Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

The aim of this paper is to describe changing learner identities and trajectories of identification that take place among vocational education and training (VET) apprentices in Norway. This paper describes 23 young, male VET students' learner identities in compulsory school (age 7-15) in comparison to their learner identities in VET…

In light of an international policy movement to increase focus on students' academic achievement, the question of how to improve schools has become an important issue at all levels in the school system. Substantial resources have been invested in reforms to improve conditions for pupils' learning. Great expectations and responsibility are often…

Enhancing students' learning autonomy has been emphasized in the current round of English curriculum reforms by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in China. The initial aim of the new guidelines was developed to enhance students' English proficiency to better fulfil their basic education (Nine-year compulsory education). However, up until now, very…

While many earlier studies have shown a positive correlation between parents' education and children health, little attempt has been made to address the possibility that unobserved characteristics underlie this intergenerational relationship. This paper explores the effect of additional schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws in Great…

This paper sets out the main findings of the International Instructional Systems Study (IISS), conducted by the UCL Institute of Education and funded by the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The study examined the instructional systems and intended curricula of six "high performing" countries and two US states. The…

Drawing on world culture and local culture explanations of educational change, this article aims to understand the dynamics of educational reform in Turkey in 1997 that expanded compulsory primary education from five to eight years. To do so, speeches given by opponents and proponents of the reform in the Turkish parliament were analysed.…

In many developing countries, researchers and policy makers have downplayed issues of age in grade intentionally. This is done partly to avoid the pedagogical issues that over-age or under-age children in schools raise. It is also done to avoid putting extra pressure on government especially in developing nations that is still working hard to…

In different ways and in different contexts it has been and still is argued that music education should be prioritized because of its positive impact on pupils in terms of general development as good citizens and in terms of skills in other disciplines. In this article, the authors discuss whether this tendency is best interpreted as an example of…

Today, technology education in Sweden is both a high-status and a low-status phenomenon. Positive values such as economic growth, global competitiveness and the sustainability of the welfare state are often coupled with higher engineering education and sometimes even upper secondary education. Negative values, on the other hand, are often…

The purpose of this study is to compare how Swedish school principals understand basic values that are important in fulfilling the Swedish national curriculum, Curriculum 1994 (a new curriculum, Curriculum 2011, which came into operation in autumn 2011, has only minor differences compared to the common text in Curriculum 1994), considering…

The article examines the stability and success of ideas within pedagogical discourses. Why do certain ideas attract actors and how does change come about? These general questions are dealt with through considering the example of the swift spread of an interdisciplinary idea, "arbetsområde" (translated to "spheres of work") in…

Understanding the relationship between high school dropout and teen childbearing is complicated because both are affected by a variety of difficult to control factors. In this paper, I use panel data on aggregate dropout and fertility rates by age for all fifty states to develop insight by instrumenting for dropout using information on state…

The role of pre-vocational education in general compulsory education has become increasingly relevant over recent years, with the international debate focussing particularly on its importance in school-to-work transitions. This study considers curriculum design and the implementation of pre-vocational education in four countries with radically…

This paper presents results of a study on teachers' conceptions of assessment carried out on a sample of 493 teachers of Spanish as foreign language from all over the world. At the moment of data collection, the participants were members of an international online teacher community and were teaching at different professional contexts: basic…