Pundits and bureaucrats use the results from international tests, particularly the PISA, to make claims about the quality of the public education system in the United States and make policy recommendations. In this article I argue, with evidence, that the scores and rankings from PISA are not important and that they cannot give policy makers or…

As a springboard into her response inspired by Noah Sobe's article, this author offers two possibilities for what cosmopolitanisms can tell about comparative and international education research. First, from her perspective, rooted in justice and peace studies, she is intrigued by several authors' assessments of cosmopolitanism as a cognitive or…

Ullysses Tucker likes a good challenge. After spending the first 20 years of his career working in media, he entered the development profession in 2000. He worked for the State University of New York Plattsburgh, New Jersey's Montclair State University, Louisiana's Grambling State University, and Western Illinois University before joining London…

Since the late 1990s there has been a fundamental shift in the way schooling and even education as a whole is evaluated. From this new perspective the education system would seem to be interpreted as a sub-system of the economic system and thus subservient to it. Decisions on education matters seem to have become determinant for individual…

The attention to the visualization of education policy is an area of study yet to be developed and explored. This paper extends the scholarship of "mediated education policy production" by developing a visual methodology to analyse a visual education policy document that takes the form of a documentary titled "Learning…

In the era of globalization, China, Korea and Japan have put forward favorable policies to develop higher education. The essay is aimed to make a comparison of their various policies. The conclusion is that, when facing similar forces and problems against the background of globalization, the guidelines and goals of the key construction projects in…

The field of youth studies appears to have increasingly taken on a self-consciously "international" orientation, characterized by grappling with how to represent local youth identities and social practices within international, transnational, or global contexts. This challenge is repeated across many different types of study and worked…

This essay focuses on the use of ideal types within different theoretical frameworks for the comparative analysis of culture and values. It emphasizes the importance of cultural agency, and the potential for enhanced understanding and the anticipation of future developments through exploring deep-level cultural patterns. The essay is written as a…

Many observers describe the 21st century as a complex age with new demands for education and new requirements for accountability in teaching and learning to meet society's needs in a new, global economy. At the same time, innovations in teaching and learning and proposals for measuring them often seem disconnected from public and political…

Compares the intellectual fecundity and publishing rates associated with various principal modern languages and the character of library systems used to bank and lend this intellectual capital. The problem, principal languages and recorded text, sources of data for bibliolinguistics, and book production by language and nation are discussed.…

Major conceptual differences exist between critical communication scholars and marketing researchers in their approaches to the study of international advertising. In marketing research, the conceptual framework is characteristically built around the multinational corporation, while critical communication scholarship stresses the nation-state. The…

As a counter to Europocentric views, a comparative approach should be used to study the history of European civilization in the premodern period. A framework for considering European history in comparison to that of three other civilizations is presented. (RM)

An analysis of four definitions of distance education from which are chosen six main components for a comprehensive definition. The article delineates the field of distance education and recommends some unanimity regarding terminology. (EAO)

Discusses the effect of recent developments (particularly globalization and advances in technology) on the production and perception of language, and on translation and the job profile of translators. Two conflicting forces of "globalism" and "tribalism" are presented and set off against the sociological concept of cultural…

This debate is part of a larger discussion on the effect of recent developments (particularly globalization and advances in technology) on the production and perception of language and focuses on assessing the quality of source texts and target texts in translation, the nature of translation versus the changing job profile of the translator, the…