Asia Pacific Education Review最新文献

Existing studies have identified the key facilitating conditions for e-portfolio assessment to support students’ learning. However, these studies have to adopt a more holistic examination of challenges that stakeholders may encounter when implementing e-portfolios. By reviewing affordances of e-portfolio assessment and contextual influences on e-portfolio implementation through the ‘culture-as-garden’ metaphor, this paper examines why the facilitating conditions matter and recommends strategies for creating such conditions to enable stakeholders’ uptake of the affordances of e-portfolio assessment. Focussing on an e-portfolio assessment initiative in two undergraduate programmes, this study examines how the affordances of e-portfolios are taken up (or not taken up) to support students’ learning. Interviews with stakeholders showed how the presence (or absence) of the facilitating conditions influenced their e-portfolio implementation, and the extent to which the affordances of e-portfolio assessment were taken up by stakeholders to support student learning. The stakeholders’ narratives revealed a number of challenges that they encountered at the institutional (e.g. a top-down decision-making process of e-portfolio implementation), programme/course (e.g. insufficient teacher guidance and feedback for students), and individual (e.g. teachers’ and students’ need for technical support) levels. To address such challenges, this paper recommends six strategies for creating the facilitating conditions to assist stakeholders’ successful e-portfolio implementation. Theoretical and practical implications and future research directions are discussed.

This study explores the reasons why South Korean students choose to attend an American international branch campus in Korea, focusing on a single case of N University. The research utilizes an extended analytical framework by integrating the concept of global cultural capital with the push–pull theory to offer a comprehensive view of the multifaceted factors influencing their choices at different levels. It was found that students often select an American branch campus as a second choice due to unavoidable constraints, driven by aspirations for greater prestige and recognition. The students’ decision-making process is complex, deeply rooted in Korean society’s emphasis on educational attainment, the stratified hierarchy of domestic higher education institutions, and the desire to obtain American credentials. Nonetheless, the perceived ambiguous institutional identity of these campuses is identified as a significant deterrent. By applying a trilateral push–pull framework, capturing the dynamic interplay between Korean higher education institutions, United States higher education institutions, and international branch campuses, the study sheds light on the nuanced perceptions and decision-making processes of Korean students toward foreign-affiliated universities operating within their home country.

In the current study, we examined the longitudinal relations among emotions, appraisals, and behavioral engagement with feedback in a sample of 314 Singaporean secondary school students. Students worked on writing assignments, and teachers gave feedback in the form of grades and comments. Students’ emotions, appraisals, and receptivity to instructional feedback were assessed using a number of self-report instruments administered at four points in time, including the baseline and three additional waves. Repeated Measures ANOVA has shown variations in enjoyment, pride, excitement, anxiety, and shame, whereas non-significant differences were found for behavioral engagement, and aggregates of positive and negative affect over time. The latent growth modeling results have shown a steady decrease in enjoyment, pride, hope, and excitement, while the decline in anxiety and shame differed over time depending on the level of those emotions. Additionally, gender differences and changes in receptivity to instructional feedback were revealed. Cross-lagged panel model analysis also showed non-significant cross-paths, indicating high stability for the reciprocal influence of emotions and behavioral engagement over time. The findings provide insights about links among emotions, appraisals, and behavioral engagement and how these are forged by how students deal with the feedback.

To support effective collaborative learning, it is essential to enhance collective efficacy and provide timely, tailored feedback throughout the learning process. However, it is often difficult for a single instructor to monitor multiple groups and deliver feedback that meets the specific needs of each team in real time. This study aims to develop and validate a systematic design for an AI chatbot that enhances collective efficacy in collaborative learning environments. The design will be devised by developing and validating design principles. The design-based research methodology was conducted to develop the design principles, which were then validated by experts and evaluated for usability. This process involved a review of relevant literature and case analysis, followed by expert validation and usability test to confirm the design principles’ validity. The final design principles are composed of four design elements— (1) support for group cohesion, (2) support for affective cohesion, (3) support for collaborative learning activities, and (4) facilitation of dialogue—and ten design principles. These include the principle of belongingness formation, interdependence, positive atmosphere, empathy formation, sharing, collaborative problem-solving, social regulation, immediate scaffolding, familiarity, and personification. The design principles are further supported by 46 actionable sub-guidelines. Validation was conducted through three rounds of expert review and usability testing with educators and developers, whose diverse perspectives informed both the pedagogical soundness and technical feasibility of the principles. This study contributes to the field by offering theoretically grounded and practically applicable guidelines for designing AI chatbots in education. Importantly, the principles are designed to be usable by educators without requiring technical expertise, thus supporting scalable and accessible implementation in real classrooms.

This article explores how new immigrant parents in Singapore deploy social, cultural, and economic capitals as strategies to support their 1.5- and second-generation children’s academic and socio-cultural integration. Based on in-depth interviews with 64 new immigrant parents from mainland China, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and a few non-Asian countries, we identified foremost the distinct strategies parents employed to facilitate their children’s academic integration. Non-Chinese parents predominantly rely on bridging social capital, forming connections with local parents to navigate Singapore’s education system. In contrast, Chinese parents draw on bonding social capital derived from co-national networks, leveraging digital platforms like WeChat to exchange education-related resources. Beyond academics, immigrant parents also actively mobilise a variety of capitals—economic, social, and cultural—to support their children’s socio-cultural integration, whilst striking a balance between local integration with maintenance of socio-cultural connections with their homeland.

Class composition factors including class size and the grade or other level of students are often studied for their impact on factors such as academic outcomes and student achievement, but less often address the impacts on teachers’ instructional strategies. This paper reports on an analysis of the relationship between class compositional factors, including class size and level of study, on differentiated instruction (DI) in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP). In the IBDP, students take subjects at Standard Level (SL) or Higher Level (HL), and it is a common practice to combine classes of SL and HL students within each subject, often because enrolment numbers are too small to make streamed classes viable. Examining the practices of teachers in IBDP schools in Hong Kong, this paper outlines a typology of teachers’ approaches to DI, highlighting the ways compositional factors impact upon teaching and learning and reflecting on the relationship between teacher beliefs and actions in DI in their senior secondary classrooms.

This research explores the integrated dialectic between human rights education and education for sustainability in the context of global crises, including climate change and unexpected pandemics. The authors examine disparities between students’ rights and citizenship education in South Korean educational policies, questioning their lack of alignment concerning sustainability. To address this issue, we adopted a document analysis of two key educational policies introduced by the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE), South Korea: the Development Plan for Ecological Transition Education (implemented since 2020) and the Master Plan for Students’ Human Rights (implemented since 2018). These documents were analyzed through the lens of transformative education, specifically drawing on the Freirean ecopedagogy approach. Our analysis of the transformative educational dimensions embedded in these policies reveals a tendency to emphasize one aspect of citizenship for sustainability—either rights or responsibilities—rather than integrating both. Based on these findings, we argue that both policies should more explicitly address the interconnectedness between civic and moral responsibilities and individuals’ inner cognition as moral and political agents. Ultimately, we propose that for a new paradigm of human-nature relations to influence existing discourses in South Korea, these two policies should not be treated separately. Instead, they should be integrated to cultivate moral and political agents based on cosmopolitan citizenship, centered on ecology and human rights, and emphasizing the reciprocal cycle of valuing both responsibility and rights.

To investigate whether and how international postgraduate researchers’ bilingual capabilities may facilitate their postgraduate research in particular theorising, this qualitative study adopts the theoretical lens of the relationship between translanguaging and research theorising, and analyses data that were collected through semi-structured interviews from both postgraduate researchers and research supervisors and postgraduate theses from Australian universities. Thematic analyses have identified and distilled the translanguaging theorising practices where Chinese postgraduate researchers mobilised an expansive integrated intellectual repertoire for theorising through translanguaging. Their translanguaging theorising practices are exemplified through three research scenarios, where these postgraduate researchers have engaged in translanguaging practices for a) expanding intellectual resources, b) theorising the research process, and c) hybridising theoretical dimensions. We argue that such translanguaging theorising of bilingual postgraduate researchers can then create a translanguaging space for theorising that facilitate the development of academic skills, the enrichment of data, the comprehension and refinement of theoretical perspectives and tools for original contribution to research. By so doing supervisors may assist bilingual postgraduate researchers grow into independent bilingual researchers.

This study examines the urban–rural achievement gap among Chinese middle-school students. Engaging with the classical family–school debate, this study sheds lights on the contribution of family and school factors to the achievement gap led by one of the most important institutional factors—hukou status—in China. To decompose the gap and investigate its generating mechanisms, the author uses structural equation modeling. Analyzing two waves of the China Educational Panel Survey, the author finds that family socioeconomic status (SES), as the confounding variable, effectively accounts for the disadvantage of Chinese rural students. After family SES is controlled for, family cultural activity is the major force enlarging the urban–rural gap; while parental educational expectation is the force reducing the urban–rural gap. Mechanisms of school-related variables make almost no statistically significant contribution to the gap.