Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the relationship between prospective teachers' cultural profiles and service quality expectations in a pedagogical training program in Greece. Design/methodology/approach: Using the EppekQual scale and an alternative Hofstede's cultural scale, 113 prospective teachers in a Greek training program were…

Developing countries achieve surprisingly weak results in international cognitive competence studies. The results are about one to two standard deviations below the average norm-values obtained in Western countries. The results are so low that they are sometimes difficult to believe. For example, in the World Bank collection, Nigeria scored 262…

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a worldwide commitment to a set of ambitious goals that advance sustainable social justice across the globe. Higher education (HE), while featuring in SDG 4: Quality Education, needs to occupy a bolder and more explicit position in the formulation of the SDGs and in their attainment, not…

Brexit raised the question of whether the UK will continue to attract internationals. Here the focus is on academic staff - a critical component of the "War for Talents" discourse and current geopolitics in the field. Despite a clear trend of loss of EU internationals, at least among western EU countries, the UK more than compensates for…

This research study was conducted to illuminate teacher attitudes toward professional development in a large urban school district and to discern if differences existed in teachers' perceptions of professional development are dependent upon employment in a high-achieving school or low-achieving school. This study also sought to determine whether…

Using data from a longitudinal German large-scale study and structural equation modeling, this study investigated the effects of different dimensions of the early home learning environment (HLE) as well as the effect of language-related preschool quality at the age of 3 to 5 years on students' later school-relevant language proficiency (as…

The American Sociological Association identified 12 major recommendations for the undergraduate major, which include 11 learning goals articulated in the sociological literacy framework. In total, these recommendations identified upward of 70 different curricular elements that optimal sociology programs should consider satisfying. This article…

There is an increasing need to train and retrain personnel that would be saddled with the capabilities, professional and skill developmental requirement that meets societal needs. In this case, there is need for adequately trained personnel that will bridge the gap between societal needs; industrial needs with classroom instructions and vice…

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words as in Lord Byron's (1788-1824) line from his satirical epic poem Don Juan; "melancholy merriment", An oxymoron is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect, often revealing paradox. The effect I aim for here is the actualization of affect; affect made…

This multiple case study investigates instructional designers' perceptions of online course quality, their use of cognitive load strategies when designing online courses, and whether utilization of these strategies contribute to online course quality. The participants of this study were instructional designers (n = 5) who worked in various campus…

This chapter summarizes existing evidence on the link between education and innovation and presents open questions for future research. After a brief review of theoretical frameworks on the link between education, innovation, and economic growth, we explore three alternative policies to encourage innovation through education: expanding access to…

Customers in the higher education industry in the U.S. are unable to make value decisions about their educational purchases due to a lack of quality measures that enable comparisons of institutions' academic offerings. In an environment in which all student work is posted online, it would be possible to evaluate bodies of student work to enable…

This article reports the outcomes of community participation and quality learning education resulting from the MEMBACA II project. MEMBACA (Making Early Matter through Books and Community Action) is a literacy project that targets young children in Indonesia. The MEMBACA project includes teacher training, community reading activities, and…

This article seeks to provide a new paradigm for questioning how quality and excellence in teaching practices are understood and evaluated. By combining ideas from complexity theory and Michel Foucault's conception of polymorphous correlations, I argue that a shift away from the forms of thought that engender reductionist evaluations can become a…

Research Findings: A growing number of stakeholders in early childhood education (ECE) rely on self-assessment to assess and improve the quality of ECE. In this systematic review, we investigated the reliability and validity of self-assessment in ECE, summarizing findings from 27 publications. We meta-analytically synthesized findings from 25…