This concluding article aims to pull together the analysis undertaken in the preceding articles in this special issue. By sketching an overview of the university reforms and developments revealed in the sectoral articles, it draws out the trends of university restructuring in East Asia. It then projects the significances of these trends in terms…

This study reassessed the extent to which socio-economic background, gender, and region endure as sources of educational inequality in Canada. The analysis utilized the 28,000 student Canadian sample from the data set of the OECD's 2003 "Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)". Results, consistent with previous findings,…

China, the same as her Western counterpart countries, has been experiencing educational decentralization over the last two decades. Such a policy shift, however, brings with it issues of "managerialism," "accountability" and "competition," all of which are becoming part of the common language in the educational…

Purpose: This paper aims to give a picture of the entrepreneurship education programs currently provided in Hong Kong secondary schools, to present teachers' evaluations of the effectiveness of the programs offered, and to point out the factors that hinder the development of entrepreneurship education in Hong Kong secondary schools.…

Purpose: This paper aims to trace the evolution of two initiatives--the direct subsidy scheme and independent schools initiative--their genesis, rationale, current form and take-up rate. It also analyses them as education reforms in terms of policymaking dynamics. The very notion of the term "privatization" will be examined.…

Researchers can evaluate learning by using direct and indirect assessment. Although there are various ways to apply these approaches, two common techniques are pretests and posttests (direct assessment), in which students demonstrate mastery of topics or skills, and the use of knowledge surveys (indirect assessment). The present authors used these…

Constituents often criticize business schools for failing to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of how business organizations function. Business schools have responded to the mandate with attempts to integrate discipline-specific functional knowledge into a coherent understanding of the evolving business organization. Successful…

Psychometricians continue to introduce new approaches to setting cut scores for educational assessments in an attempt to improve on current methods. In this paper we describe the Item-Descriptor (ID) Matching method, a method based on IRT item mapping. In ID Matching, test content area experts match items (i.e., their judgments about the knowledge…

The Western China University Graduates Volunteer Teaching Program (VTP) is a government-oriented social movement aimed at the advancement of social equity and the establishment of a harmonious society. University students, as the undertakers of volunteer teaching, serve as a vital part of this program. The participation of university students has…

Since passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2002, state departments of education across the U.S. have been busy creating or modifying school accountability systems to meet NCLB guidelines. Ultimately, NCLB seeks to have all public school students proficient in English/Language Arts and mathematics by 2014. To identify schools…

The Supplemental Educational Services (SES) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 creates an opportunity for eligible students to receive free effective academic support services outside of the regular school day. The SES provision is relatively new and little information is currently known about the efficacy of such services. The…

In the United States, when English language learners (ELLs) are tested, they are usually tested in English and their limited English proficiency is a potential cause of construct-irrelevant variance. When such irrelevancies affect test scores, inaccurate interpretations of ELLs' knowledge, skills, and abilities may occur. In this article, we…

This paper describes three multigrade school reforms in Latin America: (1) Colombia's "Escuela Nueva", (2) Guatemala's "Nueva Escuela Unitaria", and (3) Chile's MECE-Rural. Each reform endowed primary teachers and students with special training and instructional materials, and encouraged new kinds of instruction in rural…

Since the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, public education has been high on the national agenda. The nation's need for human capital and the need to provide equality of educational opportunity to all children and youth without regard to their race, ethnicity, or social status are the two needs that then framed education…

What is the nature of latent predictors that facilitate diagnostic classification? Rupp and Templin (this issue) suggest that these predictors should be multidimensional, categorical variables that can be combined in various ways. Diagnostic Classification Models (DCM) typically use multiple categorical predictors to classify respondents into…