Inclusion of students with disabilities into regular schools is now one of the most significant issues facing the education community both nationally and internationally. In order to address this issue there is widespread acceptance that teacher training institutions must ensure that new teachers are trained to teach effectively in classrooms where there are students with a variety of learning needs. Utilizing a data set of 603 pre-service teachers from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong and Singapore this study reports the effects of training in inclusive education on pre-service teacher attitudes towards inclusion, their sentiments about people with a disability and their concerns about inclusion. The results are discussed in relation to a range of factors that could have produced different gains in their attitudes, sentiments and concerns among cohorts from different countries.
[Copyright of Disability & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687590802469271]

Presents a study which explored the feasibility of doing comparative education research while focusing on a single society. Focus on comparative historical education research in Hong Kong, China; Problems with periodization, agency, and terminology; Discussion on the issues related to colonialism; Conclusions.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305792990290306 ]

Singapore and Hong Kong are vying to be the principal educational hub for the Asia-Pacific region and have begun to compete with Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA in providing cross-border education. Although these four Anglo-American countries still dominate cross-border education, Singapore and Hong Kong hope to make inroads into this export market and compete on the global stage. To create "world-class" universities, Singapore and Hong Kong have introduced quality assurance mechanisms, diversified funding sources, and restructured their university governance systems. This article compares the accountability measures introduced into Hong Kong and Singapore universities, and the responses of academics and administrators to these measures. The results indicate that both countries introduced greater autonomy as they augmented accountability for their universities, and the term "decentralised centralism" describes the kind of government control exerted in these Asian universities in the twenty-first century.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188790701845972]

Greater China is an umbrella term used to cover Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. This article reviews the evolution of comparative education in these four societies, noting major forces which have shaped the field. The article observes and comments on similarities and differences within the four societies. It has been prepared as a response to the millennial special issue of the journal, and notes some lessons and contributions from the field in Greater China to the global field of comparative education.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050060120091256]

This article attends to comparative education scholars' calls for more dialogue on the contribution of theory to comparative education research. It first presents the results of a review of a small sample of articles from comparative education related journals that elicited the purposes of their comparative research strategies in terms of exploration, explanation, argument, prediction, recommendation, and theory development. The article then discusses perspectives on the potential for the use of theory to contribute to richer explanations of educational phenomena. Finally, it demonstrates how a comparative study of political socialization in Hong Kong and Mainland China led to the development of explanatory concepts of critical thinking and the application and reconceptualization of the theory of resistance to explain the formation of students' attitudes towards the nation.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050060500073215]

The study examines the reading attitudes and attainment of Hong Kong, Singapore and English primary-school students using data collected in the PIRLS 2001 international reading survey. The results shows that reading attitudes and confidence tend to be significantly related to reading achievement test scores. The results also support the view that English pupils, generally speaking, do well on reading tests, both at 'reading for literary purposes' and at 'reading to acquire and use information' . There is also a clear relationship between gender and achievement. The findings support the view that girls' reading attitudes and achievement are generally better than those of boys at the age levels examined.
[Copyright of Research in Education is the property of Manchester University Press.]