New Public Management (NPM)-inspired higher education (HE) governance has become increasingly topical in recent years. However, while existing research provides an overall understanding of relevant changes, it does not offer a complete analysis of complex governance and falls prey to deterministic and relatively narrow ideological impositions.…

This article explores how complex globalization processes play out in early childhood education (ECE) in Denmark. The article builds on two concepts of globalization: First, we understand globalization as the ways in which transnational educational policy discourses characterized by neoliberal pedagogical values affect national and local policies.…

Liberal Studies (LS), a high-stakes senior secondary school subject in Hong Kong, has evoked widespread debate in recent years concerning the curriculum content about Mainland China. Highlighting the deregulated textbook policy on this subject as adopted by the Hong Kong Education Bureau (EDB), this paper compares how specific socio-political…

The concept of educationalization refers to the government's tendency to impose heavy responsibilities to solve social problems on the school system. In this paper, after briefly reviewing the concept of educationalization, I will show that it is a ubiquitous phenomenon in contemporary Japan through three cases. This will prove that school reforms…

Increased attention on "what works" in education has led to an emphasis on developing policy from evidence based on comparing and combining a particular statistical summary of intervention studies: the standardised effect size. It is assumed that this statistical summary provides an estimate of the educational impact of interventions and…

In addition to the longstanding threat posed by narrow economism, faith in the possibility of peace and progress through democratic politics -- central to the humanistic vision of the 1972 Faure report -- today faces additional challenges. These challenges include the ascendancy of neurocentrism in the global policyscape. Whereas the effects of…

Cost-effectiveness analysis is rarely used in education. When it is used, it often fails to meet methodological standards, especially with regard to cost measurement. Although there are occasional criticisms of these failings, we believe that it is useful to provide a listing of the more common concerns and how they might be addressed. Based upon…

The article is a critical sociological analysis of current transnational practices on creating comparable measurements of dropout and completion in higher education and the consequences for the conditions of scientific knowledge production on the topic. The analysis revolves around questions of epistemological, methodological and symbolic types…

In this study, we applied decision trees (DT) to extract a compact set of pedagogical decision-making rules from an original "full" set of 3,702 Reinforcement Learning (RL)- induced rules, referred to as the DT-RL rules and Full-RL rules respectively. We then evaluated the effectiveness of the two rule sets against a baseline Random…

Growing up in poverty increases youth risk for developing aggressive behavior problems which, in turn, are associated with a host of problematic outcomes, including school drop-out, substance use, mental health problems, and delinquency. In part, this may be due to exposure to adverse school contexts that create socialization influences supporting…

The OECD Survey of Adult Skills is the jewel in the crown of its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This paper argues that the findings and policy lessons from the project to date justify the high hopes which were placed in PIAAC when detailed planning for the project began in 2003. First, it presents a brief…

In Sweden, as in many other European countries, poor neighborhoods with ethnically diverse inhabitants and high crime rates have grown up around big cities in the last decades. We hypothesized that, compared with adolescents in advantaged neighborhoods, adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods would perceive their schools as relatively safe, due…

Findings from the fields of cognitive science and cognitive development propose a variety of evidence-based principles for improving learning. One such recommendation is that instead of having students practice solving long strings of problems on their own after a lesson, worked-out examples of problem solutions should be incorporated into…

This paper contributes to conversations about school, post-compulsory and further education policy by reporting findings from a three-year study with disaffected students who have been referred to special "behaviour"schools. Contrary to popular opinion, our research finds that these "ignorant yobs" do value education and know…

The article discusses comparative organizational studies, focusing on change in higher education institutions, and in particular (but not only) on studies that compare organizations in different national settings. It first presents and discusses different approaches to comparison based on a couple of typologies that have been developed to identify…