In recent decades, higher education has experienced a massive expansion worldwide, which has often been linked to increasing higher education diversification. New sectors and new types of institutions emerged with this massification process to offer more diversified types of advanced training. At the same time, this expansion was often embedded in…

School choice is associated with increased educational inequality and across-school segregation. This article documents the organisational practices and logics affecting school segregation and inequality. Through an institutional ethnographic study of principals' responses to school choice within the context of immigration in Malmö, Sweden, I find…

Students of middling achievement who achieve intermediate results on the Basic Competence Test, a national high-stakes entrance examination in Taiwan, experience the highest test anxiety. The present study explored why such students experienced greater test anxiety and the source of that anxiety. A questionnaire survey was administered to 5,220…

High-stakes testing (HST) is critical in the educational system of East-Asian countries like China, and the ongoing standards-based reform in many Western countries like the USA. HST has been criticized for corrupting an educational system through means like disengaging students from authentic learning. It seems that students' affective learning…

The recent expansion of the overseas education market in China has led to the rise of "Background Promotion Projects" designed to strengthen the applications of elite university aspirants. Based on ethnographic findings of a particular Background Promotion Project, a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition, this study analyses…

Grounded in Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), this study contributes to empirical efforts to understand factors affecting the career-development process of American youth by focusing on change in occupational expectations between age 16 and 26. The study is based on the secondary analysis of longitudinal data from the Education Longitudinal…

Understanding the factors that influence students' results in hybrid learning environments is becoming increasingly important in today's educational environment. The goal of this research is to examine factors that influence students' academic performance as well as their level of participation in blended learning environments. A comprehensive…

The literature on college choice is extensive and navigating it for purposes of review is complicated by the dual meaning given to the word choice. To clarify, in this article, the phrase "college choice" refers to the concept defined by Don Hossler and Karen Gallagher in their seminal 1987 article entitled "Studying Student College…

Context: Thailand is facing skilled labour shortages, which has prevented the country from achieving significant economic progress. This paper examines Thailand's vocational education policy discourses from 1992 to 2014 and how successful such policies were in building the country's skilled labour force. Approach: This study utilised a qualitative…

We utilise a dataset of students in their final year of upper secondary education in Ireland to provide a detailed examination of the preferences of prospective students for higher education institutions (HEIs). Our analysis is based upon a discrete choice experiment methodology with willingness to pay estimates derived for specific HEI attributes…

This paper presents findings from an interpretative phenomenological analysis with 20 students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds who were accepted onto a Foundation Year in Oxford University. It explores the factors that impacted on their decision to apply to a prestigious university and student's views on their transition to the…

In this paper, I draw on a qualitative study of Iraqi-born Muslim mothers in Australia exploring how they navigate choosing secondary schools for their daughters. While the mothers interviewed for this study agreed on the importance of education and its role in facilitating upward social mobility for all their children, they articulated a specific…

Strengthening critical thinking abilities of citizens in the face of news published on the web represents a key challenge for education. Young citizens appear to be vulnerable in the face of poor quality news or those containing non-explicit ideologies. In the field of data science, computational and statistical techniques have been developed to…

This study examines the Finnish media debate surrounding the OECD-led PISA Study during the periods 2001-2009 and 2013-2014. The empirical focus of the study is on how debaters dissatisfied with Finnish education have justified their criticism in the context of debating PISA and how the justifications used have changed as Finland's PISA ranking…

In Turkey, students are placed in a high school according to the scores they receive from a large-scale transition exam. Although the assessment procedures have shown changes over time, scores of this exam still play a vital role in students being accepted into a prestigious high school, which may also be an initial step for their prospective…