The Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) results, released in 2013, have spurred researchers to engage in rich analyses. In addition to making it possible to compare skill levels among the 23 participating nations, the PIAAC data have enabled researchers to analyze relationships among cognitive literacy, numeracy, and…

The comparative analysis of modern foreign concepts and systems of professional training of specialists in Western European countries has been carried out. Leading ideas, principles and regularities of the development of continuous professional education have been revealed. It has been stated that most developed European countries gradually reduce…

Comparing places represents one of the most traditional threads of comparative inquiry. However, international and comparative (adult) education research has to date focused on comparing places more in the sense of territorial entities. In contrast, this paper moves away from understandings of national or regional territories as given,…

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is put forward as a landmark development in the lifelong monitoring and international comparison of education. The first round of PIAAC's Survey of Adult Skills compared performance in literacy, numeracy and…

Innovation has become an increasingly important concept for Australian businesses in enabling them to continue to compete in an international market, but where does vocational education and training (VET) sit in this? To date, VET has been largely overlooked by the National Innovation and Science Agenda as a potential contributor in this field.…

Today Ukraine is in the process of establishing an integral base for adult education and the system of employees' professional development. Hence, the research of the experience of the countries with a fixed, ramified, but integral system of normative and juridical documents in the above-mentioned fields can be of great use. Addressing to the USA…

The necessity of forming foreign communicative competence of adult immigrants has been substantiated. The topicality of this issue for Ukraine has been defined. The experience of Global Talent Bridge, an initiative of World Education Services that is dedicated to helping skilled immigrants fully utilize their talents and education in the United…

Vocational education and its leadership is an important sphere of economic activity worldwide and is being impacted by several trends including: the increasing significance and centrality of skills development in today's economies; economic trends associated with globalisation (internationalisation of education and emergence of global labour…

Through a comparative study of the United Kingdom and Spain, this article addresses the effect of different research governance structures on the functioning and uses of research evaluation. It distinguishes three main evaluation uses: distributive, improvement, and controlling. Research evaluation in the United Kingdom plays important…

This paper describes and conceptualizes the meaning of lifelong learning from two cultural perspectives--East and West. It examines the different principles underpinning lifelong learning that explain why and how elders in the two cultures engage differently in continued learning. Finally, it discusses the cultural impact on elder learning by…

All industrialized countries are grappling with a common problem--how to provide assistance of various kinds to their rapidly aging populations. The problem for countries searching for models of efficient and high-quality long-term care (LTC) policies is that fewer than a dozen countries have government-organized, formal LTC policies. Relatively…

In most advanced countries, young people are now expected to remain in education until the age of 18 and, in a context of poor opportunities for those who leave at an early stage, there are concerns about those who are being left behind. In this paper we use comparable survey data to focus on the destinations of young people in two contrasting…

This article compares the evidence from the 2009 PISA survey on the distribution of skills amongst 15-year-olds in different regions and country groups and explores how education systems in these regions contribute to different levels of inequality. In the second part, it presents evidence from surveys on adult skills and attitudes on how skills…

There is concern from government in each of the sample sites over the role fathers play in supporting their children through school. Fathers have become a more "visible parent" and a focus for policy-makers in education. Family literacy programmes are used in this article as an example of an educational programme where fathers are often…

This article investigates the social benefits of initial vocational education and training (VET) for individuals in different European contexts. Drawing on data from the European Community Household Panel, results show that initial VET is associated with positive changes in social outcomes for individuals across Europe. Health benefits were mainly…