This study is an attempt at better understanding the education choices of top-performing students in elite schooling. It applies a 'glonacal' framework (Maxwell 2018, "Changing Spaces -- The Reshaping of (Elite) Education Through Internationalisation." In "Elite Education and Internationalization: From the Early Years Into Higher…

Today parents are faced with increasing expectations to attend to their young children's learning and cognitive development. South Korea and Singapore are well-known for their competitive education systems and for consistently topping international student assessment tests. They also share an inflated private tuition industry, fuelled by the…

This study explored the impact of a living-and-learning program (LLP) in a residential college of an Asian university on a freshmen cohort. It utilized a theoretical framework based on Astin's input-intermediate outcome-environment-outcome model. We examined survey data collected at two time points a year apart to understand how the freshmen's…

Applying path analysis to 237 secondary school students and 320 post-secondary students in Singapore, parents' education was found to have important effects on adolescents' educational aspiration as mediated through educational track and adolescents' financial stress and self-esteem. This effect is strong for adolescents in both secondary and…

International student achievement comparisons have aroused interest widely across the world. Finland dominated the comparisons for a long time but now Asian countries have fared better. Both countries studied have faced abundant immigration, which has changed the student groups. In this article, we compare two quite different top countries:…

Higher education in Asia is massifying at an exceptional pace and scale. In this paper, I ask how practices and discourses which inform the internationalization of Singapore's higher education can provide opportunities for developing cosmopolitan learning that it claims to provide. Cosmopolitan learning is closely related to cross-border student…

This paper highlights how a small group of minority students worked to take advantage of the privileges available once they were admitted to an elite school. The argument proposed is that, unlike their more privileged peers, minority students who have made it through the gateways of elite schools have to work out a salvation of privilege to level…

This study explores the significance and complexity of time practices and experiences in understanding the emerging identities and aspirations of South Korean pre-college students and their mothers who moved to Singapore for the children's education. I adopt the notion of chronotope, a spatial-temporal frame for a specific type of personhood, to…

This study seeks to understand the "what" and the "why" of student engagement by investigating the "aims" that students pursue through engagement (i.e., their achievement goals) and the "reasons" driving such engagement (i.e., their motivation). Self-report instruments measuring students' motivational…

Drawing upon insights gained from the extant work on culture and pedagogy, this paper explores the ways in which, in an ostensibly meritocratic education system, ideas about students' cultural backgrounds and its relevance for teaching are interpreted, negotiated, and ultimately drawn upon to engage students in the low-progress academic tracks.…

This paper draws on a Linguistic Ethnography (Blommaert & Rampton 2011) of a group of academically elite students in Singapore. The group comprises locals born in Singapore, as well as immigrants from China and Vietnam. My informants all attended a top-ranked secondary school in Singapore. I present data from interviews and a focus group…

Optimism is a positive psychological trait which may help individuals to cope with stressful and adverse situations. This study examined the associations of dispositional optimism, academic self-efficacy, self-esteem, and gender on high-ability students' stress perception of academic expectations. 298 high-ability senior high school students in…

This article reports a case study of two Chinese-English bilingual families in Singapore and illustrates the importance of incorporating two hitherto disconnected fields of research--family language policy and family literacy practices--to an understanding of early language and literacy acquisition in the familial milieu. Specifically, this work…

We provide further evidence for the two-factor structure of the 9-item Academic Expectations Stress Inventory (AESI) using confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 289 Canadian adolescents and 310 Singaporean adolescents. Examination of measurement invariance tests the assumption that the model underlying a set of scores is directly comparable…

Background: Students' academic self-concepts are known to be domain specific. Researchers have also identified two related components of self-concept:cognitive (how competent students feel about a subject domain) and affective (their interest in the subject). This paper examines whether both components are domain specific. Research has also shown…