Asia Pacific Education Review最新文献

School choice policy in China aims to achieve educational equity by limiting school choice. Synchronous Admission Reform (SAR hereafter) is a recent school choice reform in China, which continues to limit parents’ autonomy and strengthen the equal distribution of school resources. This study explores Chinese middle-class parents’ (n = 21) justice claims in SAR. The findings suggest parents’ three distributive justice claims, including situational principles of distribution, institutional partiality in distribution, and entrepreneurship representative of distribution. Each claim contains contradictory interpretations of education equity. While parents admire SAR’s egalitarian promise, they recognize the present unbalanced school development and engage in a meritocratic way of hoarding opportunities. Despite their complaints over SAR’s institutional partiality, they acknowledge SAR’s political representation. Instead of participating in policy networks, parents adopt an entrepreneurial way of non-compliance. Parents’ contradictory discourse is shaped by an interplay of policy discourse, school gaps, and parents’ agency in a competitive and high-stakes education environment. Our analysis offers a micro-psychosocial lens for policymakers and practitioners to understand educational equity in everyday discourses.

Change and continuity are among the fundamental concepts of procedural knowledge. Its relevance in history and history education requires that the concepts are appropriately reflected in historical reconstruction, teaching history and curriculum documents. This study, therefore, seeks to examine how the concepts of change and continuity are reflected in selected History of Ghana ‘approved’ textbooks for primary schools. The mixed critical research design that blends qualitative and quantitative approaches was used to examine 12 selected history of Ghana ‘approved’ textbooks for primary schools. Two methods of documentary analysis—content analysis and visual semiotics—were used to analyze the data. The results show that change and continuity are reflected in the approved textbooks, albeit there are differences among the textbooks. The differences also existed in how change and continuity are reflected separately in the various textbooks. Therefore, any review of the textbooks should ensure a balance between the two concepts.

Despite a key feature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a core strength of liberal arts and sciences education, interdisciplinarity is also a noisy buzzword which does not always make sense from an institutional point of view. Traditional interdisciplinary fields take it for granted like fish in the water while, somewhere else, people keep a distance with questions. Doing interdisciplinarity faces additional boundary challenges due to strong gravitational forces that are national, historical, and increasingly from between college and workplace. For a higher education institution whose vision for robust interdisciplinarity is rooted across these boundaries, it is not enough to set up a curriculum, hoping that once and for all the train of interdisciplinarity will roar on. In reality, it may take a higher magnitude of interdisciplinarity and constant enabling mechanisms to balance out certain gravitational forces, such as the pro-STEM and pro-exam tendencies in Chinese higher education. This study surveyed the inaugural undergraduate class of Duke Kunshan University (DKU) as well as its undergraduate faculty to propose a theory of change for scaled interdisciplinarity. The resulting theory of change elaborates on an actionable definition of interdisciplinarity using a vocabulary common to college and workplace, a mobility lens for measuring and leveraging different and especially higher magnitudes of interdisciplinarity, and a linchpin mechanism for energizing this mobility so that interdisciplinarity is more entwined with other institutional facets of teaching, learning, and research.Kindly check and confirm the edit made in the Article title. Checked and confirmed.

Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are commonly used to evaluate the causal effects of educational interventions, where the entire clusters (e.g., schools) are randomly assigned to treatment or control conditions. This study introduces statistical methods for designing and analyzing two-level (e.g., students nested within schools) and three-level (e.g., students nested within classrooms nested within schools) CRTs. Specifically, we utilize hierarchical linear models (HLMs) to account for the dependency of the intervention participants within the same clusters, estimating the average treatment effects (ATEs) of educational interventions and other effects of interest (e.g., moderator and mediator effects). We demonstrate methods and tools for sample size planning and statistical power analysis. Additionally, we discuss common challenges and potential solutions in the design and analysis phases, including the effects of omitting one level of clustering, non-compliance, heterogeneous variance, blocking, threats to external validity, and cost-effectiveness of the intervention. We conclude with some practical suggestions for CRT design and analysis, along with recommendations for further readings.

Despite generous financial aid provided by the government for low-income students studying at universities, eligible students are still reluctant to apply for such aid. This study aimed to assess the effects of students’ expectations; knowledge, attitudes, and actions toward higher education; financial aid; parental, school, and student characteristics; and intentions to apply for scholarships among low-income students in two districts of Central Java, Indonesia. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds were invited to participate in the survey, and logistic regression was employed to assess the determinants of students’ intentions to apply for financial aid. This study revealed that more than 70% of low-income students have low expectations, which is mainly attributed to a lack of academic performance. Moreover, expectations play a significant role in increasing students’ intention to apply for financial aid by 3.026. In addition, the level of knowledge, positive attitude toward higher education, and financial aid and action were demonstrated to be statistically significant in affecting students’ intention to apply for aid.

Instrumental variables is a popular approach for causal inference in education when randomization of treatment is not feasible. Using a first-year college program as a running example, this article reviews the five assumptions that must be met to successfully use instrumental variables to estimate a causal effect with observational data: SUTVA, as-if random assignment, exclusion restriction, nonzero average causal effect of instrument on treatment, and monotonicity, and concludes with recommendations for researchers.

Causal inference is a central topic in education research, although oftentimes it relies on observational studies, which makes causal identification methodologically challenging. This manuscript introduces causal graphs as a powerful language for elucidating causal theories and an effective tool for causal identification analysis. It discusses graphical criteria for causal identification, which provide principled approaches for removing bias and assessing causal identification given a causal theory. Through illustrative examples, this manuscript demonstrates the application of causal graphs and adjustment criterion for covariate selection in the context of education research, exemplifying their key advantages particularly in scenarios where randomized experiments are impractical. This manuscript aims to acquaint researchers with causal graphs as an effective tool for causal inference, thereby facilitating theory-based causal inquiries in applied education research.