The present state and future trends of blended learning in workplace learning settings across five countries

This article reports survey findings related to the current status and future trends of blended learning in workplace learning settings from diverse cultures. This particular survey was conducted of 674 training and human resource development professionals from five different countries, mostly from the Asia-Pacific region (i.e., China, South Korea, Taiwan, United States, and the United Kingdom). The results show that blended learning will become a popular delivery method in the future of workplace learning not only in Western countries but also in Asian countries. Still, the respondents indicated that there were several barriers to blended learning; one of the most noticeable issues was their lack of understanding of blended learning. There is a pressing need, therefore, to provide practitioners with guidance on how to implement blended learning in their organizations. Additionally, among the countries surveyed, the results of the present study revealed that there were significant differences in the current level of adoption of blended learning, the respondents’ attitudes toward and perceptions of blended learning, and the content areas taught by blended learning. Respondents’ predictions related to emerging instructional strategies, technologies, and evaluation techniques for blended learning are also reported.     

Learning how teachers learn in underdeveloped countries

This paper argues that practitioners and researchers in underdeveloped countries should organize themselves into teams to find and share research and experience-based information about factors that influence the quality of teaching. The teams would compile locally-developed knowledge about three topics: What teaching practices are most effective in classrooms? How do teachers who use those practices learn them? How and what should teacher training institutions teach teachers so that they will use effective practices? The paper briefly reviews published research to argue that the answers to the latter two questions are not yet fully developed, and especially not for underdeveloped countries.     

The representation of emotion knowledge across development

The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 female; 10% Hispanic, 30% Asian, 2.5% Black, 57.5% White) were recruited from a Midwestern city (2019–2020), and sorted emotion cues in a spatial arrangement method that assesses emotion knowledge without reliance on emotion vocabulary. Using supervised and unsupervised analyses, the study found evidence for continuities and gradual changes in children's emotion knowledge compared to adults. Emotion knowledge develops through an incremental learning process in which children change their representations using combinations of factors—particularly valence—that are weighted differently across development.     

Instructional leadership structures across five university departments

Higher Education - In this paper, we investigate leadership related to the instruction of lower division undergraduate courses at five university mathematics departments with strong calculus...     

The development of research-oriented learning in five european countries

The demand of research-oriented learning in higher education which was raised in various European countries at the end of the 1960s focused above all on institutional feasibilities. In this article a broader view on the subject is given. Research-oriented learning is examined both as part of students’ abilities and as a special learning style. The empirical data were gathered by means of a scale developed within an international longitudinal study on student socialisation. The findings show effects of selection as well as of socialisation. They indicate heterogeneity between main fields at the beginning of study and continuous development, throughout the course of time spent attending university. This trend is similar for four of the five countries studied — Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Poland. The fifth country Yugoslavia proved to be an exception. But in all five countries the level reached by students remains unsatisfactory in view of the university’s objectives. The factors determining the development of a research-oriented learning style, in addition to the field of study, are motivation and gender. Throughout their studies women in all countries remain at a lower average level. This in particular, would have to be considered in a renewed discussion of the topic.     

Everyday environmental education: five practices of ecologically minded teachers

Abstract

In this article, I report the findings from a qualitative study involving seven ecologically minded teachers who participated in a Critical Friends Group. Ecologically minded teachers are not necessarily trained or required to teach about environmental issues, yet they do so because of their values and beliefs. The participants shared the following five practices: exposing externalities, emphasizing active learning, providing multiple perspectives, asking critical questions, and collaborating with others. I describe these practices and make recommendations for future research.     

五国职教体系的比较

本选择加拿大、英国、德国、韩国、中国这五个有代表性的国家，对其职教体系从宏观上进行比较．目的是为了“洋为中用”。通过分析和比较．对职业教育的层次设置、职业教育与普通教育的沟通机制、职业教育与就业的关系、职业教育的凭与职业资格证书的联系、各级职业教育的学生分流以及职业教育的凭性质等问题。提出了一些值得我们学习和借鉴的观点。     

Early gender test score gaps across OECD countries

The results reported in this paper contribute to the debate about gender skill gaps in at least three ways. First, we document the large differences in early gender gaps across developed countries using a large scale, modern, representative data source. Second, we show that countries with pro-female sorting, countries that place girls in classes with higher than average scores have smaller gender test score gaps, at least in math. Third, we show that the degree of academic tracking is correlated with observed gender gaps across developed countries.     

Britain's contribution to the training of mathematics teachers in other countries

Despite differences in both the nature and scale of the problems facing teacher trainers in developing countries compared to those in Britain, British collaboration is still widely sought in mathematics teacher education in such countries. Various forms that such assistance may take are described, with reference to specific examples from a number of countries. Three mathematics projects in which British aid has been involved ‐ in the West Indies, Southern Africa and India ‐ illustrate how in‐service teacher education is an integral component of such projects.     

Recruitment of rural teachers in developing countries: an economic analysis

Monetary and non-monetary incentives for rural teacher recruitment are a prominent feature of developing-country education systems. Despite the widespread use of incentives, there is little theoretical or empirical evidence on their effectiveness. This paper interprets incentive policies within the framework of the economic theory of compensating differentials. The discussion clarifies the implicit assumptions of incentive policies and aids in organizing further empirical work on their effectiveness. Existing evidence on compensating differentials, mainly in the United States, shows that teachers tend to trade off monetary wages against non-monetary aspects of their jobs, such as geographic location and class size.     

中外教师合作教学研究概况

总结了合作教学的起源及理论依据,从二语习得理论和行动研究层面回顾了合作教学的发展,概述了国内一些高校在英语专业基础课和非英语专业的大学英语教学中进行中外教师合作教学研究的成果,指出了目前研究中有待解决的问题,为今后的相关研究提供了方向。     

Training and education of teachers in higher education in developing countries

The article describes our experience and experiments in helping to develop a training programme for academic staff at Universiti Sains Malaysia and the model of staff training associated with this programme. This is used as a basis for proposals for a more general scheme of staff training for universities in the South East Asian region, a special feature of the proposals being the use of distance teaching and of individualised learning materials in teaching and learning in higher education. The ultimate aim of the scheme is to make the region independent of outside assistance.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Open University Conference on The Education of Adults at a Distance, Birmingham, 19–24 November, 1979.     

A comparison of work-related values of adolescents from five countries

This study examined different lists of values for commonality and the comparability of the frequency ofCareer Decision-Making System (CDM) value selections among samples in five countries. A convergence of work values appeared among the American value listings. Correlations showed substantial commonality of CDM value rankings between countries. Discussed was the CDM's methodology of value data collection and its use with clients.     

Gender differences in reading performance on documents across countries

Females are known to excel over males in most reading tasks, but notconsistently so in tasks that require processing information from maps,tables, charts and diagrams, so called `Documents'. The IEA ReadingLiteracy data provides possibilities to investigate gender differencesacross countries in such tasks in two age groups, 9-year-olds and14-year-olds. The general question about cultural influences vs. aninvariant pattern of gender differences is of great interest for genderresearch, and central in this study. The aim of the paper is to describeand analyze gender differences on Document tasks, and investigate if andhow the pattern of differences varies over countries. Another aim is todemonstrate the power of using a multivariate analysis technique bycontrasting it against traditional univariate approaches. The univariateanalysis indicates female advantage as the most common in the youngergroup and a mixed pattern in the older. The multivariate analysisindicate that Document tasks are not unidimensional, because bothgeneral and specific dimensions can be extracted from the raw scores.The traditional univariate analysis often disguised true patterns ofdifferences in the data, both in terms of country differences and interms of the direction of the gender differences. Raw score differencesbetween the genders proved to be due to differences in both general andpassage specific dimensions. Ten of the countries showed genderdifferences in both directions in the general dimension among9-year-olds, while an almost consistent pattern of female advantage wasfound among 14-years-olds. Many of the specific passage dimensionsturned out to favor either males or females. This complex pattern variedover both age groups and across countries, although commonalities in thepattern among subgroups of countries were common.     

发达国家高职院校聘任兼职教师的国际比较

发达国家在高等职业教育师资管理方面有两个突出的表现:一方面,极为重视高等职业教育师资的规格,主要体现在职业教育师资的专职化和培养培训的正规化;另一方面,强化教师聘任制度中的市场因素,主要体现在兼职教师的数量大量增加.本文就美国、德国、澳大利亚、法国、英国、日本等发达国家高职院校聘任兼职教师的情况进行一个国际比较,以期对我国高职院校兼职教师的聘任有所借鉴.     

Mathematical equivalence assessment: Measurement invariance across six countries

Within mathematics education research, there has been a strong focus on students’ understanding of mathematical equivalence because of its key role in the development of mathematics skills. One of the most frequently used tools to assess students’ understanding of equivalence has been the Mathematical Equivalence Assessment (MEA) (Rittle-Johnson et al., 2011). In this study, we investigate for the first time the cross-cultural measurement invariance of an adaptation of the MEA. This included a sample (N = 2760) of students aged 8–12 years old from China, England, New Zealand, South Korea, Turkey, and US to examine whether the same construct is being measured across all countries. Configural and partial scalar invariance was established for a two-factor, 11-item version of the adapted MEA. There were significant mean differences across countries, with students from China performing better and students from New Zealand performing worse than the rest of the sample.