In this reflective essay, I share my experiences as a US-based professor leading graduate students on a 2-month teaching practicum in northern Thailand. I describe the process of arranging the practicum in coordination with the host university and the challenges of teaching 2 teacher-education courses while also mentoring novice teachers and…

In recent years a number of western universities have established professional development courses in international contexts. These have often involved tutors travelling to countries with which they may have previously had little contact, in order to deliver courses that have been long established in their own universities. This article discusses…

The growing demand for an increasingly skilled competitive workforce and the associated demand for change and responsiveness in the provision of technical vocational education and training (TVET) has led to the development of stronger links between New Zealand and the People's Republic of China. A collaborative model programme project aims to…

The re-conceptualisation of texts over the last 20 years, as well as the development of a multimodal understanding of communication and representation of knowledge, has profound consequences for the reading and understanding of multimodal texts, not least in educational contexts. However, if teachers and students are given tools to…

The series Investing in Youth builds on the expertise of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on youth employment, social support and skills. It covers both OECD countries and countries in the process of accession to the OECD, as well as some emerging economies. This report provides a detailed diagnosis of the youth…

To study the concept of national IQ profile, we compared U.S. and Finnish WAIS, WAIS-R, and WAIS III nonverbal and working memory subtest norms. The U.S. standardization samples had consistently higher scores on the Coding and Digit span subtests, while the Finnish samples had higher scores on the Block design subtest. No stable cross-national…

The Global Partnership for Education (GPE) is the only multilateral partnership and fund dedicated exclusively to education in the world's poorest countries. The partnership includes developing country partners, donor countries, multilateral agencies, civil society, teachers, philanthropic foundations and the private sector. GPE brings together…

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in…

Increasingly, school teachers are expected to be able to teach about and across cultures, as well as teach in digitally enriched classrooms. Teacher educators are expected to prepare their teaching students for such challenges. One university designed the eTutor online environment to enhance and support the development of pre-service teachers'…

In this article the author reflects on her visits to American schools to talk about the experiences she describes in "Red Scarf Girl." In her book, she explains picture by picture, story after story how she and her family lived in darkness, how they were brainwashed, and about the concentration of power in China. She stresses that …

Whereas the autism prevalence rate has been very closely monitored in the United States, the same has not been observed in many other countries. This may be attributed to the fact that each culture views and defines autism differently. Using field notes and semi-structured interviews with family members with an individual with autism, teachers,…

One challenge for comparative research is providing a convincing and comprehensive account of how social and political value positions translate into situated acts of teaching; or bringing values and practice together to allow teaching embedded in one context to be compared with teaching embedded in another so as to better inform educationalists…

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,…

As the world becomes smaller in a small field like gifted education, cross-cultural research gives us a unique opportunity to understand top students and academic interventions in a deeper way. In this article, the author describes the importance of cross-cultural research as a way to serve gifted children globally. A description of a…

Research on the opinions of Russian and French college students reflect different national views as to the qualitity of personality that are necessary for the head of a modern state. (Contains 1 table and 3 notes.)