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The aim of this study is to identify the most prolific countries in the field of special education and to discuss the widespread impact of their papers by taking into account the country's h-index. Through a bibliometric analysis, the data were collected in the Web of Science Core Collection category "Education, Special" in the Social Science Citation Index during 2011-2020. The 25 most prolific countries in the field of special education were determined in terms of paper productivity, and it was seen that the leading country was undisputedly the USA (54.42%). Meanwhile, a strong positive correlation was found between the h-index and the number of papers published by the countries (r=0.864). On the other hand, when the ranking in terms of the number of papers was reconfigured by the h-index, it was relatively changed. The possible reasons for this change for the countries with the most changing rankings were discussed by considering some definitive criteria such as the journal quartiles, the percentage of international and domestic, and the percentage of open access papers. This study reports a positive correlation between the quality and quantity in the field of special education for the publications of countries. It has been shown that where the positive correlation deviates, then especially, the journal quartiles, the percentage of international collaboration and the percentage of open access papers have a significant effect. The bibliometric findings may be useful to enrich the discussion about the widespread impact of papers and debate whether the use of h-index is acceptable for cross-national comparisons.

In a recent paper, Reardon found that the relationship between family income and children's academic achievement grew substantially stronger in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. We provide an international context for these results by examining the income-achievement association in 19 other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries using data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Programme for International Student Assessment. First, we calculate and compare the magnitude of "income achievement gaps" across this sample of countries. Second, we investigate the association between the size of a country's income achievement gap, its income inequality, and a variety of other country characteristics. We find considerable variation across countries in income achievement gaps. Moreover, the U.S. income achievement gap is quite large in comparison to this sample of countries. Our multivariate analyses show that the income achievement gap is positively associated with educational differentiation, modestly negatively associated with curricular standardization, and positively associated with national levels of poverty and inequality.

This paper presents an innovative analytical model of Ethics Education, and uses it to analyze the major learning components found in England's National framework for religious education (NFRE). The model is based on research on Ethics Education in French­-speaking countries but can be used to characterize Ethics Education within any specific educational program. It includes seven components: three simple ones--Education for Society (ES), Personal Identity (PI), Education for Otherness (EO)--and four interwoven ones (PI /EO, PI /ES, EO /ES and PI /EO /ES). Our results from the analysis of the NFRE show a strong concentration of PI and EO components in its learning goals, and validates the model of Ethics Education developed in French-­speaking context.

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.

The paper examines if there has been an increase in the attention paid to social and environmental issues (SEI) in accounting curricula. Using schools participating in the Aspen Institute's Beyond Grey Pinstripes (BGP) program, we measure the increase in the number of accounting courses incorporating SEI across the biennial application years of 2005, 2007 and 2009. We also examine the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Our findings suggest that there was not an appreciable increase in the number of accounting courses dealing with SEI between 2005 and 2007, but that the increase was significant during the period from 2007 to 2009. Further, the increase over the four-year period from 2005 to 2009 was also significant. In addition, there is a significant increase in the percentage of SEI coverage in accounting courses between 2007 and 2009. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an experiment by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills to the entire world. The instructors were two of the best known experts in the subject of artificial intelligence. Although students would not get Stanford University grades or credit, 20,000 from 190 countries finished the course successfully receiving a "statement of accomplishment" from the tutors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Udacity is a start-up from the authors of CS221 delivering similar massive free online courses. EdX, a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world, is one of the most recent proposals in this realm. Massive open online courses known as connectivist MOOCs (c MOOCs) on the other hand have been delivered since 2008. They are based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward the resources and learning. In the research literature, newspaper and magazine articles both types of OOCs, AI Stanford like courses (AI) and c-MOOCs, have been identified in many occasions as equivalent. Distance education (DE) pedagogy can be classified through the evolution of three categories: cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist. These three current and future generations of DE pedagogy have an important place in a well-rounded educational experience. To a large extent, the generations have evolved in tandem with the technologies and all three models are very much in existence today and are categorized by a set of conditions. In this paper we study in detail representative courses from AI and c MOOC formats. We establish that although they share the use of distributed networks the format associated with c-MOOCs, which are defined by a participative pedagogical model, are unique and different from AI. We further assign to the AI to a cognitive-behaviourist (with some small contribution of social constructivist) and MOOCs to connectivist pedagogy. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

Despite being a landmark of 20th century biology, the "classical molecular gene concept," according to which a gene is a stretch of DNA encoding a functional product, which may be a single polypeptide or RNA molecule, has been recently challenged by a series of findings (e.g., split genes, alternative splicing, overlapping and nested genes, mRNA edition, etc). The debates about the gene concept have important implications on biology teaching, and, thus, it is important to investigate whether and how these are addressed in this context. In this paper, we report results of an investigation relating to the treatment of genes in higher education cell and molecular biology textbooks. These results indicate that, despite several findings challenging time-honored ideas about genes, these ideas continue to be widely used in textbooks, even though the textbooks themselves discuss part of those findings. Textbooks also harbor a proliferation of meanings about genes that may make the concept look vague and confused, and even lead to ideas that are at odds with our current knowledge about genomes. (Contains 7 figures.)

It has been said that the difference between a dialect and a language is that a language has an international border and a flag. But that is not entirely true. Canada has a border, a flag, and two major languages, somewhat in the fashion of Belgium. Unlike Belgium, where they call the local varieties of French and Dutch "Walloon" and "Flemish," respectively, Canadians have not come up with new names for their languages to make them seem more their own. Although the major languages of Canada may have some differences from the languages of the United Kingdom and of France, in most polite circles the languages are known simply as English and French. The importance of the French and English conflict and coexistence is so pervasive that the Canadian census provides data on bilingualism only in terms of French and English. This article does not deal directly with Francophone/Anglophone issues, although it cannot ignore them completely. The author's focus is on the description and reputation of Canadian English in the scholarly, popular, and Internet sources that deal with the variety of English spoken in Canada, the native language of nearly two-thirds of the population.

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the estimated returns can be causally interpreted. Using the PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills, this paper explores several approaches that aim to address potential threats to causal identification of returns to skills, in terms of both higher wages and better employment chances. We address measurement error by exploiting the fact that PIAAC measures skills in several domains. Furthermore, we estimate instrumental-variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment and parental education to circumvent reverse causation. Results show a strikingly similar pattern across the diverse set of countries in our sample. In fact, the instrumental-variable estimates are consistently larger than those found in standard least-squares estimations. The same is true in two "natural experiments," one of which exploits variation in skills from changes in compulsory-schooling laws across U.S. states. The other one identifies technologically induced variation in broadband Internet availability that gives rise to variation in ICT skills across German municipalities. Together, the results suggest that least-squares estimates may provide a lower bound of the true returns to skills in the labor market.

Background: Educational qualifications and literacy skills are highly related. This is not surprising as it is one aim of educational systems to equip individuals with competencies necessary to take part in society. Because of this relationship educational qualifications are often used as a proxy for "human capital". However, from a theoretical perspective, there are many reasons why this relationship is not perfect, and to some degree this is due to third variables. Thus, we want to explore the net relationship between educational attainment (harmonized according to the International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED) and literacy skills, and how much skills vary within education levels across countries. Methods: We use data from 21 countries from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies 2012. This paper compares the literacy skills of adults who achieved different levels of educational attainment across countries. Given the high degree of educational differentiation in most countries, we do this using a more differentiated educational attainment variable than what is commonly used. In our analyses we firstly adjust for factors that are likely to affect access to education and the acquisition of educational qualifications and literacy skills, such as parental education and language and migration background. In a second step, we also take into account factors affecting skill development after initial formal education, such as occupation and skill use at home. Results: We firstly find a high degree of heterogeneity of skills across countries for equivalent education categories. Secondly, we find skill similarities for equivalent education categories classified at different broad education levels, sometimes even breaking the hierarchical order of 'higher education entails higher competencies'. Conclusion: We conclude that ISCED levels cannot be taken as a cross-nationally comparable proxy for human capital in terms of literacy skills, and that education has to be harmonized in a substantively more meaningful way in future adult literacy surveys.

Mastery of literacy skills in the language(s) of the host country is considered a key element for the successful integration of immigrants. The current paper focuses on possibly one of the most challenging aspects of the issues of linguistic integration of immigrants, i.e., literacy acquisition by "low-literate" adult immigrants in a "multilingual" environment such as Luxembourg. It documents Luxembourg's current state of literacy education policies and practices with regard to low-literate adult L2 learners. Also, it contains a participatory observation on a French literacy course in Luxembourg in order to look into the actual implementation and effectiveness of such courses in more detail. In doing so, we look into the relevant policies and practices of two other multilingual countries, i.e., Canada and Belgium, in order to situate the present practices of Luxembourg within larger contexts and provide insights into how to promote better policy and education options for low-literate adult immigrants in Luxembourg.

The implementation of authentic learning elements at education institutions in five countries, eight online courses in total, is examined in this paper. The International Virtual Benchmarking Project (2009-2010) applied the elements of authentic learning developed by Herrington and Oliver (2000) as criteria to evaluate authenticity. Twelve teachers in four benchmarking pairs applied these elements to compare practices and identify development challenges in their online courses. The results indicate multiple roles and perspectives and scaffolding were the most strongly implemented elements. Collaborative construction of knowledge was implemented weakly. Development challenges were identified, such as continuous evaluation in authentic assessment. The project raised teachers' awareness of cultural background as a factor affecting views on authentic e-learning. Differences in the culture code of e-learning among Finland, Korea, Canada, Belgium and UK are items to consider when developing multicultural learning. (Contains 1 table.)

While there is a considerable body of literature that presents the results of citation analysis studies, most researchers do not provide enough detail in their methodology to reproduce the study, nor do they provide rationale for methodological decisions. In this paper, we review the methodologies used in 34 recent articles that present a "user study" citation analysis with a goal of informing collection management. We describe major themes and outliers in the methodologies and discuss factors that require careful thought and analysis. We also provide a guide to considerations for citation analysis studies, so that researchers can make informed decisions.

This paper reports results from two studies aimed at examining whether perception of social acceptance and actual social acceptance differ according to the presence of an illusion of scholastic incompetence. Results of both studies conducted in Belgium and in Quebec (respectively 179 and 543 participants) show that children's illusion of scholastic incompetence is linked to a negative perception of social acceptance. However, according to the evaluation by peers, social acceptance of those children is similar to the others. This suggests a generalization of the negative bias of self-evaluation to both academic and social domains. The discussion proposes further variables that could improve the understanding of the origin of the illusion of incompetence. (Contains 4 tables.)

Organised medicine in a number of advanced industrial countries resisted the post-war trend toward more state involvement in the funding and organisation of medical care. While there were eight doctors' strikes during the peak of reform efforts in the 1960s, two of the most prolonged and bitter struggles took place in Canada and Belgium. This comparative analysis of the two strikes highlights the philosophy, motives, and strategies of organised medicine in resisting state-led reform efforts. Although historical and institutional contexts in the two countries differed, organised medicine in Canada and Belgium thought and responded in very similar ways to the perceived threat of medical insurance reform. While the perception of who won and who lost the respective doctors' strikes differed, the ultimate impact on the trajectory of public healthcare on the medical profession was remarkably similar. In both countries, the strike would have a long-standing impact on future reform efforts, particularly efforts to reform physician remuneration in order to facilitate more effective primary healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]