One of the recent tributes to the success of Finnish schooling was the PISA 2000 project report. As befits the field of education, the explanations are primarily pedagogical, referring especially to the excellent teachers and high-quality teacher education. Without underrating the explanatory power of these statements, this paper presents some of…

Having data available is so important because it can improve upon our personal perceptions. Admittedly, statistics can sometimes be skewed to tell whatever story their handlers want them to tell, but by and large, high-quality data allow us to step back from personal perceptions and embark on an analysis with an eye toward identifying the root…

Mathematics and science are key areas of knowledge for development but South African performance in these areas is still of concern. This policy-related article provides a nuanced analysis of performance indicators. Using Gauteng as a case study the article examines the mathematics trends (the period 1998-2003) in participation and in particular…

The signing of the No Child Left Behind Act on January 8, 2002, moved the federal effort to influence K-12 schooling to a new and higher level--more aggressive, focused, and directive. The act requires that school districts and schools demonstrate adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward a particular goal: universal student achievement of standards…

In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," the Red Queen tells Alice: "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." In the first of a series of columns, this author discusses why the Red Queen principle, as…

Contemporary universities, serving mass higher education markets, find themselves delivering complex, broadly based projects such as student support and welfare, human resource development, and business enterprise. Established concepts of academic administration and devolved management have been overlaid by more fluid institutional structures and…

This paper examines the presentation of three sets of indicators on education published by the OECD ("Education at a Glance"), the European Union ("Key Data on Education") and the French Ministry of Education ("The State of Education") in recent years. In the first part, the author describes the way "Education at…

The last decade the development of (international) educational indicators has been extending in many ways: the number of countries involved, the aspects covered, the impact on educational policy, their attention in the media. More recent is the attention that is given to the feedback of indicators to individual schools. More and more stakeholders…

In 1996 the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) adopted an Environment Plan which incorporated classical technical education, promoting multidisciplinary environmental research, and improving the environmental performance of university life as a whole. This paper outlines the first environment plan (1996-2001). It discusses its encouraging…

The goal of this study was to determine if on-line out-of-class quizzing would lead to increases in (a) classroom engagement (b) academic performance and (c) preparation perception of college students. Twenty-four sophomore level students enrolled in a required functional anatomy course participated in this study. Results from this study indicate…

Along with the rest of the education sector universities have been encouraged to develop strategies for educational improvement. The strategies that have emerged have been heavily influenced by the policies and priorities of the government and government agencies, such as the Quality Assurance Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council, and…

Studying change in student achievement is of central importance in numerous areas of educational research, including efforts to monitor school performance, investigations of the effects of educational interventions over time, and school effects studies focusing on how differences in school policies and practices relate to differences in student…

The author maintains that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 brands good schools with "failing" labels, places the heaviest burdens on states that were already striving to meet challenging education goals, imposes inflexible rules, and fails to make good on promises to pay for programs that would help struggling schools meet the…

This article offers a German response to John Hull's recent article on "religious education in Germany and England" (in "BJRE", volume 27, issue 1). The author claims that recent developments have brought religious education in both countries much closer together than in the past and that the differences between the respective…

This manuscript describes the impact of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation on Career and Technical Education (CTE) programs. The manuscript begins with a review of the various aspects of the NCLB legislation, discussing historical legislation leading up to NCLB and emphasizing contemporary issues that affect K-12 education. The manuscript…