ECNU Review of Education

Learning mathematics is a complex process, requiring many conceptual lenses and rich data sources to document and understand students’ construction of knowledge. The purpose of this article is both to introduce a unique database on students’ mathematical learning and to describe analytical techniques used to study students’ growth of the knowledge of mathematics and language.

Our approach includes the following aspects: First, we describe a unique collection of video-taped recordings of longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of diverse, U.S. students, learning mathematics (Video Mosaic Collaborative, VMC). Second, we introduce our analytical methods, which utilize the database for collaborative study of students’ learning. These methods include video-narrative analyses that display fine-grained examinations of interactions among students who are solving engaging problems that require them to reason mathematically and to represent their understandings with language and non-language forms. These analyses, referenced as VMCAnalytics, demonstrate the accessibility and flexibility of the database to study relationships among students’ mathematics and language learning.

The findings generated are illustrated by two examples demonstrating the accessibility and flexibility of the database to study relationships between mathematics and language learning (mathematics register).

The contribution of our work is illustrated by describing the rich database; employing a collaborative research approach; and signifying our understanding of relationships among students’ mathematical and language learning.

—The purpose of this paper is to explain how the introduction of the Internet and digital tools renews and enriches John Dewey's experimentalist model for teaching and learning with particular attention to the place of and resources for higher order thinking.

—The methods include a close exposition of Dewey's classical texts, and a thought experiment introducing ICT elements into Dewey's design diagrams for teaching and learning.

—Dewey's model has inherent difficulties, and that digital technologies helps resolve them.

—With the Internet and new digital tools, teachers can design new virtual learning spaces and learning activities. Learners can use online information and communication tools to act more effectively using higher-order thinking skills.

The purpose is to stimulate imagination of artificial intelligence (AI) and education beyond current schooling.

The approach this article took is a broad review of literature on learning, teaching, schooling, and technological development and evidence-based reasoning about the possible future of education in the context of AI.

Schools could be transformed with the advancement of technology, especially generative AI. The changes should start with student-driven personalizing learning and problem-oriented pedagogy.

The value of the article lies with the unique definitions of personalized learning and problem-oriented pedagogy as well as the contribution of AI to support a new form of learning.

—Forty years ago, China made a critical decision to reform and open up, achieving sustained economic growth. Simultaneously, China continued to center efforts on achieving its education modernization goals. It succeeded in the unconventional development of education, consolidating a population of nearly 1.4 billion into a powerful human-resource-centered nation and creating favorable interactive relationships with social and economic development. This paper aims to explore how these achievements were gained and how these relationships were made.

—This paper is conceptual in nature.

—Based on the policy documents and development practice, this paper proposes a model of Dual Priority Agenda (DPA), whereby the government prioritized education development, and this development focused predominantly on promoting national development.

—By elaborating the background, characteristics, rationales, and mechanisms of the DPA, this paper contributes to a new conceptualization of reciprocal relationship between the state and educational modernization.

Private supplementary tutoring has been increasingly used by parents as part of wider strategies to assist their children’s education careers in China. With a theoretical lens of parentocracy, this article aimed to investigate the influential parental factors underlying the demand for private tutoring, focusing on parents’ socioeconomic resources and attitudes toward education.

This article drew upon data from the 2014 iteration of the China Family Panel Studies. Structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was employed to explore the influences of parental factors.

The SEM analysis confirmed that parental income, education, and aspirations on children’s education had both direct and indirect positive effects through the mediating factor of role construction on demand for tutoring. A multiple-group analysis was further conducted, and the difference in the patterns for urban and rural parents was explored. Parental occupation had no impact on demand for tutoring for rural parents but had both direct and indirect effects for urban parents. Both direct and indirect effects of household income on demand for tutoring were greater for urban parents than for rural parents.

This article examined the direct and indirect influences of parental factors on demand for private tutoring and explored the differences in patterns for urban and rural parents in a quantitative way. Findings have implications for education inequality.

This article presents a definition and rationale for evidence-based reform in education, and a discussion of the current state of evidence-based research, focusing on China, the U.S., and the UK.

The article contrasts the state of educational research in the U.S., the UK, and China, world leaders in evidence-based reform.

The article suggests ways in which Chinese, U.S., UK, and other scholars might improve the worldwide quality of evidence-based reform in education. One indicator of this partnership is an agreement among the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Nanjing Normal University, and Johns Hopkins University to work together on Chinese and English versions of the website Best Evidence in Brief and a collaboration between Johns Hopkins and the ECNU Review of Education at East China Normal University.

This article is the first to compare developments in evidence-based reform in education in China with parallel developments in the U.S. and UK Building understanding of current evidence-based policies should help all countries learn how evidence can play a greater role in education policy and benefit many students.

In Korea, private tutoring is considered a social evil that damages the capacity of public schooling and undermines social justice. Although the government has implemented various policies to reduce private tutoring, ranging from improving the quality of education to providing “quasi-private tutoring” programs and regulating the shadow education market, total spending on private tutoring has continued to increase. This study examines a little noticed but important cause of institutionalized private tutoring in Korea.

The study employed a socio-ecological perspective to analyze both education and socio-structural factors. An extensive review of the government's private tutoring reduction policies and related literature was conducted.

Private tutoring functions as a means by which parents can help their children compete for admission to prestigious universities and pass on wealth and social status to their children. Participation in private tutoring has become a social norm that is taken for granted. The root causes of institutionalized private tutoring lie in both educational and socio-structural factors.

The study suggests that government policies, when ignoring the long-established “grammar” of parents about children's education, may either end in failure or produce unintended consequences.

The article distinguishes between the three concepts of standardization of the tasks of pedagogical action in modern educational systems:

- the traditional concept of standardizing educational goals through curricula,

I examine these concepts and show

- that traditional curricular orientations suffer from the fact that they have not developed controls over the achievement of objectives,

Instead of replacing traditional input control with output measurements, it is important to link teaching and educational research in such a way that competence measurements not only measure the levels of demands achieved by learners but also the quality and effectiveness of teaching.

The train of thought overcomes the juxtaposition of philosophy of education and empirical research and shows how the two can cooperate theoretically and empirically.

Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes—both cognitive and noncognitive—found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct.

Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison.

Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why—at the empirical level—the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars.

In directly responding to these doubts, one original contribution of our piece is to show just how difficult it may ultimately be to divest from the symbolic foundations already laid by Western liberalism: Even if divergent thought can be imagined and different cultural narratives explored, dominant readings of empirical “realities” continue to be entrapped in the logic laid by Western liberalism.

The purpose of this article is to analyze educational changes, in particular transformational changes, and suggest a new approach to shift the paradigm in education using an ecological conceptual framework.

An ecological analysis of two key factors in education: prescribed curriculum and student autonomy.

Paradigm shift can happen in schools, but it cannot be imposed by systems and systems typically are unable to propose transformational changes. Such changes should happen within schools, but not affecting the entire school. Thus a “school within a school” approach is proposed with some examples. The small change could affect entire systems from the perspective of panarchy theory.

This article brings a fresh perspective on making the much needed transformational changes possible in schools. AI partnership, personalized learning, student autonomy, self-determination, and self-directed learning are all fascinating and hopeful ideas that could bring the best education possible for all students. However, implementing these would demand a paradigm shift in schools. Schools are the most resilient social entities, but they are also the organizations easiest to change. For over 200 years, the essence of schooling has not changed, but there have been significant changes in curriculum, textbooks, testing, and pedagogy. Today, we need schools to operate with a different education paradigm to enable students to have more autonomy and control of their learning in order to survive and thrive in the uncertain age of Artificial Intelligence. It seems apparent that the school system has successfully resisted paradigm shifts or transformational changes.

This commentary aims to echo Wilkinson, Bailey, and Maher's (this volume) arguments about the affordances of videos and video databases in studying learning and teaching.

This article illustrates a multivocal approach to the videos from the Video Mosaic Collaborative (VMC). In particular, three mathematics teachers in Shanghai were invited to watch and discuss a set of VMC videos. Two recurring themes concerning mathematics learning and teaching were identified in this video-cued interview and discussed in relation to the VMC Analytics.

The VMC videos played a mediating and facilitating role in the interview, helping the teachers notice and reflect on the mundane, implicit culture practices. Based upon this analysis, I argue that to tap into the potential of video in educational research, we need to see videos as more than data and look for more possibilities of using them.

To open and further research dialogues, this article discusses future directions of using videos in educational research and serves as an invitation to creative explorations, in-depth conversations, ethical reflections, and cross-cultural collaborations on the use of videos in education.

—This paper aims at exploring politics of contemporary knowledge cultures and possible directions for responding to the postdigital challenge.

—This paper researches history and present of several prominent strands and readings of the knowledge economy. Following Caruso's work (2016), it examines more closely the differences between the managerial paradigm and the cognitive capitalism paradigm. Recognizing the postdigital nature of contemporary knowledge cultures, it points towards a postdigital merger between the managerial paradigm and the cognitive capitalism paradigm.

—The paper identifies individual and social tensions between industrial and post-industrial modes of production and rapidly changing dynamic of social development. It examines the relationships between knowledge cultures and digital technologies. Based on recent insights by the father of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee and his non-determinist views to digital technologies, it identifies knowledge cultures as sites of political struggle against various (material and non-material, technological and non-technological) closures over access to information and knowledge. Finally, it briefly outlines possible directions for responding to the postdigital challenge of knowledge cultures.

—The paper provides an original contribution to theory of knowledge cultures and its relationships to the postdigital condition.

This article examines responses from the tutoring sector to Chinese national and local government regulations on private supplementary tutoring. It adds to the literature on policy enactment, showing the importance of context and noting the diversity of tutoring providers compared with schools.

The article draws on semi-structured and informal interviews with 11 tutors, 15 managers of tutoring enterprises, 5 members and managers of professional organizations, 5 government officials, 5 school managers, 5 teachers, and 20 parents. Data from interviewees were triangulated with observations, news reports, blogs written by tutoring analysts, and ad hoc research by industrial observers.

Policy enactment in the tutoring sector is even more complex than that for schooling. Standardized policies do not necessarily achieve the aspired goals.

The article adds to the literature not only in China but also internationally. It highlights the importance of distinguishing between aspirations and realities in this domain. It also proposes conceptual considerations for regulating tutoring, given its diverse and fluid nature.

This article examines the state of progress of evidence-based educational policies in Europe and identifies organizations for the generation and dissemination of evidence. Further, it discusses some of the most relevant challenges facing the development of evidence-informed education policies in Europe.

This article analyzes official documents by the European Commission (EC) and other organizations. Literature in the field of evidence-based education worldwide is examined to identify the primary challenges and issues related to the development of a culture of evidence in Europe’s education sector.

The EC has recently prioritized evidence-informed policy and practice in education, increasingly encouraging member states to utilize evidence in the policy decision-making process. According to official documents, this process began in 2006 and has since enjoyed remarkable progress through several initiatives intended to spread a culture of evidence in education. However, several challenges and issues remain regarding the promotion of evidence-informed policymaking.

Having prioritized evidence-informed policy and practice, the EC strongly encourages the adoption of evidence in the policymaking process. This article provides a point of reference regarding the initiatives already undertaken and the challenges facing evidence-based educational policies and policymaking in Europe.