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Purpose: As a borrowed concept, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education holds limited relevance in many country contexts. This study investigates how school administrators in Turkey view STEM education from three dimensions: (a) their understanding of STEM education, (b) their experiences of STEM implementations, and (c) their perception of their roles in STEM implementation. Design/Approach/Methods: This phenomenological study analyzes the perceptions of school principals working in prominent high schools in Turkey. Findings: The findings indicate that there are gaps in STEM implementation at both the conceptual level and the school level, including epistemological issues, infrastructural gaps, mismatch with overall organizational culture, and knowledge and skill gaps. Despite efforts to integrate STEM education into educational practices, significant deficiencies are making it an unrealistic practice in Turkey. Originality/Value: While the literature on STEM education is expanding, a few empirical studies focus on school management in relation to STEM education. Arguably, despite promising to transform science and mathematics teaching, STEM education appears to have limited relevance to science and mathematics teaching in Turkey--rendering it yet another example of concept and policy borrowing in education.

Purpose: This review aims to discuss the meaning of organizational change, change dynamics, and the current state of debates on organizational change in schools. The core purpose of this review is not only to restate the literature on organizational change in schools but also to challenge the current theoretical understanding of change in schools by rising the new perspectives on change in schools. Design/Approach/Methods: As part of this effort, we discuss the dominant perspectives of change, forces of change, and illustrate the interventions adopted by different school systems to deal with the need of change. Findings: The literature on change in schools suggests that, parallel to the change intervention in other organizational settings, largely fail. Falling short of intended goals in change interventions is not a simple methodological problem but rather an ontological issue of how we perceive change and organization. Parallel to the arguments in the literature, continuous change has been indicated as an alternative perspective to planned change. Finally, leadership has been indicated as a key driver of organizational change. Originality/Value: The review discusses applicability of continuous change and elaborate on alternative leadership approaches to guide continuous change in schools.

Higher education (HE) in the changing context requires leadership training and development as a vital element for university governance and innovation. While there are several theoretical frameworks on leadership development, most of them are outcome evaluation-oriented. Consequently, there is a lack of a leadership development model which emphasises both design process and expected outcomes. In addition to this, HE leadership development has been gradually transformed toward complexity and flexibility due to the volatile external environment of the 21st century. Thus, instead of having a development programme that simply focuses on individual skill enhancement, a comprehensive leadership development programme that equally fosters leaders' competencies (leader development) and develops collective leadership (leadership development) is increasingly utilised. Unfortunately, previous theoretical frameworks fail to take into consideration these new features. The main aim of this study was to develop a comprehensive theoretical model for academic leadership development (ALD) that promotes both leader development and leadership development. In the present study, 24 academic leaders, lecturers and researchers from five European and six Chinese HE institutions co-designed the ALD model. The constructed model consists of four main dimensions: theoretical core, types of training and providers, training format and ultimate goals. The results contribute to developing, promoting and enhancing leadership development in academic settings.

The internationalization of higher education (IHE) has become a key policy issue for governments, a research field for scholars, a strategic priority for universities, and a career orientation for administrative staff. Yet, with recent social, political, and economic trends heavily embellished by globalization and neoliberalism, the term IHE has resulted in conflicting perspectives. Although there are numerous analyses on IHE, these analyses seldom focus on conflicts among different constituencies of the university (leaders, academics, administrative staff). This study aims at exploring the perspectives of key constituencies on the common conception and practice of IHE. The study was designed as basic qualitative research in which the data set was collected from four flagship universities in Türkiye. The results indicated a variety of academic, economic, political, and socio-cultural conflicts by different constituencies. These conflicts are mostly related to the association of IHE with neoliberal values while the progressive values remain invisible.

Higher education (HE) provides a unique opportunity to accomplish social and economic integration and mitigate the impact of displacement for forcibly displaced migrants (FDMs) in the long run. Against this backdrop, the purpose of the study is to explore the HE experiences of Syrian FDMs in Turkey. Utilizing snowball sampling, 24 FDMs in Turkey were interviewed. The results suggested that for the FDMs, HE was a mechanism for reconstructing their lives. However, they faced several challenges before and after access to HE. These challenges emanated from the education system itself due to the difficulties in accessing official documents from the home country, managing the admission process of different universities and language barriers as well as the broader social, economic, and cultural systems (e.g., public pushback). Concerning the challenges rooted in its education system, Turkey exhibited a dynamic approach to dealing with the problems and opening space for Syrian FDMs in HE. However, the challenges resulting from discrimination cause Syrian FDMs to question their sense of belonging stemming from cultural, geographical, and religious proximity to Turkey and reexamine their intentions of staying in Turkey forever.

This paper explores elements of open education within the context of higher education. After an introduction to the origins of open education and its theoretical foundations, the topics of open and distance learning, international education issues in open education, open educational practices and scholarship, open educational resources, MOOCs, prior learning accreditation and recognition, and learner characteristics are considered, following the framework of macro, meso, and micro levels of research in open and distance learning. Implications for future research at the macro, meso, and micro levels are then provided. [The authors of this article belong to The COER Group, Center for Open Education Research (COER), University of Oldenburg, Germany.]

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "'Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures--EduArc,'" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries' political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country's context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education cannot be put into practice without considering institutional contexts, which differ not only globally but also within the same country. Each institutional context provides educators with opportunities or limitations where Open Educational Practices (OEP) and OER for teaching and learning are involved. As part of a broader research project, and as a follow-up to national perspectives, an international comparison was conducted, based on institutional cases of nine different higher education systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey). Aspects regarding the availability of infrastructure and institutional policies for OER, as well as the existence of measures directed at OER quality assurance and at the promotion of the development and use of OER were covered. The resulting theoretical contribution sheds light on an international comparative view of OER and points towards country-specific trends, as well as differences among institutions. These aspects could provide an impetus for the development of institutional guidelines and measures. In line with international literature on the topic, recommendations are derived to promote/enhance the use of OER in teaching and learning in higher education at the institutional level.

This paper explores faculty's perspectives and use of open educational resources (OER) and their repositories across different countries by conducting a multiple case study to find similarities and differences between academics' awareness, perceptions and use of OER, as well as examining related aspects of institutional policy and quality that may influence individual views. Data were collected through nine expert reports on each country studied (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Turkey) and were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using thematic coding. Findings show the impact on individual OER adoption with regard to the individual control of diverse factors by faculty members; of institutional policies and quality measures on the externally determined factors (by the institution); and of institutional professional development and provision of incentives in more internally determined factors (by the faculty members themselves). These findings carry implications for higher education institutions around the world in their attempt to boost OER adoption by faculty members.

The pressure on the universities to take a visible place in the rankings has caused anachronistic policies and practices in evaluating the performance of universities. The value attributed to the rankings results in policies prioritizing the criteria imposed by rankings while evaluating the performance of academics, which successively causes several issues in assessing the real impact of the academic practices. Considering these criticisms and concerns about the impact assessment, this study aimed at exploring the perceptions of academics about the impact of their academic practices. Adapting the interpretive phenomenological design, the data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 participants from the field of education in five flagship universities of Turkey. The findings of the study revealed that, although impact assessment understanding of the academics and their institutions go parallel with covering the practices around three basic missions of the university, many activities go in between without recognition by the same impact assessment practices. Interestingly, the academics exhibited their commitment to institutional policies in impact assessment practices; however, they exhibit resentment for the same policies due to failing to recognize the localized mission of the university, threatening the deeply rooted values of the academy, fouling the academy with ethical violations, and causing further detachment between academic practices and societal needs. The concerns and criticism of the current impact assessment are likely to alter the priorities of the universities and push them to adapt an impact assessment, which is less relevant to the local needs of their societies.

Decades of research suggest that the role of leaders in mitigating the negative impact of social and economic problems on the students is highly contentious one and more analyses in different cultural contexts are necessary to clarify the role of leadership in disadvantaged school settings. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of leadership in resetting equitable and excellent educational experiences in two primary schools located in a socio-economically disadvantaged urban setting in Turkey. Multiple case study was identified as the design of the study, and two primary schools located in the same neighborhood were identified as the cases of the study. The results drawn from the multiple cases showed that leadership has a limited capacity to create socially just educational provisions and ensure excellence in schools' academic practices. Parallel to the analyses in the sociology of education, sociological structures are more critical for the disadvantaged students in benefiting from educational provisions. As a result, leadership as an intervention mechanism must be empowered to set ties with other public services in disadvantaged schools.

Theorizing on the Affective Events Theory this study aims at (1) exploring the relationships among trust, change-related positive and negative affect, commitment to change, and job satisfaction and, (2) investigating their impacts on the change implementation behaviors of teachers in the second-order educational change context. The study was designed as a correlational one and took place in 85 public schools randomly selected through stratified cluster sampling from 13 school districts in Ankara, Turkey. Structural Equation Modeling was used to analyze the data which were collected from a sample of 663 public school teachers. The results verified the superior role of trust in top management in shaping change-related reactions rather than work-related one and documented the unique roles of positive and negative change-related affect in constructing teachers' change and work-related attitudes. The results also revealed that affective and attitudinal responses of change receivers are influential in predicting the degree of their change implementation behaviors. These findings indicate the need for building trust at both school and system levels while investing in positive change-related affect for more desired outcomes of educational change interventions.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student achievement and a set of school-level variables, including distributed leadership, academic optimism, teacher collaboration and enabling school structure. The study was designed as correlational research. A Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis was conducted with a data set collected from 23,053 students and 426 teachers from 40 randomly selected public schools in Turkey. The data were collected using previously developed scales and student achievement data from the Ministry of National Education. HLM results revealed that two dimensions of academic optimism -- namely collective efficacy and trust in clients -- and hindering bureaucracy significantly predicted between-school differences in student achievement. The tested HLM model explained 60% of the variation in student achievement across schools. The results revealed that student achievement is shaped by school-level variables that are tied to the structural and functional characteristics of schools in Turkey. However, these school characteristics are rooted in the societal structures and cultural characteristics of the country. Hence, it is concluded that a reinterpretation of common school-level variables used to predict student achievement in the contexts of different countries is necessary.

In many countries, "open and distance education" is perceived as a way to meet the growing need for higher education. This paper explores the development of online and distance education in three countries that are still a white spot on the landscape of international distance education research although they have implemented elaborated distance education systems: Turkey, Russia and Saudi-Arabia. In order to understand the current state of distance education systems in the three countries, their respective systems are described from a historical perspective, compared in regard to their organization, important institutions for open and distance education and current developments. This comparative analysis directs the focus on little investigated education systems and contributes to an enhanced understanding of their past, present, and future.

Turkey possess one of the most vibrant educational systems in the World. This study specifically aims at revealing Turkish school principals' perceptions about the large-scale changes imposed by the Ministry of Education and the strategies they follow for coping with these changes. The study was designed as a generic qualitative study. Twenty principals from different schools at different levels were identified through snowball sampling and semi-structured interviews were conducted with each of them. The decoupling between change interventions and the needed change, inappropriate change implementation process, the passive role of the school principals in the design phase of change interventions are some of the major challenges that school principals encounter. The passivity of the principals during design phase put them into a state of reluctant activeness to find out resources, create readiness and adopt a mediating role between top authority and the teachers in order to implement the imposed changes.

Purpose: Drawing on and theorizing continuous change, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the antecedents of continuous change behavior in schools. Relying on conceptual discussions about organizational change (OC), three sets of variables including context (workload, participatory management, trust), process (knowledge sharing, social interaction) and outcome (job satisfaction) were identified as antecedents of continuous change. Design/methodology/approach: To test the predictive value of the antecedents for continuous change, a correlational study was design and structural equation modeling was used to test the direct and indirect relationships among study variables. The data were collected from a sample of 648 primary and secondary public school teachers. Findings: The results showed that context, outcome, and process factors function through direct and indirect paths to contribute to the prediction of continuous change behavior. Moreover, knowledge sharing either directly or indirectly played a central role in the prediction of continuous change behavior. Research limitations/implications: These results suggested that a widened knowledge base provides the basis for ongoing experimentation with, alteration, and modification of work categories in schools. Providing such factors in schools seems to facilitate the ongoing improvement of work practices in schools, even in the absence of a planned change intervention. Originality/value: This study is one of the first empirical studies tested the predictive value of antecedents of continuous change in school organizational context, where OC is the norm and change failures are very common.

Decades of research form an extensive body of knowledge on International Collaboration in Research (IRC). However, experiential perspectives of the operative core (the academics) in research collaboration, remained relatively uninvestigated. Besides, explorations on how academics in peripheral countries accomplish IRC are still very limited. Finally, the representation of social sciences is also limited compared to natural sciences and engineering. The current study aims to explore the factors facilitating and inhibiting IRC from the lived experiences of academics in Iran and Türkiye comparatively. The study was designed as a dual phenomenology, one study in each country. In each of the countries, 20 academics in social sciences participated in the study. The results suggest that similar generic forces motivate the researchers for IRC in Türkiye and Iran at the individual level, parallel to international literature. However, macro‐level factors surrounding higher education ecologies including national‐level support schemes, geopolitical dynamics, and the country's foreign policy play an important role in determining the IRC cluster to connect with and the mode of collaboration in these two peripheral countries. The role of macro‐level political factors in IRC patterns suggests that although individual researchers intend to attach to the core cluster (USA, UK, Germany, France) of IRC at the global level, macro‐level factors push researchers in the periphery for more periphery‐periphery collaboration, which may strengthen the growing regionalization in IRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, internationalization within higher education has emerged as a distinct field for practice and research. However, there are few meta-analyses of how the research trends and foci of this topic have evolved and shifted over time. This article analyzes the content of the "Journal of Studies in International Education" ("JSIE"), a central outlet for internationalization research, thus shedding light on overarching developments and trends within the field. In this investigation, the text-mining tool Leximancer™ is used to generate concept maps based on the titles and abstracts of all 406 scientific articles published in the "JSIE" between 1997 and 2016 (first issue). Four major developmental waves in this research area are revealed: delineation of the field (1997-2001), institutionalization and management of internationalization (2002-2006), consequences of internationalization: student needs and support structures (2007-2011), and currently, moving from the institutional to the transnational context of internationalization (2012-2016). The results show how the meaning of the concept has evolved to encapsulate several other related concepts in research on higher education, while reporting practices toward internationalization at individual, institutional, and national levels.

Research on the patterns of international student mobility and the dynamics shaping these patterns has been dominated by studies reflecting a Western orientation, discourse, and understanding. Considering political, economic, cultural, historical, and ecological factors, this study argues that international student mobility is not only an issue of the economically developed, politically stable, and academically advanced Western world but also one that involves countries with different economic, political, and academic characteristics. Taking into account various theoretical orientations, this study argues that political, economic, cultural, and historical factors have led to the emergence of non-traditional destinations for international students; these countries are labeled as emergent regional hubs. In order to empirically test this, a social network analysis was conducted on a worldwide dataset representing 229 countries. The findings evidenced the strong position of traditional destinations for international students. However, the results also suggest the rise of several regional hubs, which are undergoing internationalization processes in different forms and with different rationales. The mobility patterns in emerging regional hubs deviate from those in traditional destinations, which fundamentally change the nature of internationalization in this context.

Educational policy borrowing has become rather common in our globalised world. However, the literature lacks contextual criteria that may be employed by researchers and policy makers to assess the correspondence of a particular policy to the local context of a borrowing system. Based on a secondary analysis of documents and research reports, this paper describes the process of policy borrowing in the Israeli and Turkish educational systems. Discrepancies were found between the basic qualities of the borrowed policies and the contextual features and processes that characterise each educational system. The lack of congruency appears to be even deeper in centralised structures where the act of policy setting is done by top-level policy makers who are isolated from local school circumstances. Threshold criteria referring to fundamental considerations during decision making are offered and their theoretical and practical implications for centralised structures are discussed.

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to discern the issues pertaining to different dimensions of internationalization from the perspectives of both foreign and local students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 foreign, and 13 local students. The results show that there is a dissonance between policy makers and implementers, and the students themselves on "what a truly international higher education organization" in fact is. Moreover, the results suggest that asymmetrical aims of local and foreign students endanger fulfillment of the academic, social, and cultural rationales behind internationalization. Fulfilling the rationales of internationalization depends not only the adaptability of foreign students to local conditions but also on the priorities, choices and level of commitment of local students, administrative staff, and faculty members to the imperatives of internationalization. (Contains 2 tables.)

This study analyses the functioning of a school as a social system in an atypical context with the purpose of generating propositions to tackle educational problems confronted by socially and economically disadvantaged groups attending these schools. Adopting the constructivist grounded theory, the analysis suggests that there is a kind of "vicious cycle" in the functioning of this atypical school, which adversely affects the school system. Breaking the vicious cycle involves five basic propositions: (1) making school a better place than students' homes, (2) overcoming the enduring difficulties of working in an atypical school, (3) multiplying learning opportunities, (4) prompting parents to assume more responsibility, (5) locating leadership that makes a difference. These propositions clarify the significance of informal subsystems, school community and the wider environment along with their enabling and blocking effects on a disadvantaged school system. Parallel to other studies on disadvantaged schools, the study highlights the need to refine the orthodox view of the concept of formal education and school, as well as the role of school principal, teachers and parents affiliated with atypical schools.

Theorizing on the role of teacher attitudes in change effectiveness, this study examined the predictive value of context (trust), process (social interaction, participative management and knowledge sharing) and outcome (job satisfaction and workload perception) variables for cognitive, emotional and intentional readiness of teachers for change. The study was designed as predictive correlational study. Data were collected from 1,649 elementary teachers. Hierarchical linear regression analysis results indicated that background and context variables are weak predictors of readiness for change (RFC), while job outcome and process variables emerged as stronger predictors of RFC. The central role of job satisfaction and trust in predicting RFC suggests that readiness cannot be limited to times of change; rather, it is closely related to total experiences of teachers on their job. As a result, for a more effective management of teachers' attitudes towards change leadership needs to hold a broader temporal and contextual understanding rather than demonstrating limited interventions during times of change.

This study aims to explore the factors contributing to the perceived preparedness of graduate students for responsible conduct of research (RCR). A convergent mixed design was used, and both interview and quantitative data were collected, analyzed, and integrated to understand the role of individual and institutional factors in the perceived RCR preparedness of graduate students. Both interview and quantitative data converge on the role of mentor instruction and institutional policies in developing RCR preparedness. The findings also suggested that greater exposure of students to ethical norms and practices is critical in nurturing RCR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims at building a theoretical base for continuous change in education and using this base to test the mediating roles of two key contextual variables, knowledge sharing and trust, in the relationship between the distributed leadership perceptions and continuous change behaviours of teachers. Data were collected from 687 public school teachers. The results showed that the combined effect of knowledge sharing and faculty trust in principal mediated the relationship between teachers' distributed leadership perceptions and continuous change behaviours. The directions of the coefficients of the relationships between the independent variable and the dependent variable suggested that higher distributed leadership perception leads to increased knowledge sharing and trust in principal, which in turn was associated with greater continuous change behaviours. The study showed that school systems have an extensive capacity for self-improvement, even in the absence of a pre-developed change plan.

Readiness for change is one of the constructs that fosters positive behaviours, attitudes and thinking towards new adjustments on the part of employees. As one of the internal context variables, trust acts as a catalyst for supportive behaviours in times of change and uncertainty by reducing change related resistance and stress. Based on this understanding, this study explores the predictive value of organizational trust for cognitive, emotional and intentional readiness for change among a group of primary and secondary school teachers in Turkey. The data from 603 public school teachers were collected using the Omnibus T-Scale and Readiness for Change-Cognitive Emotional Intentional Scale. Taking each dimension of readiness for change as a criterion variable, three sets of predictors were defined for three separate hierarchical regression analyses. The results provided empirical evidence concerning the relationship between intentional, emotional and cognitive readiness for change and perceived faculty trust in colleagues and in the principal after statistically controlling for the school level and teacher demographics at primary and secondary level public schools. The results were interpreted within the scope of the current literature as well as structural and functional characteristics of Turkish education system.