Despite the great body of work examining the cultural content of the international and local ELT textbooks, the cultural content and elements of the ELT textbooks in the inner, outer, and expanding circle countries have seldom been reported. That said, the purpose of this study was twofold: first, it was aimed to investigate the cultural content…

This article analyses the contribution of post-compulsory education and training systems to the development of literacy and numeracy skills across OECD countries. While there is extensive cross-country comparative research on the effects of primary and lower secondary education systems on aggregate skills levels, there has been little comparative…

Through the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals, governments committed to achieving universal secondary school completion, including eliminating gender disparities, by 2030. Yet, by 2013, only 14 percent of children in low-income countries had completed secondary school. And in many countries, even those who attend school fail to gain basic…

Many nation-states have realized the importance of tertiary education and the world has seen a corollary increase in tertiary education enrollments. Using Berry and Berry's event history model as a framework, this study tests both the internal features of each country and the influence that nation-states have on each other with regard to setting…

With the strengthening of the global economy, contemporary societies have come to view the educational achievements of their young people as a major component of national competiveness. But there are substantial variations in the strategies employed by different nations. To maximize educational achievements, some nations believe that the provision…

Easing access to higher education (HE) for those engaging in lifelong learning has been a common policy objective across the European Union since the late 1990s. To reach this goal, the transition between vocational and academic routes must be simplified, but European countries are at different developmental stages. This article maps the…

This paper examines the relative importance of upper secondary subject choice and attainment in explaining social inequalities in access to higher education (HE) in Scotland and Ireland. These two countries differ in the extent of curriculum differentiation, in the degree of standardisation in school examination and in HE entry criteria. In…

This study sought to understand environmental knowledge and attitudes among young people to explain the relationship between environmental education (EE) and reported pro-environmental behaviours (PEB). A mixed-methods design was employed: 88 university students in the UK and Nigeria were surveyed and 6 were subsequently interviewed. The findings…

The assessment of university students' economic knowledge has become an increasingly important research area within and across countries. Particularly, the different influences of prior education, native language, and gender as some of the main prerequisites on students' economic knowledge have been highlighted since long. However, the findings…

The results from a cross-national study comparing calculus performance of students at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai and students at the University of Michigan before and after their first university calculus course are presented. Overall, ECNU significantly outperformed Michigan on both the pre- and post-tests, but the Michigan…

Drawing on comparative analyses from nine Western countries, we ask whether local-born children from a wide range of immigrant groups show patterns of female advantage in education that are similar to those prevalent in their host Western societies. We consider five outcomes throughout the educational career: test scores or grades at age 15,…

Ogbu and Simon's (1998) and Ogbu's (2003) cultural-ecological theoretical framework postulates that voluntary immigrants, those who chose to migrate to a new land, would perform well academically because of their perceived beliefs that they could get a good education and could succeed more in their "new" land of opportunity than in their…

This article examines cross-country variations in adult skills inequality and asks why skills in Anglophone countries are so unequal. Drawing on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent Survey of Adult Skills and other surveys, it investigates the differences across countries and country groups in inequality in both…

Results are presented of a comparative study of the reasons for parental choice of Scottish Gaelic-medium and Welsh-medium primary education in the year 2000 and of the reasons for pupils' decisions to continue with Gaelic or Welsh-medium education at secondary school in 2007. Parents in both contexts cited the quality of Celtic-medium education…

Improvements in workforce skills are essential for European countries to attain higher economic growth and to compete effectively on product markets. Literature indicates a positive relationship between levels of education and productivity growth. This report builds on and expands this body of research in two ways: (1) It investigates the…