As development and operation of the massive open online courses (MOOCs) involve multiple stakeholders to work in cooperation, this paper inquired two key stakeholders in the MOOC development, teaching, and operation: administrators and faculty in 50 higher education institutions in China. We sought the experiences and expectations from MOOC…

English language education has always been accorded paramount importance in China since the mid-1980s. In order to improve English teaching quality, China has initiated several rounds of English curriculum reform at various levels against the backdrop of the unprecedented spread of English as a lingua franca. Drawing upon the texts of the national…

Previous research concerning teacher practical knowledge has revealed its epistemological foundations, content structure and research methodology, but little research examines its ethical dimension. Based on a four-year project in China, this study probes the ethical dimension of an experienced teacher's practical knowledge, explicated in a…

Background: Despite the large body of literature regarding student misconceptions, there has been relatively little cross-cultural research to directly compare the prevalence of common scientific misconceptions amongst students from different cultural backgrounds. Whilst previous research does suggest the international nature of many…

A Chinese and a Swedish preschool teacher education programme were examined in search for commonalities and differences of the curriculum decision-making considerations involved in the respective programme revision process. Findings include: (1) the two programmes have shifted orientations and become similar, yet there was no fundamental…

Developing nations including Bangladesh are significantly lagging behind the millennium development target due to the lack of science, technology and engineering education. Bangladesh as a least developing country has only 44 engineers per million people. Its technological education and gross domestic product growth are not collinear. Although…

Compared with the rich exploration of teachers' emotional geographies in the West, there have been only a small number of studies conducted in Chinese societies that have adopted Hargreaves's emotional geographies to analyze human interactions in education. This study explores the nature of emotions felt by teachers during their interactions with…

This paper draws upon research evidence obtained as metaphors from biographical narrative interviews of Mandarin teachers of English working in China, which has illustrated the problems of teachers adapting to change in Chinese schools. The research has attempted to explore teachers' professional adaptation under strenuous challenges, that is, the…

The present study sought to compare and contrast educational policies on creativity education in four Asian Chinese societies, namely mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. It establishes five criteria on creativity education policy, including policies regarding legislation on creativity education, definitions of creativity, standard…

School-based curriculum development has been a highlight of China's new curriculum reform since 1999. This reform introduces a curriculum policy change towards devolving partial power in curriculum decision-making to teachers, and invites their active involvement in transforming their role from being book-knowledge transmitters to curriculum…

Since the introduction of the action research into China in the 1980s, especially since the start of the twenty-first century, Chinese education researchers have been trying to localize it in relation to the backdrop of the national curriculum reform in basic education. This article presents three cases in which educators aimed for a conscious…

This article proposes a conceptual framework to examine the development of the teacher education system in contemporary China. Within the framework, three development periods, including the era of shifan, and the era of post-shifan, the era of professional teacher education, are investigated in terms of governance, institutional structures, and…

This paper sets China's education of English majors within the changing global and national context. It examines the impact of accelerating globalisation and the rise of global English, the adjustment of China's English language policy, the growth of the education of English majors and the challenges faced by this sector of education. To adapt to…

This paper analyses some changing aspects of learning and "cultures of learning" in China: these are related to meeting the needs of Chinese learners studying in higher education in the UK. We use the term "cultures of learning" to draw attention to the socio-cultural aspects of key practices, expectations and interpretations…