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So-called ?design experiments? have been presented as a radical alternative to traditional experimental designs in behavioral sciences. A closer scrutiny of design experiments shows that they share the basic linear methodology of traditional randomized controlled trials, and thus ignore resistance and agency of learners as a source of surprise and novelty. Formative interventions based on Vygotsky?s principle of double stimulation offer an alternative that builds on and purposefully fosters...

School mapping consists of the building of geospatial databases of educational, demographic and socioeconomic data for educational institutions in order to support educational planning and decision making. Such databases contain data such as the geographic location of schools, the numbers of existing schools of different levels in the public and private sectors, their capacities, physical condition and facilities, enrolment and the number of teachers and their attributes. Also often included...

In this paper the process of building an international student community is explored. Strategies discussed include guided interaction within a virtual environment between home students studying in their own culture and international students studying at a distance. The context includes both the state and private sector in South East Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. The subject is a Master of Arts in Education for practising in-service teachers of English. Through exchanging...

In this paper the process of building an international student community is explored. Strategies discussed include guided interaction within a virtual environment between home students studying in their own culture and international students studying at a distance. The context includes both the state and private sector in South East Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. The subject is a Master of Arts in Education for practising in-service teachers of English. Through exchanging...

In Brunei, more girls are enrolled at the institutions of higher education than boys. The aim of this study was to evaluate if a constructivist teaching approach, enriched with interactive whiteboard technology could empower males to minimize gender differences in achievement in Chemistry. Two groups of students were taught for six weeks: one group using the constructivist teaching approach enriched with interactive whiteboard technology and the other group using a traditional teaching...

Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn while in school. This paper examines studies published between 1990 and 2010, in both the education literature and the economics literature, to investigate which specific school and teacher...

This report is the second in a Series on early child development in low-income and middle-income countries and assesses the effectiveness of early child development interventions, such as parenting support and preschool enrolment. The evidence reviewed suggests that early child development can be improved through these interventions, with effects greater for programmes of higher quality and for the most vulnerable children. Other promising interventions for the promotion of early child...

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog...

A substantial body of research demonstrates that schools with large populations of poor, non-white and low-achieving students, on average have more difficulty attracting and retaining teachers (Boyd et. al., 2005; Boyd et al, 2009; Hanushek et. al., 2004; Ingersoll, 2001; Scafidi et. al., 2007). However, little work assesses the extent to which differences in the neighborhoods

The past two decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the use of technology in our daily life. Notwithstanding its phenomenal influence, the use of technology in education remains sporadic and disjointed. The promise that technology will bring deep-seated changes in the way that educators teach and students learn remains, disappointedly, elusive. This paper argues that the lack of systemic frame of reference may have explanatory power over such less than impressive performance of ICT...

Quality assessment is one of the activities performed as part of systematic literature reviews. It is commonly accepted that a good quality experiment is bias free. Bias is considered to be related to internal validity (e.g., how adequately the experiment is planned, executed and analysed). Quality assessment is usually conducted using checklists and quality scales. It has not yet been proven, however, that quality is related to experimental bias. Aim: Identify whether there is a...

It has become commonplace to measure teacher quality in terms of teacher value-added. Operationally, this means evaluating teachers according to the learning gains of students on various achievement tests. Existing research consistently shows large variations in teacher effectiveness, much of which is within schools as opposed to between schools. The policy implications of these variations are dramatic. But the underlying statistical modeling has become the subject of intense research, in...

Healthcare providers, consumers, researchers and policy makers are inundated with unmanageable amounts of information, including evidence from healthcare research. It has become impossible for all to have the time and resources to find, appraise and interpret this evidence and incorporate it into healthcare decisions. Cochrane Reviews respond to this challenge by identifying, appraising and synthesizing research-based evidence and presenting it in a standardized format, published in The...

To the extent that students benefit from high-achieving peers, tracking will help strong students and hurt weak ones. However, all students may benefit if tracking allows teachers to better tailor their instruction level. Lower-achieving pupils are particularly likely to benefit from tracking when teachers have incentives to teach to the top of the distribution. We propose a simple model nesting these effects and test its implications in a randomized tracking experiment conducted with 121...

In 1987, the government of Ghana embarked on a process to decentralise education management to districts as part of wider social and democratic governance reforms. A central part of this reform was the prescription of active community participation in the affairs of schools within their locality. This paper explores the different meanings community participation had for school community stakeholders. It examines the multiple understandings of how community and school relations work and the...

In 1997, the Government of Sri Lanka launched a comprehensive set of education reforms designed to promote equitable access to basic education and improvements in learning outcomes. The package of reforms arose as a political response to widespread youth unrest in the late 1980s and attracted considerable ‘political will’, a vague but much vaunted term in the international policy discourse. Yet, despite seemingly high levels of national political will, reform has not been plain sailing....