‘Keeping up with the time’: rebranding education and class formation in globalising India

This paper investigates the emergence of ‘internationalised’ schools as a form of middle-class aspiration in Kochi, India. It complements recent literature on the growth of international schools catering for host country elites, and shows how private schools are actively engaged in extending the aspiration for internationalised education among the city’s middle classes. The article shows how internationalised schooling has penetrated beyond Indian metropoles into secondary cities. It provides a detailed ethnographic account of how a private school has rebranded itself as an ‘internationalised’ school, involving the introduction of new practices and the repackaging of the school’s old nationalist project.     

The effects of cognitive strategy instruction on Chinese reading comprehension among Hong Kong low achieving students

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of cognitive strategy instruction (CSI) on Chinese reading comprehension of Hong Kong low achieving students. A total of 88 Grade 7 students from four intact Chinese language remedial groups were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. Students in the treatment group received a 6-week Chinese CSI Program in their regular Chinese language lessons. The findings in this study generally supported that the Program had a positive impact on the reading development of low achieving students. Students who received strategy instruction made superior gains in comprehension performance, used more strategies during their reading process, had more knowledge about, strategy use, and showed a more positive attitude toward the reading instruction than did their peers who received traditional Chinese language instruction. Students’ improvements on their strategy use and reading comprehension were maintained 4 months after the termination of the Program. However, the positive treatment effects of the Program were not transferred to other school subject materials, and students’ reading motivation did not have significant changes after the Program. Factors contributing to the success of the Program as well as its limitations are discussed.     

Working Memory, Motivation, and Teacher-Initiated Learning

Working memory is where we “think” as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and working memory, and concludes that the apparent novelty of the proposal offered to describe motivation in terms of working memory results from the apparent lack of cross-channel exchange among these research traditions. The relation between working memory and motivation is explored in the context of the interactive compensatory model of learning (ICML) in which learning is considered to result from the interaction of ability, motivation, and prior learning. The ICML is recast in light of the revised definition of motivation offered here. This paper goes on to suggest ways in which a range of teaching and learning issues and activities may be reconceptualized in the context of a model emphasizing a learner's working memory that makes use of chunks of previously acquired knowledge.