PISA and high-performing education systems: explaining Singapore’s education success

Singapore’s remarkable performance in Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has placed it among the world’s high-performing education systems (HPES). In the literature on HPES, its ‘secret formula’ for education success is explained in terms of teacher quality, school leadership, system characteristics and educational reform. This article offers an alternative explanation for the education success of Singapore and, in so doing, questions the basic assertions of the HPES literature and, in particularly, the use of PISA results as the prime indicator of the educational performance of a school system. The explanation is informed by a historical perspective on the development of the Singapore education system and based upon a body of empirical findings on the nature of pedagogical practice in classrooms, both of which are vital for understanding the educational performance of Singapore’s education system. The article concludes by addressing the implications of this analysis for educational policy borrowing.     

Assessing collaborative work in a higher education blended learning context: strategies and students’ perceptions

This study examines students' views on a blended learning module developed and offered at the University of Aveiro. The paper presents the module and the strategies, tools, activities and assessment. In order to examine the effectiveness of the module, data were collected from reflections, postings and questionnaires. Findings document students’ opinions concerning the module, the activities and their learning. Students valued the module but expressed concerns in using the wiki tool, assessing collaborative work and in engaging in peer assessment activities. The results have practical implications for the design of collaborative activities and innovative assessment in blended learning environments.

Bewertung kollaborativer Arbeit in einem gemischten Hochschulbildungs‐Lernkontext: Strategien und Wahrnehmungen der Studenten

Diese Studie untersucht die Ansichten von Studenten auf einem gemischten Lern‐Modul, entwickelt und angeboten von der Universität Aveiro. Das Papier stellt das Modul und die Strategien, Tools, Aktivitäten und Bewertung vor. Um die Wirksamkeit des Moduls zu untersuchen, wurden die Daten von Reflexionen, Notizen und Fragebögen gesammelt. Die Ergebnisse dokumentieren die Meinungen über das Modul, ihre Aktivitäten und ihr Lernen. Studenten schätzten das Modul hatten aber Bedenken beim Wiki‐Tool, bezüglich des kooperativen Arbeitens, Bewertungen und Peer‐Bewertungs‐Aktivitäten. Die Ergebnisse haben praktische Folgen für das Design gemeinsamer Aktivitäten und innovative Bewertungen ?gemischter Lernumgebungen”.

L’évaluation du travail collaboratif dans un contexte d’enseignement universitaire mixte: le strategies et les perceptions des étudiants

La présente étude examine les opinions des étudiants sur un module d’apprentissage mixte (blended) mis au point et assuré à l’Université d’Aveiro. Cet article présente le module et les stratégies, les outils, les activités et l’évaluation. Pour déterminer l’efficacité de ce module, on a rassemblé des données à partir des réflexions, des envois et des questionnaires. Les éléments recueillis illustrent les opinions des étudiants à propos du module, des activités et de ce qu’ils ont appris. Les étudiants ont apprécié le module mais exprimé leur inquiétude quant à l’usage de l’outil wiki, de l’évaluation du travail collaboratif et de l’engagement dans des activités d’évaluation de leurs camarades. Ces résultats ont des retombées pratiques pour la conception des activités collaboratives et d’un mode d’évaluation innovant dans des environnements d’apprentissage mixte.

La evaluación del trabajo colaborativo dentro de un entorno de aprendizaje mixto (Blended Learning) en la enseñanza superior: estrategias y percepciones de los estudiantes

El presente estudio examina las opiniones de los estudiantes acerca de un módulo de aprendizaje mixto desarrollado y propuesto por la Universidad de Aveiro. El artículo presenta el módulo y las estrategías, herramientas, actividades y evaluación. Para determinar la eficacia del módulo se hizo una recogida de datos, basandose en reflexiones, mensajes y cuestionarios. Los resultados ilustran las opinones de los estudiantes acerca del módulo, de las actividades y de lo que han aprendido.Los estudiantes valoran el módulo pero expresaron su preocupación acerca del uso de la herramienta wiki, de la evaluación del trabajo cooperativo y de la dedicación a actividades de evaluación mutual. Esos resultados conllevan consecuencias prácticas para el diseño de actividades cooperativas y la evaluación innovadora en entornos de aprendizaje mixto.     

Individual and school factors affecting students’ participation and success in higher education

The purpose of this study is to identify school factors that affect students’ achievements at the secondary and tertiary levels of education. The analysis included data of 9,894 students who studied in Auckland regional secondary schools in 2004. The results indicate that, although student demographic characteristics are associated with students’ pathways and achievements, schools’ demographic composition did not affect student outcomes. It was found, however, that schools’ organisational factors do have an effect. At the university level, none of the schools’ characteristics was related to students’ achievements at the higher end of the achievement scale (GPA ≥ 4). However, students from private or state-integrated schools were found to be more likely to achieve low GPA (<2) than students who came from state schools. In conclusion, it is suggested that interventions targeting at-risk populations based on demographic factors should focus on individuals or groups rather than on institutions; while school-based interventions should identify the schools by their structure and function rather than by their demographic characteristics.

Paulo Freire and ‘the need for a kind of education in hope’

This paper explores Paulo Freire’s philosophy of hope. This is significant because, for Freire, it was human hope that rendered education possible, necessary and necessarily political. Like other areas of his thought, however, his reading of hope contained ambiguities and contradictions, and the paper explores these by locating Freire’s thought in the wider context of the philosophy of hope. It focuses in particular on the divergent interpretations Freire provides regarding the objective and the experience of hope. It argues that many of the conflicting demands placed on the radical educator stem from the tensions and vagaries one finds within his philosophy. The paper concludes by discussing the wider significance of Freire in light of the discourse of ‘complex hope’ that is developing within educational studies.     

A micro-perspective on students’ behavioral engagement in the context of teachers’ instructional support during seatwork: Sources of variability and the role of teacher adaptive support

Despite increased acknowledgement of the significance of situational factors to engagement, engagement is traditionally seen as a student characteristic. In this study, we investigated to what extent variation in observational measures of behavioral student engagement during seatwork is due to students versus teachers, teacher-student dyads, or situational (i.e., variation in time) effects. Additionally, we studied whether adaptive support during teacher-student interactions contributes to student engagement following that interaction. A cross-classified multilevel analysis of 324 video- and audio-recorded secondary school teacher-student interactions showed that situational factors and error were the strongest source of variability in student engagement. Other than expected, teacher-related and dyad-related variability were limited. Although behavioral engagement after teacher-student interaction was significantly higher than pre-interaction student engagement, higher post-interaction levels were not related to the level of adaptive support provided during the teacher-student interaction. These findings imply that situational factors deserve more attention in engagement research, for example by investigating what situational factors contribute to engagement. For teachers, the time-variant, situation-dependent nature of engagement opens up valuable opportunities to actively design optimal learning situations.     

Hearing-impaired pupils in mainstream education in Finland: teachers’ experiences of inclusion and support

Today, in Finland, the majority of hearing-impaired pupils attend regular schools. This is in line with inclusive policy. This study aims to investigate do these pupils receive support from teachers, what kind of support is given and how is inclusion functioning. A questionnaire was used with 109 Finnish teachers, with both closed- and open-ended questions. All teachers taught hearing-impaired pupils in mainstream education, at primary or at secondary stage. According to the results, the main support categories were pedagogical and technical support. However, 48% of teachers gave no support. Inclusion was successful according to teachers. Various forms of support and key areas of teaching are discussed.     

Adult education in a workplace context: recognising production workers’ responses and partnership challenges

Abstract

This article is about a larger regional Swedish partnership programme that was established to develop site-based education for production workers. A partnership is seen as composed of different practice architectures. The actors involved represented larger transnational as well as smaller manufacturing companies, employers, the metal workers’ trade union, educational organizations, university researchers and public labour market authorities. Adult education teachers were engaged to act as leading action researchers on company-specific projects. The partnership programme is used here to illustrate the problem of supporting recognition under shifting partnership circumstances. The aim is to analyse enabling and constraining conditions affecting the teachers’ efforts as well as new possibilities that appeared as the partnership evolved over time. The article illustrates how the development of site-based education within a partnership framework means to develop a new practice that is very sensitive to local circumstances. It also shows how local meetings between people both enable and constrain, but also may open up a space for mutual recognition. A normative argument is that local spaces for mutual recognition need to be supported in a respectful way. Recognition of the particularities of each site is vital for this to happen.     

Leadership and students’ academic success: mediating effects of self-efficacy and self-determination

When exploring the effects of leadership on students, most studies have focused on either how leadership affects the students’ academic outcomes or how it contributes to their personal development. This study merged both approaches and aimed to measure the mediating effects of self-efficacy and self-determination among leadership, students’ intentions to persist and GPA. A Structural Equation Analysis was applied to a data-set of 1009 students from 39 countries to examine these relationships. The results showed a full mediating effect of academic self-efficacy between leadership and students’ intentions to persist and between leadership and GPA, and revealed a full mediating effect of self-determination through autonomy and relatedness constructs between leadership and intention to persist. This result implies that even though leadership does not directly affect students’ academic outcomes, it enhances their confidence and motivation, which provides them with the inner drive to aim high, persevere and achieve their goals. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are also discussed.     

Assessing students’ perception of parental career-related support: development of a new scale and a new taxonomy

The object of this study was to assess students' perceptions of their parents’ career-related behaviours and their influence on the students’ behaviours. In study 1 (528 students), we developed the SIL Scale (support, interference and lack of engagement), a nine-item questionnaire applied to educational and job contexts. In study 2 (1204 students), we tested a person-centred approach and developed a new model called the WID Types (willing, involved and in difficulty), which identifies three clusters of students. The associations between the clusters and career choice difficulties, level of career exploration and stage of the vocational choice confirmed its validity.     

The intersection of culture and institutional support for Latino students’ academic success: Remediation or empowerment?

The study is framed by critical race theory to explore the intersection of cultural and institutional factors that influence Latino students’ completion of high school. The purpose of this study is to determine the extent to which factors related to students’ background, culture, socioeconomic status, and institutional-support such as participation in mentoring and/or dropout-prevention programs, can predict Latino students’ successful completion of high school. The overarching research question is: To what extent do family background, students’ educational aspirations, and institutional support programs predict whether Latino students’ complete high school? Using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002), from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) with 2,217 Hispanic participants, the study used a logistic linear regression model for the analysis. The findings identified students’ gender, socioeconomic status, first language, educational aspirations as well as the aspirations of their parents, school poverty concentration, and school support programs to be significant predictors of high school completion. The logistic regression model correctly classified between 78%, 85%, and 81% of the cases included in the group for timely completion according to first-, second-, and third-generation respectively. A similar classification was found for high school completion-within-two-years. The discussion highlights marked differences between the effect of dropout-prevention programs and that of mentoring programs on Latinos’ high school completion. In addition, that the factors represented by individual and institutional variables might not operate in isolation but instead might intersect with socioeconomic and cultural factors that ultimately create barriers for this minority group.     

Self-regulated learning and students’ perceptions of innovative and traditional learning environments: a longitudinal study in secondary education

This study investigated the relationship between the development of students’ self-regulated learning and students’ perceptions of the learning environment in terms of autonomy support, the emphasis on relevance and collaborative learning. In addition, we compared innovative learning environments that aim to enhance self-regulated learning with traditional learning environments. Questionnaires for measuring self-regulated learning and perceptions of the learning environment were administered by 648 students. Self-regulated learning was measured at the start of secondary education and again half way through the first year. The results point to the importance of how students perceive the learning environment for self-regulated learning. There was a positive relationship between autonomy support and relevance and self-regulated learning. Furthermore, students in innovative environments perceived more autonomy support, more emphasis on relevance and more collaborative learning than those in traditional environments. Students in innovative environments, however, reported no more self-regulated learning than students in traditional environments.     

Translating between representations in a social context: a study of undergraduate science students’ representational fluency

Interacting with and translating across multiple representations is an essential characteristic of expertise and representational fluency. In this study, we explored the effect of interacting with and translating between representations in a computer simulation or in a paper-based assignment on scientific accuracy of undergraduate science students’ explanations regarding the underlying mechanisms of action potential. The study proposed that a simulation designed with scaffolded inquiry and with multiple dynamically linked representations fosters students to use greater scientific accuracy in speaking about a complex scientific phenomenon as well as to work with this complex knowledge in higher cognitive domains. Student explanations were analysed for use of accurate scientific language as they worked with the instructional tool as well as under test conditions. We also investigated the cognitive domain that students worked within as they created explanations of the phenomenon under study. The proportion of elaborations that occurred in higher-level cognitive domains such as applying, analysing, evaluating and synthesising was used to denote representational fluency. The rationale for this approach is discussed. Findings suggest that the simulation prompted students towards operating in higher cognitive domains in order to construct new knowledge and therefore promoted representational fluency. It also suggests that translating between representations in a simulation in a collaborative social setting contributes towards students’ use of accurate scientific language. Students’ perceptions expressed during the interviews confirmed the findings.     

‘Selective cosmopolitans’: tutors’ and students’ experience of offshore higher education in Dubai

As the offshore mobility of higher education has increased in recent times, the question of how it interacts with the recipient cultures has become ever more significant. Using ethnographic methods, this empirical study examined the adaptation of the UK teacher education model – the Postgraduate Certificate in Education – to the context of Dubai. The study asks ‘how do students and tutors experience the adaptation of British education in the context of Dubai?’ This paper will argue that tutors and students in offshore Dubai teacher education are ‘selective cosmopolitans’ who negotiate cross-cultural influences pragmatically and ambivalently. The study addresses a significant gap in the literature, as there is little written on the internationalisation of higher education in the context of Gulf Cooperation Council countries. There is also an inadequate appreciation of the role of local culture and religion in offshore education and tutors and students’ role as active agents in negotiating cross-cultural dynamics in the offshore educational setting.     

Employers’ support for adult higher education students in liberal post-socialist contexts

In most European countries, the proportion of adult students among both full-time and part-time workers has increased significantly over recent decades. Undertaking paid work is also increasingly common among traditional students. The opportunities to work while studying depend largely on the role of employers in promoting learning. However, both theoretical frameworks and empirical studies typically focus on the behaviour of firms in providing training. The support of employers for formal adult education has remained a marginal topic. The aim of this article is to analyse the contributions of employers to the acquisition of higher education from the perspective of the adult learners; we investigated how employers support their staff in higher education studies. We also tried to identify which kinds of learners have a better chance of receiving various benefits. We used two different data-sets: quantitative data from a study of adult students in higher education and qualitative data from interviews with managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises and at least one employed participant in formal adult education, collected in the framework of the international research project Towards a Lifelong Learning Society in Europe: The Contribution of the Education System supported by the EU Sixth Framework Programme.     

Higher education in further education: delivering higher education in a further education context—a study of five South West colleges

This paper comprises a summary of research into the teaching of higher education (HE) courses in further education (FE) learning environments. A comprehensive study of college management and teaching staff attitudes together with teaching practices, pedagogy and research was carried out with six partner colleges of the University of Plymouth where a substantial amount of HE teaching was delivered. A questionnaire was developed, piloted and distributed to all staff teaching HE in the colleges, with a similar but separate questionnaire being used for management. Five colleges responded. We present data relating to the differences in teaching practice and pedagogy between FE and HE teaching and the problems of realizing these in FE learning environments. We also look at the ways in which independent study and critical reflection among learners are developed. The questions of research and scholarly activity and their relevance to HE teaching are addressed. Considerable challenges are faced by staff teaching mainly FE courses, on standard FE teaching contracts, being expected to deliver HE courses effectively. We also consider the challenges of delivering ‘a real HE experience’ in FE environments and those involved with going on to university afterwards.     

Coaching doctoral students – a means to enhance progress and support self-organisation in doctoral education

In this paper we focus on individual coaching carried out by an external coach as a new pedagogical element that can impact doctoral students’ sense of progress in doctoral education. The study used a mixed-methods approach in that we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from the evaluation of a project on coaching doctoral students. We explore how coaching can contribute to the doctoral students’ development of a broad set of personal competences and suggest that coaching could work as a means to engender self-management and improve relational competences. The analysis of the participants’ self-reported gains from coaching show that doctoral students experience coaching as an effective method to support the doctoral study process. This study also provides preliminary empirical evidence that coaching of doctoral students can facilitate the doctoral study process so that the doctoral students experience an enhanced feeling of progress and that they can change their study behaviour in a positive direction. The study discusses the difference between coaching and supervision, for instance power imbalances and contrary to earlier research into coaching of doctoral students this study indicates that coaching can impact the supervisor–student relationship in a positive way.     

Exploring teachers’ and students’ conceptions of learning in two further education colleges

The Learning to Learn in Further Education Research Project (L2L) is coordinated by the Campaign for Learning and run by researchers at Newcastle and Glasgow Universities. The project involves teachers at two further education (FE) colleges, Lewisham and Northumberland, using practitioner enquiry methodologies to explore and share what works in learning and teaching in their context.

This article uses data collected as part of the larger project to explore how the combination of societal, political and economic forces that have shaped provision in this sector impact on students’ and teachers’ views of learning when compared with the compulsory sector. The authors sought to establish whether factors such as an ethos of performativity and instrumentalisation of the curriculum were indeed at play in shaping understandings of teaching and learning, and what it means to learn in an FE context.

Telephone interviews with 16 teachers provided evidence that such pressures were impacting on teaching despite the ambitions of the teachers that their practice be responsive to student need rather than curricular imperatives. Involvement with the university and the L2L project was seen by many as a way of countering perceived constraints on their freedom to exercise professional judgement. Face-to-face mediated interviews with 64 learners drawn from a number of qualification routes revealed a simplistic model for learning based around listening and the practising of skills. The authors discuss the extent to which students appear to understand this as building the necessary foundations for later, more sophisticated learning rather than as requirements of their courses per se.     

‘Hardworking,determined and happy’: first-year students’ understanding and experience of success

While all agree student success in higher education is important, there is less agreement on what it means to be a successful student. Student success is often measured by institutional reports of grades, student retention and qualification completion. More recently, broader definitions have emerged; however, these do not incorporate student perceptions of success. The current study addresses this gap by exploring how first-year students talk about their success. Drawing from weekly interviews of students at an Australian regional university, the data are analysed through the lens of a conceptual framework of student engagement. The findings demonstrate that success is inextricably linked with student engagement as well as other dimensions of the student experience. As expected, students assess their success extrinsically with institutional measures such as grades and feedback. In addition, their behavioural engagement was seen as a more immediate measure of their success, while happiness and satisfaction were necessary for some students to feel successful. Perceptions of success have important consequences for students in terms of increased positive emotions, self-efficacy and course belonging. Success for these students has multiple dimensions. These findings give rise to suggestions for a staged approach to supporting first-year student success. However, the student experience is complex and multifaceted and further research is needed with different student cohorts who may define and experience success in other ways.