Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which…

Persistence represents a crucial trait in learning. A lack of persistence prevents learners from fully mastering their current skills and makes it difficult for them to acquire new skills. It further hinders the administration of effective interventions by learning systems. Although most studies have focused on identifying non-persistence and…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

This article reports on a case study of Miho, a Japanese high school teacher, exploring her efforts to bridge research and practice in her use of motivational strategies. Drawing on Emirbayer and Mische's conceptualisation of agency and Connelly and Clandinin's theorisation on teachers' personal knowledge, the study examined how this language…

This study aims to first investigate the effect of the extreme response style (ERS) which could lead to an attitude-achievement paradox among the countries participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS 2015), and then to determine the individual- and country-level relationships between attitude and achievement…

The purpose of this study is to equate and further validate three forms of the vocabulary size test (VST) created by Aizawa and Mochizuki (2010). These three forms, VST 1, 2, and 3, were administered to a cohort of 189 high school students ranging in age from 16 to 18 in April of their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd year of high school. Although these…

This book examines the perspectives and experiences of student teachers who are in the process of becoming secondary school English teachers in Japan. It reports on the trainee teachers' attitudes towards theory and practice in their professional development. Through a discussion of what professional expertise should look like in this context, the…

International comparative assessments of student achievement are constructed to assess country-level differences and change over time. A coherent understanding of the international trends in educational outcomes is strongly needed as suggested by numerous previous studies. Investigating these trends requires long-term analysis, as substantial…

Purpose: Cross-cultural comparisons based on ordinal Likert-type rating scales have been threatened by response style which is systematic tendencies to respond to items regardless of the item content. So, this study aimed to investigate the effect of extreme response style and acquisance response style on TIMSS 2015 data. Method: The sample of…

This paper examines the "subjectification" function of political education in democracy, considering the present situation of political education in Japan. In particular, from the point of view of political science, it focuses on the relationship between democratic theories and political education and considers whether the possibility of…

In the literature, response style is one of the factors causing an achievement-attitude paradox and threatens the validity of the results obtained from studies. In this regard, the aim of this study is two-fold. Firstly, it attempts to determine which item response tree (IRTree) models based on the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) approach…

Our research examined whether adolescents in the United States, China, and Japan differed in their conceptions of a creative person. Participants were American (n = 321), Chinese (n = 235), and Japanese (n = 393) adolescents in 7th and 8th grades who completed surveys at 3 time points. Using an open-ended questionnaire, adolescents were asked to…

Despite their well-established connections to student motivation and to learning outcomes, attributions, particularly at the task-level, have not garnered much attention in L2 learning research. However, research evidence in educational psychology (e.g., Stajkovic & Sommer, 2000) suggests that L2 task attributions may affect subsequent task…

The purpose of this study was to investigate Japanese secondary physical educators' professional development experiences teaching Japanese traditional dance education at a private secondary school. This study used a descriptive-qualitative research method, using in-depth interviewing within andragogy theory. Four physical education teachers (three…

This paper describes a mixed-methods investigation into whether an asynchronous, virtual collaboration with Japanese peers helped pre-service social studies teachers in the U.S. demonstrate civic competence as it relates to international and global education. After the collaboration, most students described themselves as better-prepared world…