The "Playing for Success" (PfS) initiative is targeted on underachieving young people. It aims to contribute to raising educational standards, especially in numeracy and literacy, bringing the attainment levels of lower achieving pupils closer to the average expected for their age. This study set out to consider whether there was any evidence of…

This article considers the issue of global education in schools by focusing upon the case of one particular English secondary school and exploring the pedagogic and curricular perspectives of its staff and students. It recognizes the strong normative and holistic dimension to global education and the challenges it faces in, and presents to…

Can education for sustainable development (ESD) policies help to create a more sustainable society? In the article I argue that contemporary secondary school curriculum policies relating to ESD are rhetorical devices that will achieve little towards resolving global problems. I suggest that the conceptualization of SD is itself fundamentally…

Back in 1992, the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded grants to five curriculum development teams and charged them with the task of starting over. Five years later, each of the development teams had produced an innovative and "integrated" curriculum. All represented notable departures from the commonly encountered, calculus-driven high…

Reasoning with data is already pervasive in society, and its importance as a life skill is increasing. We argue that the current statistics curriculum in the United Kingdom at the secondary level does not prepare our young people adequately, and suggest ways in which it could be improved.

The curriculum landscape in Singapore has been undergoing significant changes recently. While there exists a national curriculum and a central curriculum agency, the Curriculum Planning and Development Division (CPDD) within the Ministry of Education (MoE), there is a movement toward what is termed "school-based curriculum development."…

What lies behind the lack of theorizing about content in history in contrast to much greater attention given to theorizing about children's developing understanding of historical skills and processes? Egan's model of the characteristic ways in which children of different ages engage with the world is used to raise the question of what content to…

This paper focuses on challenges in mentoring software development projects in the high school and analyzes difficulties encountered by Computer Science teachers in the mentoring process according to Shulman's Teacher Knowledge Base Model. The main difficulties that emerged from the data analysis belong to the following knowledge sources of…

This article examines China's senior high "Thought and Politics" ("sixiang zhengzhi") texts, analyzing how these seek to legitimize the regime's developmental strategy. It is argued that their overriding emphasis on the strengthening of the state is premised upon the imperative of securing China's position within global order…

"Underachievement" has been one of the dominant discourses in education in recent times, but it is unclear what is meant by the term "underachievement", and there is no widely accepted way of defining or measuring it. This paper describes the final stage of a large study which used contextualised models to identify students who…

The research reported in this case study explores the understanding of stoichiometry and related concepts of Thai science students in grades 10 and 11 after major national curriculum reforms. Students' conceptions and alternative conceptions were investigated using a questionnaire--the "Stoichiometry Concept Questionnaire" (SCQ) (N =…

A project has been developed for KS3 maths, funded by the Bowland Trust (www.bowlandmaths.org.uk) with additional support from the DCSF. It consists of a teaching resource of about 20 case-study problems aimed at developing thinking, reasoning and problem-solving skills and has been distributed to all UK secondary schools. Each case study includes…

There is growing concern that almost 20 years after the 1988 Education Act, top-down, large-scale reform has stalled. The policy mix of choice, competition, markets, regulation, accountability and leadership seems not to have closed the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged areas and individuals, while most variations in school performance can…

In the past two years, considerable media and government attention has been directed towards the teaching of Australian literature in secondary schools. This article explores the main themes of this discourse, and considers recent discussions about Australian literature in the National English Curriculum in the context of this debate. By way of…

The objective for this study is to investigate the contribution of the "plasma" mode of instruction to the school experiences of students in Government secondary schools in Ethiopia, as viewed by students, their parents and teachers, and by comparing it with experiences in Catholic secondary schools, which did not use "plasma".…