This statement on social work practice research highlights the contributions of scholars, practitioners, and conference participants in the Fourth International Conference on Practice Research (ICPR) in 2017, hosted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in May 2017. It focuses on the contexts and challenges of carrying out practice research in…

In this article, Charlie Taylor offers a commentary on Yang et al.'s 2021 "Reading in a Foreign Language" article, "Text Difficulty in Extensive Reading: Reading Comprehension and Reading Motivation." In their study, Yang et al. analyzed the effects of text difficulty on the reading comprehension and motivation of high school…

This article explores the significance of sustainability and several ways in which education for sustainable development (ESD) can be considered. It presents several issues related to the theories of sustainability and ESD, which are generated based on a firm concept of anthropocentrism. ESD has been used for developing a scientific understanding…

The aim of this paper is to explore the meaning of dwelling in place in terms of the critical trilogy of place. The critical trilogy is a constructively interpretive framework incorporating Greenwood's critical pedagogy of place and Heidegger's philosophical insights of dwelling. The critical trilogy of place, comprising decentralisation,…

This study investigates the images of teachers presented in Taiwanese children's books published between 1960 and 2012 using the narrative theory outlined by Nikolajeva ("Child Lit Assoc Q," 28(1):5-16, 2003). A purposive sample based upon the portrayal of school life is applied. One hundred and one books were identified as texts in…

This paper explores the notion of Affective Pedagogy of Human Rights Education (APHRE) on a theoretical level and suggests a concept of curricular framework. APHRE highlights the significance of affectivity and body in the process of learning, factors usually neglected in the mainstream intellectualistic approach to learning, especially in areas…

In this paper we reflect on the challenges of engaging in social justice work within elite schools. Drawing on experiences collaborating with an elite school in a justice-oriented research project, we consider the theoretical resources that informed this work. We demonstrate how Freire's work has been critical in forming the kind of relations that…

With a specific focus on power relations in creating and distributing knowledge in society, this study examines the government-published children's series "Historical Picture of Taiwan" produced in Taiwan in the Martial Law era (1949-1987) to uncover ideological assumptions and persuasions permeating both linguistic and visual…

This paper examines an account of a practitioner-initiated transformation of workplace-based social relationship within a grassroots adult education institution. This tripartite relationship among adult students, staff and teachers, abbreviated as AST, is a major driving force for activities and missionary functioning of the XinZhuang Community…

Museums have been employing theatre activities in their educational programmes to outreach youngsters for more than three decades all over the world since the late 1980s; however, it is still quite a new experience for eastern and south-eastern Asian countries. In the past 3 years, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan started to use different forms of…

When implementing standard setting procedures, there are two major concerns: variance between panelists and efficiency in conducting multiple rounds of judgments. With regard to the former, there is concern over the consistency of the cutoff scores made by different panelists. If the cut scores show an inordinately wide range then further rounds…

The study compared the aberrance detection powers of the BW person-fit indices with other group-based indices (SCI, MCI, NCI, and Wc&Bs) and item response theory based (IRT-based) indices (OUTFITz, INFITz, ECI2z, ECI4z, and lz). Four kinds of comparative conditions, including content category (CC), types of aberrance (AT), severity of…

With regard to the evolution of Marxist theories affecting the relationship between China and Taiwan historically and conceptually, this paper starts with the conceptual framing of the general evolution of Marxist theories--Marxism, neo-Marxist, and post-Marxism. Through dialectical and reconceptualized practice and learning the development of…

The promotion of sex/gender equity education in Taiwan was initiated by a women's movement group, the Awakening Foundation in the late 1980s. In 1997, it became a policy in education. The passage of the Gender Equity Education Act in 2004 was a major milestone. At present, although gender equity education has been essentially institutionalized,…

In a selected response test, aberrant responses such as careless errors and lucky guesses might cause error in ability estimation because these responses do not actually reflect the knowledge that examinees possess. In a computerized adaptive test (CAT), these aberrant responses could further cause serious estimation error due to dynamic item…