Effective discipline is essential to creating safe, supportive learning environments for all students, which is critical to academic achievement. Since the passage of zero tolerance policies in the early 1990s, many school districts have relied on punitive discipline focused on harsh strategies such as using suspension and expulsion as primary…

According to data of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, in the 2006-2007 school year the number of daytime enrollment general education institutions was 58,500, with 38,600 of that number in rural areas. The total enrollment of all such schools was 14.3 million children, of which 4.4 million were in rural areas. From…

This article features Ruth Wright Hayre, Philadelphia's first black high school teacher and principal whose work at William Penn High School for Girls became a model for counseling and motivation programs at other majority-black high schools in Philadelphia, expanding educational and career opportunities for thousands of "able" students.…

This paper analyses how Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) can assist in increasing access to quality education and discusses how it can contribute to the content and learning methods on the Education for All (EFA) agenda. It explores both the tensions and the common ground between ESD and EFA, and identifies the potential synergies…

This paper looks at the implementation of the DESD from a global perspective. It takes the position that quality education is fundamental for learning how to live sustainably, and that the DESD needs to be better positioned in the education landscape and conceived as a global social movement that must be fostered and nurtured for the well-being of…

This article summarises research carried out between 2006 and 2008 by IPTS (Institution for Prospective Technological Studies) in collaboration with a consortium of experts from 10 member states, led by ICEGEC. The project gathered information on eLearning developments to assess drivers and barriers and to suggest implications for policy and…

A 10-year strategic plan for early childhood education introduced by the New Zealand Ministry of Education in 2002 included policies to create a teacher-led early childhood profession by 2012. This article reviews the provisions of the strategic plan and argues that it emerged from a critical ecology of the early childhood profession with a…

The MBA education has begun in America and now it has become mature after nearly one hundred years' development. Although China's MBA merely has a history of 17 years, it has already gained great achievements. In 1991, 9 universities in China had MBA program and 86 students enrolled in. In 2007, the two numbers were 127 and 59,776 respectively.…

Classroom exercises and role-playing activities that culminate in performance are invaluable instructional tools that stimulate active student responses to the aesthetic, emotional or intellectual content of literary texts and, ultimately, enrich a student's learning experience. The basic principles of classroom performance are to provide a…

Poor countries need development programs that are both effective and cost-effective. To assess effectiveness, researchers are increasingly using randomized trials (or quasi-experimental methods that imitate randomized trials), which provide a clear picture of which outcomes are attributable to the program being evaluated. This "Policy Insight"…

Changes in anatomy education over the last two decades have, in large part, led to less emphasis on gross anatomy in the medical curriculum. This has led many to question whether streamlined anatomy courses truly provide adequate preparation for medical practice. Rather than wondering about the effects of these changes, we should be actively…

As the small states that line the Arabian Peninsula spend their billions of petrodollars picking up luxury hotels, first-class airlines, and high-tech weaponry, three of the emirates--Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar--have been engaged in a high-stakes game of one-upmanship involving universities, American universities in particular. Recent reports…

This study reviews the developments of 9 Chinese top universities supported by "985 Project" during 1997-2005 based on the analysis of a series of scientometric indicators, including the total number of publications indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, the cumulated impact factor of publications,…

In this article we--as academic developers in two different faculties within a large, research-intensive university--discuss the scholarship of teaching and learning as a strategy for institutional improvement of teaching and learning. We focus on three related issues. Firstly, how can individual engagement in the scholarship of teaching and…

It is neither easy to change teacher thinking, nor is it easy to influence teaching practice by handing teachers the tools to do this in a course. It is suggested in this paper that it is not enough to let teachers who teach take a course on teaching in higher education. The process of influencing teachers' thinking should include working with the…