Soviet higher education had a distinctive institutional landscape. It combined two institutional types in a uniform model that embedded higher education in the national economy. This paper focuses on the post-Soviet system-level changes in the institutional landscape in all 15 countries of the former USSR. It shows that over last three decades the…

Does empirical evidence or ideology most influence homeschooling policy? It depends. Where empirical research and social experience abound, regulations seem less restrictive but where there is less data or experience policies seem more restrictive and ideologically driven. By comparing Europe and the United States with a look at South Africa,…

While Instrumental Music Education (IME) is offered to students in most developed countries, its rationale and implementation differ significantly due to the sociocultural values and expectations of each society, which tend to remain implicit within educational policies. In this article, we argue that each society should be fully aware of the…

From a Nordic and British perspective, the history of education is a vibrant field of knowledge production. It invites scholars from the humanities and social sciences to investigate the continuities and changes in education over time, as well as "Bildung," nurturing, learning, and teaching. By underlining the breadth of the history of…

In Japanese higher education, there is a notable shift in learning assistance. It is transitioning from merely providing remedial help to fostering comprehensive student success. This study examines learning assistance in Japanese higher education, which was restructured in the 1950s following the American university system, through comparison…

Measures of association, which typically require pairwise data, are widespread in many aspects of educational research. However, due to the need to reduce their content to equal numbers of units of analysis, they are rarely found in the analysis of textbooks. In this paper, we present two methods for overcoming this limitation, one through the use…

This article explores the framing of youth and adult education (YAE) policies in two Latin American countries, namely Chile and Peru. It takes their participation in PIAAC as a contextual starting point to unravel the problems explicitly or implicitly framed in YAE policies and their root causes, as understood by key policy stakeholders. We found…

Comparative education research is complicated by the difficulty of identifying comparable units across contexts. This paper considers the advantages and limitations of a functional equivalence approach to comparative education. The functional equivalence approach allows us to meaningfully compare the operations that serve each function in the full…

This article empirically examines the ways in which Initial Teacher Education in Scotland and Alberta, Canada, seeks to 'get students in', 'get them out and into the workforce', 'get on with teaching future teachers' and how it should 'get on with students'. Using Adams' (2016) policy heuristic, which posits that policy can be discerned in three…

The article assesses the role comparative research plays from the 1980s in understanding vocational education and training (VET) systems in Europe, driven by political, economic, social and labour market changes. This research has been transformed, moving from national comparisons of VET systems, grounded in institutional theory and engaging with…

This article contributes to contemporary theorising in comparative education by exploring how narratives of 'victims' and 'perpetrators' in postcolonial settings are understood in terms of affective justice. "Affective justice" is introduced as a framework for understanding justice as an affective practice. Through the analysis of two…

A significant distinguishing characteristic of the International Classroom Lexicon Project was the documentation of classroom pedagogical practices of mathematics teachers in the original languages of ten communities. These lexicons provide us with an opportunity to compare identified teacher practices within these communities. In this paper, we…

In a world characterized by a formal global consensus on norms of "Education for All," countries face growing social pressures to rationalize their educational institutions around a global and standardized set of best practices. In this context, I argue that national assessments are part of a more general set of organizational structures…

A comparative analysis of Irish history at school in the two parts of Ireland from 1921 to the 1990s is proposed here through an examination of history curricula and textbooks. The main focus is on the 1980s and 1990s, which were pivotal decades, usually described as having brought about a gradual convergence between the Republic of Ireland and…

Success for All (SFA) is a school improvement project promoted by the team of Professor Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University. This paper reviewed the development process of SFA and analyzed its characteristics. By comparing with China's "New Basic Education" project, we summarized the reference value of SFA for China, and further…