Education System

The Finnish education system has received attention from all over the world because it came out on top in the PISA surveys. Finnish 15-year-olds have been number one in terms of skills in science, mathematics, the reading of literature and problem solving, and only a very few students fall within the lowest PISA categories. Likewise, the differences between schools are small. A major reason for high level learning outcomes can be seen as a result of a purposeful educational policy and a high competence of teachers. The educational policy has purposefully aimed at equity in education and has promoted the common comprehensive school model. In the process, many important decisions have been made. One of those has been the decision that all teacher education was raised to the MA level (5 years programs and teachers are seen as professionals who have a right and obligation ton develop their work in schools. The structure and contents of all teacher education, including secondary school teachers, aim at research and evidence-based orientation. This means that teachers learn to take an analytical and open-minded approach to their work, that they draw conclusions based on their observations, and experiences and that they develop their teaching and learning environments in a systematic way.

This thesis consists of three empirical studies in economics of education on the determinants and consequences of language-in-education (LiE) policies. The “Environmental settings – Inputs – Processes – Immediate outcomes – Long-term outcomes” (EIPOL) evaluation model is applied to LiE policies and programs and serves as the overall framework of this research (see Introductory Chapter). Each study then targets at least one stage of the EIPOL framework to test the validity of the “green” vs. “free-market” linguistic theories. Whereas the two first studies derive models tested empirically in the African context, the third is tested on a sample of countries from the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS). The first study, Rationales to Language-in-Education Policies in Postcolonial Africa: Towards a Holistic Approach, considers two issues. First, it explores the factors affecting the choice of an LiE policy in 35 African countries. The results show that the countries adopting a uni...

An enormous challenge when the Internet matured into a mainstream technology was meeting the information technology workforce needs in a competitive business environment. In anticipation of a similar scenario for upcoming grid technology we are in the process of implementing a comprehensive multitier NSF-supported adaptation of grid technology in education. The project addresses the above mentioned challenge at three important levels of our educational system: the undergraduate, the graduate and the industrial training. Our grid technology-based curriculum has been developed for a sequence of two new courses for senior level undergraduates. The same courses would be taught at the graduate level with emphasis on research. Additionally, seminars are planned for spreading grid awareness to the local businesses and industries by using domain-dependent grid applications. This paper presents the details of the model we call GridForce (Grid For Research, Collaboration and Education) and our experiences with its implementation, with the objective of improving the technical preparedness of the workforce for the grid.

Aim: To investigate whether children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) have bowel symptoms consistent with underlying enterocolitis. Methods: Information on children's stool patterns and gut symptoms collected by questionnaire at 4 weeks and at 6, 18, 30 and 42 months of age were available for

Designers of AI educational systems have largely ignored the problem of choosing what information to present and how to present it because systems to date have not been faced with a large space of possible presentations. This paper explains how a student model can provide the knowledge needed to make presentation decisions. Systems that use a student model for this purpose can make problems more interesting, challenging, and hand-tailored to students. We describe DECIDER: a program that improves student's decision-making abilities by constructing an environment where they can confront problems and decide on a plan of action. DECIDER chooses from a database of decision-making problems and varies how it presents those problems based on a model of the student's knowledge of goals, plans, and priorities.

This short Country Report, a result of a larger infoDev-supported Survey of ICT in Education in Africa, provides a general overview of current activities and issues related to ICT use in education in the country. The data presented here should be regarded as illustrative rather than exhaustive. ICT use in education is at a particularly dynamic stage in Africa; new developments and announcements happening on a daily basis somewhere on the continent. Therefore, these reports should be seen as "snapshots" that were current at the time they were taken; it is expected that certain facts and figures presented may become dated very quickly. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed herein are entirely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of infoDev, the Donors of infoDev, the World Bank and its affiliated organizations, the Board of Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. The World Bank cannot guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this work. The boundaries, colors, denominations, and other information shown on any map in this work do not imply on the part of the World Bank any judgment of the legal status of any territory or the endorsement or acceptance of such boundaries. It is expected that individual Country Reports from the Survey of ICT and Education in Africa will be updated in an iterative process over time based on additional research and feedback received through the infoDev web site. For more information, and to suggest modifications to individual Country Reports, please see www.infodev.org/ict4edu-Africa.

Purpose -This paper aims to identify and compare the nature of decentralization that has emerged in three important Asian societies after a decade of their involvement in the decentralization movement. Design/methodology/approach -Data from the first cycle of the program for international student assessment were analyzed to investigate educational decentralization in three Asian societies: Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea. Cluster analysis was used to reveal the nature and extent of decentralization of the schooling systems in the three societies. Findings -The results revealed four models of decentralization: highly centralized, school-driven, teacher-driven, and highly decentralized. Whilst the school-driven model was dominant in Hong Kong, indicating that the school itself is largely responsible for making school-related decisions, the centralized model was dominant in both Japan and Korea, indicating that authorities outside the school are largely responsible for making school-related decisions.

Networking and collaboration in educational settings have become increasingly important in terms of supporting innovation and policy developments in many educational systems. However, to date, the role and action of the middle tier remains an under-researched area, especially in the United Kingdom. This paper draws on findings from a study of district level (local authorities (LAs)) capacity to broker and facilitate school-based networks within a context of complex multiple agendas. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) Innovations Unit and the National College for School Leadership (NCSL) involved 19 LAs over a two-year period. The authors worked as second order action researchers supporting local authority staff develop a range of strategies to broker and facilitate school-to-school networks. This paper draws on Habermassian notions of a critical theorem to describe the construction and use of a new theoretical framework outlining the strategies adopted by the middle tier officers within the project.

The number of students using the e-learning services provided by the central open education system at Anadolu University has been increasing day by day. More than 200 thousand students used the e-Book, e-Practice, e-Exam, e-Facilitator Service, e-Television, and e-Audio Book that are available in the Open Education e-Learning Portal in the 2004-2005 academic year. This study evaluates the opportunities own by the students who want to use the open education e-learning services via mobile devices. Seven groups of mobile devices i.e., laptops and tablet PCs, pocket computers with and without telephone, portable media players, mp3 players and smart telephones were analyzed in terms of online and offline use.

Several trends in the principal's role emerged during the first year of administrative reforms. These included high levels of workload and stress as they implemented the new system; negotiation of new relationships with parents and community members; concerns about opportunities for women in leadership; a higher political profile for principals in the New Right context; and tensions between the leadership and managerial aspects of their role. The move to self management has given New Zealand principals a higher degree of autonomy and power than ever before and, as the reforms begin to impact on the education system, there is a need for continuing public debate about the parameters of the principal's role in relation to the social and educational roles of schools. In addition new models for professional development are needed together with a regulation of the pace of change to reduce workload and stress.

Personalised environments such as adaptive educational systems can be evaluated and compared using performance curves. Such summative studies are useful for determining whether or not new modifications enhance or degrade performance. Performance curves also have the potential to be utilised in formative studies that can shape adaptive model design at a much finer level of granularity. We describe the use of learning curves for evaluating personalised educational systems and outline some of the potential pitfalls and how they may be overcome. We then describe three studies in which we demonstrate how learning curves can be used to drive changes in the user model. First, we show how using learning curves for subsets of the domain model can yield insight into the appropriateness of the model's structure. In the second study we use this method to experiment with model granularity. Finally, we use learning curves to analyse a large volume of user data to explore the feasibility of using them as a reliable method for finetuning a system's model. The results of these experiments demonstrate the successful use of performance curves in formative studies of adaptive educational systems.

This article focuses on the critical role ICT policy design and implementation can play in developing a knowledge-based economy in distressed US communities. Using a multiple case study research design, the study tests three hypotheses: (1) linkages among government, education and industry are a critical success factor for ICT interventions; (2) due to the long-term nature of ICT, vision and leadership are also critical; and (3) investments in technology infrastructure must be part of a larger local planning process to succeed. These hypotheses are supported, but the strength of the article is in the details about how communities crafted unique responses to critical issues.

This paper presents model-based assessment and forecasting of the Lithuanian education system in the period of 2001-2010. In order to obtain satisfactory forecasting results, constructing of models used for these aims should be grounded on some interactive data mining. Data mining of data stored in the system of the Lithuanian teacher's database and of data from other sources representing the state of education system and the demographic changes in Lithuania was used. The models cover the estimation of data quality in the databases, the analysis of flow of teachers and pupils, the clustering of schools, the model of dynamics of pedagogical staff and pupils, and the quality analysis of teachers. The main results of forecasting and integrated analysis of the Lithuanian teachers' database with other data reflecting the state of the education system and demographic changes in Lithuania are presented.

In our work with professionals, we discovered that where there was an explicit need to talk about learning, everyday language is insufficient. For example, in a conversation between a manager and an employee preparing a personal development plan, many communication problems may arise. People use the same words with different meanings and different words for similar meanings. Due to the limited distinctions made between different ways of learning, learning is often confused with training, individual differences in preferences are not taken into account, and possibilities to organize learning in various ways are not even considered. Our search here is for a language of learning: a system of meaningful distinctions in ways to learn, in order to help professionals and their managers to talk about learning. This article describes a system of five metaphors of learning. It first describes an interview/observation study generating the five metaphors. 2. A first step: finding the metaphors qualitatively As a first step, we selected 30 professional colleagues who we expected to have different perceptions of learning. The colleagues were selected on the basis of their view of organisational changes. De Caluwé and Vermaak (1999) defined five

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This paper analyses teachers' attitudes towards the use of textbooks as a means of understanding what happens in a heavily centralised education system. Whilst the research is based on a particular country, the lessons can be applied to many parts of the globalised education system. The research question here is to find out whether the teachers have freedom in varying their teaching methods or not. The main research method used was semi-structured interviews. The factors that decide this freedom are discussed in detail. Whilst the particular circumstances are peculiar to Jordan, they can be likened to the centralised national curriculum and an authoritative inspection regime in the UK.

This paper examines the inherent link between a countrys education system and its compar-ative advantage in trade. It suggests that di¤erences in education systems across countries are probably a stable equilibrium result that is compatible with and reinforced by trade patterns. In equilibrium, two distinct types of countries emerge, one that exports creativity-intensive prod-ucts and has an education system encouraging diversity (as illustrated by the US), and the other one that exports high-quality manufactured products and has an education system promoting homogeneity in student quality (as illustrated by Japan). Our …ndings present a novel expla-nation for the coexistence of low test scores of students and high economic performance in the US. JEL Classi…cation: F16, I20, J24.

The Constitution provides the ground rules to create obligations on the state and to transform the education system by introducing human rights in line with the best developed democracies. This article is not about state-compelled school attendance, but rather the ...

Geometry is taught as a subject-matter in mathematics courses at elementary school level, and as an independent course at secondary school level in Turkish education system. When the success levels of students regarding these two subjects are examined, it can be seen that there are differences. Anxiety is an important variant on success in mathematics. But whereas geometry is considered as a different field from mathematics by the students, mathematics anxiety cannot cover geometry anxiety completely and that geometry anxiety can be observed separately from mathematics anxiety. Thus the aim of this study is to develop a scale for secondary school level students in order to determine their anxiety towards geometry.

Within the context of learning technology environments, there is much effort on one hand, at de®ning metadata for educational content, and on the other, at specifying learner user pro®les. However, less attention has been paid to the understanding of the relationship between these two areas of research, in terms of semantic and structural correlations. Based on an implementation of learning object metadata and learner pro®les in a learning technology system undertaken in the Getting Education Systems Talking Across Leading Edge Technologies (GESTALT) project, this paper argues that the de®nition of a metadata schema and a User Pro®le should be a joint effort due to the complementary nature of these two descriptions in regard to the critical functions of the educational process.

Agricultural policy has in the last 50 years taken much of the risk and the initiative away from Norwegian farm forest owners. Subsidies in agriculture have guaranteed an acceptable income and there has been neither need nor incentives for starting up new activities at the farms. This situation is now gradually changing. The income both from agriculture and forestry is decreasing and farm forest owners have either to move, to find job opportunities outside the farm or to start up new activity at the farm using the farm's resources. ...

Interest is increasingly being recognized as an effective motivator for learning, however neither the constructivist learning environment design literature nor the motivation research literature directly address the challenges of designing interest-driven learning activities. In this paper, we present a design framework for the creation of learning activities that draw on interest as their primary source of motivation. This Interest-Driven Learning design framework is the embodiment of a theory that addresses two challenges to the large-scale implementation of interest-driven learning. These challenges are coverage, the difficulty of motivating the wide range of learning objectives valued by our educational system with interest, and strength, the variation over time and across learners of the motivational strength of interest in a particular topic or activity. The Interest-Driven Learning framework is based on a novel categorization of motivational constructs into interest and conte...

This paper attempts to offer an alternative framework for assessing education delivery in South Africa. Its purpose is to develop an analytic approach for understanding education delivery in South Africa in the last 11 years and to use this framework to pose a set of strategic questions about how policy might be framed to deal with delivery. The paper begins with a quick review of the country's achievements and challenges in education and shows that a failure to produce a high quality education system remains the country's primary challenge. The broad approach that is taken is to suggest that dominant approaches for understanding this lack of performance underplay the specificity of the country's context and specifically so its apartheid legacy. This legacy, it is argued, continues to be determinative in shaping, and accounting for the character of current social behaviour in the country, including the performance of children in schools.

The study examined the theoretical and practical understandings of Cultural Studies at the lower primary school level in Botswana. The education system in Botswana intends to produce learners who are reflective, adaptive and who can easily fit in every academic and social environment. Cultural Studies was introduced in 2002 as an integral part of the lower primary school curriculum (Standard 1-4) thus replacing Social Studies and Religious Education at this level. Aspects of the new subject would imbue learners with an understanding of cultural citizenship so that they become living and practicing citizens, in their everchanging global community. The qualitative and quantitative approaches were employed in collecting data. This was done through interviews, observations and questionnaires which were administered to teachers and students in primary schools country-wide. In addition, an officer from the Department of Curriculum and Evaluation of the Ministry of Education responsible fo...

This article deals with the evolution of inequalities in access to tertiary education in the Czech Republic since 1989. Following the 'velvet revolution' in 1989, the demand for both secondary school education (with a secondary school diploma) and post-secondary education has grown considerably. The opening hypothesis of this article is that there has been an increase in educational inequalities in the Czech Republic since 1989 resulting from the unequal development of the secondary and tertiary sectors of the educational system. The author starts with the findings of Gerber and Hout and Gerber, that the pressure caused by an excess of applicants between these two levels of education disadvantages the lower social strata. Using logistic regression, the author models the influence of social origin on the likelihood of a successful transition from secondary school to post-secondary school in the period 1948-99. The hypothesis of the growing influence of social origin on success in the transition between secondary and post-secondary schools in the 1990s was not, however, confirmed. On the contrary, the trend after 1989 testifies rather to a decrease in inequalities in access to post-secondary education.

Professional development (PD) of teachers comprises a major challenge in many countries. The empirical relations between teaching-learning processes and student achievements occupy educators who construct teachers' in-service training programs. Student achievements serve as a measure for testing improvements in learning. Many investigators view teachers' content-didactic knowledge as influencing the quality of teaching and student achievements. Large-scale assessments (national and international evaluation frameworks) in the Israeli educational system offer teachers opportunities for improving their teaching-learning processes and student achievements. We developed a program for the PD of science teachers based on the curriculum and large-scale assessments. The model is long term and integrates theoretical and practical knowledge. The activities should be effective and cooperative and should use diverse teaching methods and integrate advanced technologies. This article presents considerations for the construction of the program, its goals, its performance, teachers' reports on the components, and the contribution of the program's components to their PD.

The phenomenon of extra tuition is witnessed in many countries and some educationalists have described it as a parallel education system. However, the incidence and impact of extra tuition have often not been studied systematically, especially in Africa. In this article cross-national data for six African education systems (Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Zambia and Zanzibar) collected by SACMEQ, the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality, have been used to assess: (a) the incidence and growth of extra tuition, (b) the characteristics of students who received extra tuition, and (c) the association between extra tuition and student achievement. The analyses presented in this paper showed that extra tuition was a widespread phenomenon in all six education systems, and that receiving extra tuition was positively associated with the socio-economic levels of students' home backgrounds. The association between tuition and student achievement was mixed. The issues and challenges associated with tuition have been discussed and some suggestions for further research made. r

This paper aims at describing the building of an educational system for teaching and learning robotics systems. Actually, multimedia resources are used to construct a virtual laboratory where users are able to utilize functionalities of a robotic arm, by moving and clicking the mouse without caring about the detailed internal robot operation. The engineering students are its target public. The final product was a Virtual Laboratory prototype of a teaching and learning environment that can be used to study robotics topics, to manipulate a virtual robot and to communicate with a real one. It socializes the students' synthesis based on questioning and contributions, clarifying doubts and posing new questions about robotic systems. First, this paper introduces the metaphor of Virtual Laboratory used in the application. Next, it is described the Graphical and Multimedia Environment approach, an interactive graphic user interface with a 3D environment for simulation. Design and implementation issues of the real-time interactive multimedia learning system, which supports the W3C SMIL standard for presenting the real-time multimedia teaching material on the class, are used and described. With content-sharing and interactive capabilities provided by this system and its tools, students can devote themselves on the learning process just as they are in the traditional face-to-face classes. Finally, we mention the conclusions and possible future works from this research.

Este trabajo pretende contribuir a la reflexión existente en torno al proceso de adaptación al Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior, concretamente en el ámbito de la orientación y asesoramiento dentro del sistema educativo. En una primera parte, se desarrollan algunas ideas fundamentales acerca de la función del asesoramiento educativo, subrayando sus dimensiones, ámbitos de actuación y orientaciones. Además se presentan algunas propuestas realizadas por diferentes autores sobre el tema de las competencias en el ámbito del asesoramiento. En la segunda parte del trabajo, proponemos un marco teórico que pretende contribuir a la problemática existente en torno a las competencias profesionales, con la intención de complementar las ideas existentes en torno al diseño y desarrollo de la formación de estos profesionales desde la perspectiva del modelo de proceso. Palabras clave: Asesoramiento educativo, competencias profesionales, diseño y desarrollo de planes de estudio y diseño de proceso.

In this paper I respond to Ajay Sharma's Portrait of a Science Teacher as a Bricoleur: A case study from India, by speaking to two aspects of the bricoleur: the subject and the discursive in relation to pedagogic perspective. I highlight that our subjectivities are negotiated based on the desires of the similar and competing discourses we are exposed to, and the political powers they hold in society. As (science) teachers we modify our practices based upon our own internal arbitrations with discourses.

Se describe la puesta en marcha de una nueva generación de pruebas nacionales que el Instituto Nacional para la Evaluación de la Educación (INEE) utiliza, en muestras de estudiantes con representatividad nacional y estatal, para evaluar la calidad del sistema educativo nacional con base en los aprendizajes logrados en educación básica y media superior. Se describen los propósitos y principios de la evaluación del aprendizaje que asume el INEE, así como el marco de referencia de los Exámenes de la Calidad y el Logro Educativos. Se definen las características de las pruebas nacionales como: criteriales, alineadas al currículum nacional y con un diseño matricial. Se detalla el proceso para diseñar, construir, aplicar y validar estos exámenes. Se concluye discutiendo la necesidad de contar con instrumentos evaluativos de calidad para cumplir con las metas del INEE y así ayudar a mejorar la educación en México.

(IFPRI) was established in 1975. IFPRI is one of 15 agricultural research centers that receive principal funding from governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations, most of which are members of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

The methodology for the evaluation of educational systems is being developed in different elds, such as educational statistics, psychometrics, sociology and econometrics. Each discipline has developed approaches suitable for the analysis of particular aspects of the evaluation process. For example, educational statistics focuses on learning curves using standardized scores, while econometrics mainly deals with private returns (e.g. in terms of wages) or social returns (e.g. in terms of productivity). Anyway, there is a considerable overlap among the elds, for example peer effects are studied both in educational statistics, as a major topic, and econometrics, as a minor topic.

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Classifying, categorizing, and labeling children to provide education and other social services often are considered essential to ensuring equal opportunity in the allocation of these services. Systems of classification and their related forms of categorization are shaped by many factors-including their intended use-and by assumptions about human diversity. Educators generally use disability classification systems to identify and determine the eligibility of children for special education and other services. In many countries, however, the categories of disability and associated labels vary widely. In 1972, Nicholas Hobbs of Vanderbilt University convened a task force to undertake a review of the disability classification of children and the negative consequences of labeling and categorization. That project resulted in two publications, The Futures of Children (1975a), presenting recommendations based on a synthesis of the reviews prepared in the other publication, the seminal two-volume sourcebook, Issues in the Classification of Children (1975b). This sourcebook, which is now out of print, remains one of the few comprehensive and scholarly discussions of the critical issues concerning disability classification systems in health, education, and mental health. Today, the issues that prompted Hobbs to undertake his

In this paper we present new evidence on the impact of school characteristics on secondary student achievement using a rich data set from rural Bangladesh. We deal with a potentially important selectivity issue in the South Asian context: the non-random sorting of children into religious schools. We do so by employing a combination of fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation techniques. Additionally, we use the variation between two classrooms of the same grade within individual schools to identify causal class-size effects. Our empirical results do not reveal any difference in test scores between religious and secular schools when selection into religious school is taken into account. Net of school fixed-effects, we do not find evidence in support of smaller class size. However, we document significant learning deficit by gender and primary school type: girls and graduates of primary madrasas have a lower test score even after controlling for school and classroom-specific unobservable correlates of learning.

Les notions d’échec scolaire et de démocratisation du système éducatif et de l’accès au(x) savoir(x) sont à la fois étroitement liées et éminemment problématiques. Polysémiques, elles désignent des réalités contradictoirs, que l’analyse se doit évidemment de distinguer mais perd beaucoup à opposer. Mieux comprendre, pour mieux agir, requiert dès lors de travailler à dépasser le risque d’un partage du travail entre une sociologie des inégalités scolaires insuffisamment soucieuse des modalités effectives des activités de transmission et d’appropriation des savoirs et techniques intellectuelles, et une recherche en pédagogie et en psychologie des apprentissages insuffisamment soucieuse des différents contextes sociaux, institutionnels et didactiques dans lesquels ces activités sont toujours situées. Ce qui nous demande de savoir établir des rapports renouvelés entre sociologie, psychologie et didactique.

International consensus on education priorities accords an important place to achieving gender justice in the educational sphere. Both the Dakar 'Education for All'goals and the Millennium Development goals emphasise two goals, in this regard. These two goals are ...

During World War II, the United States was able to win important battles against the Japanese because among the American soldiers there were some American Indians who spoke Navajo -an indigenous language. Using the Navajo language as a base, the military developed a code for transmitting messages that the Japanese could not interpret. This historical episode is celebrated in Wind talkers, one of the movies of the summer 2002.