Due to the increasingly multicultural nature of e-learning environments, it is critical that instructors and instructional designers be aware of the importance of cultural factors in education and that they deliver culturally adaptive instruction. The main challenge of this paper is identifying the critical success factors for multicultural online…

In our knowledge society and economy, doctoral education is increasingly considered as a means to produce knowledge workers to feed the needs of the global employment market. This raises concerns about the competencies developed through doctoral training. Surprisingly, only a few studies have addressed this question and most of them are restricted…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the influence of wealth, transparency and democracy on the number of universities per million people ranked among the top 300 and 500. The highly ranked universities in the world tend to be concentrated in a few countries. Design/Methodology/Approach: ANOVA was used to test the differences between the two groups…

This supplement contains documentation on the explicit and implicit stratification variables included in the TIMSS 2011 data files. The explicit strata are smaller sampling frames, created from the national sampling frames, from which national samples of schools were drawn. The implicit strata are nested within the explicit strata, and were used…

The study combines a bibliometric approach with a content analysis of abstracts of articles to explore the patterns of international comparative higher education research in leading international journals. The overall data set covers 4,095 publications from the Web of Science for the period 1992-2012 and the amount of international comparative…

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of pedagogy in lower-secondary school mathematics in Denmark and England. Lesson observations and interviews identified the range of goals towards which teachers in each country worked and the actions these prompted. These were clustered using the lens of Bernstein's pedagogic discourse to…

The aim of the study is to determine the status of Turkey among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) members and candidate countries through cluster and discriminant analyses according to PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) 2009 results. The study includes 475460 fifteen year-old students from 65…

Background: In PISA 2009, seven East Asian countries rank high among the 65 participating countries, but some of the differences among the seven countries are small to be of substantive meaning. Aims: This paper is an attempt to fine tune the comparisons for better understanding of the situation in East Asian. Sample: Data of the seven East Asian…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to determine possible grouping of similar MBA programmes offered by 45 British and French business schools accredited by the Association of Master Business Administration (AMBA) as of January 2006. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses the statistical co-plot method reported in a similar study of leading…

Electrical engineering (EE) curricula in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region have gone through an evolutionary process, and are now approaching a maturity level. In order to address academic and local industrial needs in a unified way, a need has been felt to investigate EE curricula in a way that highlights theoretical understanding, design…

Discusses the lack of classification systems as a major deficiency in the field of comparative education. Examines previous typologies of education systems and of forms of intergroup relations. Offers a tentative classification of 135 national education systems based on 15 conventional indicators using factor analysis and cluster analysis.…

Training designs are critical to the success of intercultural training programmes. A common typology for classifying intercultural training designs distinguishes among the following dimensions: experiential discovery versus didactic expository and culture-specific versus culture-general training. The purpose of this paper is to assess different…

For primary and secondary schools, the evidence concerning the effects of streaming (grouping by overall ability) and mixed-ability grouping is inconclusive. Many have concluded that there is no difference between the two systems in their effect on academic progress, social adjustment, attitudes toward school, or friendship patterns. (RM)