Expansion of higher education has been perceived as the major tool through which China can raise its international competitiveness. To raise educational quality, the Ministry of Education initiated a new employment reform and a Teaching Quality Assessment for Undergraduate Programs. In this research, we employed a qualitative method to investigate…

The concept of new university reduces the depth of disciplinary understanding at the undergraduate level. Instead, interdisciplinary understanding has been put forward, where room is provided for the broader development of student. Receiving training from multiple perspectives will provide students with the skills necessary in an era of present…

Our educational system has always reflected the social, cultural, and economic conditions prevailing at the time. The impact of technological advances as well as global competition now impose a new agenda on higher education to ensure that all students can succeed in a complex and rapidly changing world. Fortunately, we have many resources to aid…

Purpose: A modern business graduate is expected to have strong disciplinary skills as well as the soft skills of communication and team work. However today's business graduate needs to be more than the traditional "I-shaped" graduate of the past and more of the "T-shaped" graduate employers are looking for. Many undergraduate…

Chinese higher education institutions have been subjected to the intensive bureaucratic governance led by the central authorities since 1949. Since the new public management has been a burgeoning social discourse, some reforms have been conducted recently, centering on the competitive contract-centered employment of staff, integration of…

Twenty-first-century biology is inherently interdisciplinary. Every aspect of biology, from molecules to organisms to ecosystems, is richly informed by the physical, mathematical, and computational sciences. It is both an exciting and daunting time for biology educators--exciting because of the vast opportunity for important new discoveries that…

A principal consideration in recent cross-sector educational reforms in Hong Kong is ensuring that undergraduate programmes prepare students for the future workplace, a factor that has made the capstone a central feature of the new four-year curriculum. This paper discusses a study that explored the final-year student experience based on a…

In 2008, the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne embarked upon a major overhaul of curriculum in nine languages: Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in the Asia Institute; and French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish in the School of Languages and Linguistics. This article details the changes to the beginners' Italian…

The study described in this article sets out to understand the barriers and affordances to successful completion of the short research thesis required in many advanced undergraduate courses or Honours programmes. In the study, the genre features of students' research projects and the criteria used to assess them were analysed and both students and…

The purpose of this short article is to (a) briefly summarize the findings of two important recent resources concerning the future of biology in the 21st century; one, Vision and Change, A Call to Action [AAAS, 2009. AAAS, Washington, DC], concerned with undergraduate education in biology, the other, A New Biology for the 21st Century [National…

Sun Yat-sen University's East-meets-West curriculum is distinctive, but its embrace of liberal education--education across disciplines, meant to provoke broad thinking--is far from unusual. At a time when China and its East Asian neighbors are trouncing U.S. students on international exams, educators in these countries are nonetheless adopting,…

In this article the authors peer into current elementary classrooms and college composition courses in 2020 to envision what K-12 and composition curricula can do now to ensure today's students are prepared for those future composition classes. The authors interviewed veteran (20 or more years) K-6 teachers in a small university town and…

The evolution in undergraduate medical school curricula has significantly impacted anatomy education. This study investigated the perceived role of clinical anatomy and evaluated perceptions of medical students' ability to apply anatomical knowledge in the clinic. The aim of this study was to develop a framework to enhance anatomical educational…

In this study, the following questions were addressed in an undergraduate non-major biology course using a large lecture format: Is there a relationship between students' perceptions of their learning environment and course performance, and what roles do motivation and attitudes play in mediating that relationship? The purpose of this study was to…

Within Australia most Departments of Geography have been merged with programmes in Environmental Studies or Earth Sciences, and have been cast as multidisciplinary contributors to the increasingly vocational concerns of universities. One outcome is that named Geography programmes for postgraduates are not growing in institutional prominence in…