership" (2012-2013), this paper discusses academic women's experiences and explanations for women's under-representation as knowledge leaders and producers in the global academy. Participants from South and East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Australasia and Europe shared experiences and identified desires for future action in the form of a "Manifesto for Change." The paper combines empirical data on enablers, impediments and attractions with consideration of debates on women's exclusions and disqualifications from academic leadership and knowledge production. A key question is whether women are desiring, dismissing or being disqualified from senior leadership positions in the global academy.

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 investigates achievement gaps between low and high socioeconomic students in 19 high-income countries. On average, math scores of students with indicators of high socioeconomic status (SES) are over one standard deviation above those with low SES indicators. The paper estimates the extent to which these achievement gaps can be attributed to differences in classroom- and school-level resources available to students from different SES backgrounds. In some countries, achievement gaps can be largely explained by differences in the characteristics of schools attended. However, in many other countries, the gap appears more closely related to differences in the characteristics of the students. The results point to the importance of institutional difference among countries in explaining international differences in the quality of education received by different groups within a nation. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures and 13 notes.)

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 scrutinizes decentralization of education with reference to some countries around the world. We consider discussion on decentralization to be complex, critical and broad question in the contemporary education planning, administration and politics of education reforms. Even though the debate on and implementation of decentralization education can result from differences in ideological and philosophical backgrounds (McGinn & Welsh, 1999), in this scrutiny we begin by theorizing the concept, provides dimensions and goals of decentralization and demonstrate how decentralization has been implemented in some countries. Finally, conclusion is assumed in this debate as a summary and a conduit to further discussion and investigation of educational decentralization.

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.

PISA, the OECD's international program of assessment of reading, scientific and mathematical literacy (www.oecd.org/pisa), aims to assess the ability of 15 year olds to use the knowledge and skills that have acquired at school in real world tasks and challenges. It also uses questionnaires to gather data on students' attitudes to learning and the conditions of schooling. Since 2000, PISA has tested the mathematical literacy of 15 year old students from many countries around the world. This paper describes the design of the PISA assessments, discusses mathematical literacy and reports on a selection of results from the PISA assessments, associated surveys and related analyses to give a flavour of the information that has resulted from this major international initiative. Results for Indonesia are compared with the OECD average and with a selection of countries, addressing issues of overall achievement, equity, and classroom environment.

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.

This article presents the authors' critique of lessons proposed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills (P21). The authors initiate a discussion about content that they hope will play out in schoolhouses and statehouses across the country. They take on a different task: they present a handful of lesson ideas from P21 that could enhance studies of academic content. They present examples of content-rich education in which they hope P21 will use as models to revise its current skills maps. (Contains 11 endnotes.)

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.)

A common claim about mathematics education is that it should equip students to use mathematics in the "real world". In this paper, we examine how relationships between mathematics education and the real world are materialised in the curriculum across a sample of eleven jurisdictions. In particular, we address the orientation of the curriculum towards application of mathematics, the ways that real-world contexts are positioned within the curriculum content, the ways in which different groups of students are expected to engage with real-world contexts, and the extent to which high-stakes assessments include real-world problem solving. The analysis reveals variation across jurisdictions and some lack of coherence between official orientations towards use of mathematics in the real world and the ways that this is materialised in the organisation of the content for students.

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 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.)

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.)

Background: Building or maintaining institutional trust is of central importance in democratic societies since negative experiences (potentially leading to mistrust) with government or other institutions may have a much more profound effect than positive experiences (potentially maintaining trust). Healthy democracy relies on more than simply trusting the national government of the time, and is mediated through other symbols of institutional power, such as the legal system, banks, the media and religious organisations. This paper focuses on institutional trust-the level and predictors of trust in some of the major institutions in society, namely politics, the media, banks, the legal system and religious organisations. We present analyses from a consolidated dataset containing data from six countries in the Asia Pacific region-Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand., Methods: Cross-sectional surveys were undertaken in each country in 2009-10, with an overall sample of 6331. Analyses of differences in overall levels of institutional trust between countries were undertaken using Chi square analyses. Multivariate binomial logistic regression analysis was undertaken to identify socio-demographic predictors of trust in each country., Results: Religious institutions, banks and the judicial system had the highest overall trust across all countries (70%, 70% and 67% respectively), followed by newspapers and TV (59% and 58%) and then political leaders (43%). The range of levels of higher trust between countries differed from 43% for banks (range 49% in Australia to 92% in Thailand) to 59% for newspapers (28% in Australia to 87% in Japan). Across all countries, except for Australia, trust in political leaders had the lowest scores, particularly in Japan and South Korea (25% in both countries). In Thailand, people expressed the most trust in religious organisations (94%), banks (92%) and in their judicial/legal system (89%). In Hong Kong, people expressed the highest level of trust in their judicial/legal system (89%), followed by religious organisations (75%) and banks (77%). Australian respondents reported the least amount of trust in TV/media (24%) and press/newspapers (28%). South Korea put the least trust in their political leaders (25%), their legal system (43%) and religious organisations (45%). The key predictors of lower trust in institutions across all countries were males, people under 44 years and people unsatisfied with the health and standard of living., Conclusion: We interpreted our data using Fukuyama's theory of 'high/low trust' societies. The levels of institutional trust in each society did not conform to our hypothesis, with Thailand exhibiting the highest trust (predicted to be medium level), Hong Kong and Japan exhibiting medium trust (predicted to be low and high respectively) and Australia and South Korea exhibiting low trust (predicted to be high and medium respectively). Taiwan was the only country where the actual and predicted trust was the same, namely low trust. Given the fact that these predictors crossed national boundaries and institutional types, further research and policy should focus specifically on improving trust within these groups in order that they can be empowered to play a more central role in democratic vitality., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Background: Trust is regarded as a necessary component for the smooth running of society, although societal and political modernising processes have been linked to an increase in mistrust, potentially signalling social and economic problems. Fukuyama developed the notion of 'high trust' and 'low trust' societies, as a way of understanding trust within different societies. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test and extend Fukuyama's theory utilising data on interpersonal trust in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Australia and Thailand. This paper focuses on trust in family, neighbours, strangers, foreigners and people with a different religion., Methods: Cross-sectional surveys were undertaken in 2009-10, with an overall sample of 6331. Analyses of differences in overall levels of trust between countries were undertaken using Chi square analyses. Multivariate binomial logistic regression analysis was undertaken to identify socio-demographic predictors of trust in each country., Results: Our data indicate a tripartite trust model: 'high trust' in Australia and Hong Kong; 'medium trust' in Japan and Taiwan; and 'low trust' in South Korea and Thailand. Trust in family and neighbours were very high across all countries, although trust in people with a different religion, trust in strangers and trust in foreigners varied considerably between countries. The regression models found a consistent group of subpopulations with low trust across the countries: people on low incomes, younger people and people with poor self-rated health. The results were conflicting for gender: females had lower trust in Thailand and Hong Kong, although in Australia, males had lower trust in strangers, whereas females had lower trust in foreigners., Conclusion: This paper identifies high, medium and low trust societies, in addition to high and low trusting population subgroups. Our analyses extend the seminal work of Fukuyama, providing both corroboration and refutation for his theory.