Information and communication technology (ICT) has become an important tool for school systems as they seek to enhance education and make it more efficient. This has become all the more apparent and urgent with the COVID-19 pandemic. But what degree of access do students from different socio-economic backgrounds have to ICT-based quality…

An estimated 274 million primary school children in low and middle income countries are not learning the basic foundational skills necessary to lead productive and healthy lives. The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is committed to improved and more equitable student outcomes, and has framed this as goal 1 of its strategic plan for…

International comparisons of school-level geoscience education across the world had shown great variability in the amount and content of the geoscience materials and in the ways in which it was taught. When this situation was discussed at meetings of organisations concerned with international school-level geoscience education in 2012, the decision…

Josh Reid and Colin Carmichael describe how some Year 6 children have developed their understanding of mathematics by studying Asian countries. The statistical analyses undertaken by these children appears to have strengthened their understanding of statistical concepts and at the same time provided them with tools for understanding complex…

It is all too common, given the considerable day-to-day challenges facing those involved in education, to focus on the here and now rather than look further afield. The authors of this article have been fortunate enough to see "primary science" in a wide range of international settings, from Nigeria to Chile, North America and Canada,…

Inclusion has traditionally been conceptualised as integrating children into the formal schooling system. Recent research conducted in South Asia, however, adds to evidence that the huge number of children out of school and the diversity of their needs can only be met by a diversity of provision, formal and non-formal; that because many state…

Working at the sixth grade level, the authors write about their effort to interest students in current events and their historical roots. This article outlines a series of learning experiences and assessments that the authors created for sixth grade students at Lockhart School in Massapequa, New York. These learning experiences culminated in a…

Malaysia is a federation of 13 states located in South-east Asia. The country consists of two geographical regions; Peninsular Malaysia (also known as West Malaysia) and Malaysian Borneo (also known as East Malaysia) separated by the South China Sea. The educational administration in Malaysia is highly centralised with four hierarchical levels;…

National tests, an influential assessment practice in many countries in East Asia, are often blamed as obstacles to good instructional practices. In this paper, the positive impact of assessment, national tests in particular, is discussed using the case of Singapore. The first part of the paper includes an analysis of items from the primary grade…

Since its establishment in 2003, the Japan Council on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD-J) has paid close attention to informal learning processes in community-based efforts to promote local sustainable development. ESD-J carried out two projects to collect information on and visualise community-based ESD practice: the…

The Open University of Indonesia (Universitas Terbuka, UT) has over 450,000 students distributed across a vast, diverse archipelago. UT will play a central role in meeting the requirement that over 1 million primary teachers earn four-year postsecondary degrees by 2015. While the Open University has considerable capacity in print-based and…

The scene is a televised debate, and the question is how to improve the quality of the nation's teaching force. On one side of the argument, a university scholar argues for raising the professional requirements for entry into the classroom. On the other, a top government education official, waving a thick report from a national teaching commission…

For thousands of years, the three perfections--painting, poetry, and calligraphy--have been considered the mark of an enlightened person throughout Asian cultures. Fifth-grade students learned about these three hallmarks by studying three works from the Detroit Institute of Art's Asian collection: a nineteenth-century Japanese hand scroll, a…

The focus of this workshop involving people from 13 countries in Asia and the Pacific Region was on using computers to assist learning in mathematics. The report contains the following sections: (1) Introduction; (2) The Mathematics Curriculum: Innovation and Change; (3) The Mathematics Classroom: New Ideas with Computers; (4) Software: Quality…

This document is the final report of the Regional Training Workshop for the Development of Materials for Mathematics Education in Asia and the Pacific, using a problem-solving approach. The workshop was committed to identifying materials which are readily available at low cost, in sufficient quantities to be used by children in classrooms in any…