This article addresses whether the introduction of end-of-course, linear General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examinations changed the socio-economic equity gap in England. The GCSE is a national examination offered in a wide range of subjects and taken by almost the entire 16-year-old age cohort. Between the years 2007 and 2014, it…

Standardized tests like the ACT® provide a common basis for comparison of students across schools and states and have been a key point of consideration in postsecondary admissions for over 60 years. Research has shown that, in general, test preparation has a small but positive effect on standardized test scores. In this study, we focused on how…

Recent research has documented the academic disadvantage of low social class students, whose performance is impaired by competitive educational practices. Across 2 experiments, we examined whether the pursuit of performance-approach goals (aiming to outperform others) favors the emergence of this achievement gap. We first manipulated low versus…

This paper studies the current differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students and explores the mechanism from the individual/family and school/society perspectives. The results show significant differences in expectations between rural and urban junior high school students for going on to higher education. In addition,…

Current understanding of how culture relates to the development of children's gender-related peer preferences is limited. To investigate the role of societal acceptance of gender nonconformity, this study compared children from China and Thailand. Unlike China and other cultures where the conceptualization of gender as binary is broadly accepted,…

Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…

One of the specificities of French higher education is that there is no single higher education system but two compartmentalised and hierarchical higher education systems comprising (1) universities and (2) "grande école" higher education institutions. Competing for a place in the latter requires that students have succeeded in…

This article will focus on inequalities for migrants which are (re)produced by the promise of equality through citizenship and settlement test regimes. I theorize the links between language and borders by drawing on scholarship on security before offering an analysis of language border proliferation. Drawing on other studies and my own work, I…

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in…

This paper focuses on the concept of intersectionality, which has been used to account for multiple forms of identity and inequality. It argues that intersectionality is a powerful theoretical lens that could be used in analyzing language teachers' identities and their various contexts. It is also deeply connected to an orientation and…

In the last decades, agroecological and permacultural initiatives and organizations have grown. These initiatives attend to notions of food sovereignty and alternative models of agricultural production. The confluence of different actors and social initiatives through which experiences and knowledge of cultivating food are shared, and new ones are…

Recent calls for the decolonization of the academy demand recognition for diverse canons of knowledge. Asia's economic ascent also imparts rising confidence among Asian scholars and institutions to promote indigenous knowledge. While these global calls for emancipation are invigorating, decolonial scholarship is prone to sterile theorization,…

The past 50 years have witnessed a growing presence of critical theory within different social science academic departments across the western world. The joint existence of a theory committed to exposing and criticizing various inequalities of the social order within academic institutions based on traditional hierarchies and prestigious…

This research investigates a cohort of bilingual Chinese teachers' use of a multimodal approach in their Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teaching. The data include the participants' CFL teaching practices and their reflections on multimodal teaching as recorded in their theses and a focus group discussion. The theoretical underpinning of this…

International travel has long been considered a key pedagogical strategy for global learning. Yet very little is known about whether study-abroad experiences increase students' awareness of the impact of tourism as a global phenomenon. In this study, we assessed students' learning through a content analysis of their journals and final essays from…