Singapore is known as a high-performing country with high-quality teachers and is considered a model system for educational benchmarking. Still, many accolades for the system address teachers' productivity in raising student achievement, which could reinforce a partial understanding of teacher quality in the system. Aiming at developing a more…

This paper investigates the case of Singapore where there are teachers' unions but industrial actions are rare. It questions why and how has educator organising, steered by Singapore Teachers' Union, transformed? Our findings show that historical, political, and socio-economic dynamics have influenced the transformation of STU. For more than…

South Asian economies has witnessed very slow growth over the years and the gap has widened manifold between other nations of Asia particularly East Asian nations and South Asian nations. This paper examines co-integration between the economic growth and reach of higher education in South Asian nations explaining this disparity. The research…

Purpose: Both Hong Kong and Singapore leverage teacher collaboration to improve student learning, but state reforms differ in how teacher collaborative capabilities are prioritized. This paper provides a nuanced comparison of Hong Kong and Singapore teachers' values (risk-taking, power distance and uncertainty avoidance) to develop insights into…

This study deployed a qualitative approach to explore an alternative perspective regarding graduate migrants' employability. Twenty graduate migrants in Australia participated in in-depth interviews. Findings revealed graduate migrants faced various challenges in the target labour market, and to successfully secure employment it was important for…

This mixed-methods study employed Hargreaves and Fullan's (Professional capital: transforming teaching in every school, Teachers College Press, New York, 2012) concept of professional capital to re-examine whether professional learning communities (PLCs) transformed instructional practices in contexts that endorse hierarchical cultures. PLCs that…

In this provocative volume, Chester E. Finn, Jr., and Brandon L. Wright argue that, for decades, the United States has done too little to focus on educating students to achieve at high levels. The authors identify two core problems: First, compared to other countries, the United States does not produce enough high achievers. Second, students from…

This paper summarizes initial field-test results from data analytics used in the work of the Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ATC21S) project, on the "ICT Literacy--Learning in digital networks" learning progression. This project, sponsored by Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, aims to help educators around the world enable…

This paper empirically examines the impact of academic research on high-tech manufacturing growth of 28 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and emerging countries over the 1991-2005 period. A standard research and development (R&D) expenditure based measure is found to be too general to capture the input in high-tech…

Ample evidence indicates that a person's human capital is important for success on the labor market in terms of both wages and employment prospects. However, unlike the efforts to identify the impact of school attainment on labor-market outcomes, the literature on returns to cognitive skills has not yet provided convincing evidence that the…

In 2015, PISA and TIMSS are coming up to us together. In this study, the data from PISA and TIMSS are used to investigate that which one is a better indicator of national science and technology (S&T) competitiveness? Number of S & T journal articles (per million people) is used as a measure to represent the national S&T…

Hitherto, research on transnational higher education student mobility tended to narrowly present hard statistics on student mobility, analysing these in terms of "trends" and the implication this has on policy and internationalizing strategies. What is missing from this "big picture" is a close-up analysis of the micropolitics…

In modern society, individuals are having to assume increasing responsibility for their own career trajectories. One of the key ways in which individuals can engage in such "career self-management" is by taking up learning opportunities through further study. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to explore, using the conceptual…

There is considerable evidence to suggest that the human capital needs of the world city differ from what Robinson calls "ordinary cities" or what Markusen and associates term as "second tier cities". This path is blazed most notably in the field of world cities and the flow of skilled labour, in the work by Sassen and with…

A nation's culture, competitiveness and economic performance explain academic performance. Partial Least Squares (PLS) testing of 2252 students shows culture affects competitiveness and academic performance. Culture and economic performance each explain 32%; competitiveness 36%. The model predicts academic performance when culture, competitiveness…