High student achievement across East Asia is often explained as an outcome of highly competitive, stress-inducing college entrance exams across the region. This 'exam hell' drives students to study longer and harder than their peers worldwide, a race that leads--unsurprisingly--to higher marks in international comparisons such as the Programme for…

A survey was conducted to study the preferred learning strategies; that is, surface learning or deep learning of undergraduate and graduate male and female students and the impact of the preferred strategy on their academic performance. Both learning strategies help university students to get good scores in their examinations to meet the demands…

In "Unforgiving Confucian culture: A breeding ground for high academic achievement, test anxiety and self-doubt?" Stankov (in press) provides three reasons for caution against over-glorifying the academic excellence of Confucian Asian learners, namely that it may lead to a reluctance to change their rote learning approach which is not conducive to…

The Arab world contains one of the greatest cultures and histories of any ethnic group in the world. However, since the 1980s, the education of this region has plummeted despite increases in school enrollers. This is prominently seen in the illiteracy rate of 30% throughout the Arab world. Furthermore, with a high unemployment rate of 14%, which…

This article focused on the investigation of the differences in the frequency of language learning strategy use by successful and unsuccessful first-year students of a Chinese university. The study found that successful students used a wider range of learning strategies for EFL learning significantly more frequently than unsuccessful students. It…

Education Queensland's New Basics project has extended conceptions of "equity" to incorporate dimensions such as higher order thinking and student control of classroom activity. This requires a critique of the outcomes attained by even high achieving students. It is therefore useful to interrogate professional discourses that shape…