Purpose: The paper is about a specific part of the Swedish governing system: the municipality, which has the responsibility of implementing national school goals. The starting point is an identified local governing chain including the chairman of the politically elected school board, the superintendent, principals and head teachers. It is the…

This paper examines to what extent and how the data and results of PISA have been used for various education stakeholders and to what extent PISA affect educational policy and practices in Hong Kong. From the point of view of the government, PISA has played an important role in supporting and legitimising government educational reform since 2000.…

This paper illustrates the use of simulation-based performance assessment (PA) methodology in a recent study of eighth-grade students' understanding of physical science concepts. A set of four simulation-based PA tasks were iteratively developed to assess student understanding of an array of physical science concepts, including net force,…

Teachers' participation in curriculum development is an area of research that has not been given adequate attention in the context of Saudi Arabia. This critical exploratory study investigated the issue of teachers' marginalisation in the curriculum development process with the aim of problematising power relations in Saudi Arabia's education…

After the junta came to power in May 2014, the military government started exercising their nation-centric hegemony through the educational policies and curriculum planning. Contemporary curriculum reform is employed as a mechanism for maintaining the status quo of elites group who have held privileged positions among the Thais. Looking through…

Higher education policies are increasingly focused on graduate learning outcomes, which infer an emphasis on, and deep understanding of, curriculum development across degree programs. As disciplinary influences are known to shape teaching and learning activities, research situated in disciplinary contexts is useful to further an understanding of…

The purpose of this article is to describe a collaborative effort among five teacher preparation programs to create a conceptual tool designed to put clinical experiences at the center of our programs. The authors refer to the resulting product as a clinical curriculum. The clinical curriculum describes a developmental sequence of clinical…

In this article I first discuss how in Singapore the concept of meritocracy captures both elitist and egalitarian aspirations, and the ways in which its education policies have for a long time vacillated between these conflicting dimensions. I then argue that critical studies of meritocracy need to go beyond an understanding of the term as an…

Similar to the other developing countries, undergraduate psychology programs in Turkish universities have rapidly grown in the last two decades. Although this sharp increment signifies the need for psychologists, it has also caused a number of challenges for effective teaching of psychology. The department chairs (N = 42) were interviewed with an…

As a psychologist of 35 years, Wendy Mogel discusses what she has discovered to be the new trend behind anxiety in young boys. Through hours of probing and pondering, neither hyperparenting nor early trauma (what one might think were logical causes of a young boy's anxiety) is the key to understanding this new trend. She explains that many…

Purpose: In the context of the creation of a two-year Master of Science in Business Administration programme to offer a scientifically sound and practice-related management education in Switzerland, a curriculum for learning and teaching research methods had to be designed. Major pedagogic challenges were identified and addressed by curricular…

This paper explores the controls and influences over geography teachers' curriculum making. A tension is identified between the teacher's agency to "make" a geography curriculum and a controlling social-economic climate of accountability, performance pressure and technological change which limits the teacher's agency. The paper argues…

Competence to work in schools is an important dimension of professional competence, although it is often a neglected dimension of teacher development. This article reports a qualitative study that examined student teachers' learning experiences in initial teacher education (ITE) in relation to competence to work in schools. In-depth interviews…

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities for embedding reflection in practice-based curricula in the arts. Following the root and branch curriculum reform project recently completed at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the paper presents a hermeneutic and analytical narrative of the challenges emerging from presenting reflection as…

In "Reinventing the High School Government Course," the authors presented the latest iteration of an ambitious AP government course developed over a seven-year design-based implementation research project. Chiefly addressed to curriculum developers and civics teachers, the article elaborates key design principles, provides a description…