Despite extensive discussion on critical thinking (CT) by Chinese students, there are still debates over the question of why Chinese higher education students, when studying abroad, lack (or rather do not demonstrate) CT skills. The main objective of this paper is to explore how far it can be established from the published research literature whether the key factor affecting Chinese university students' CT with respect to academic study in English is cultural background or previous training. The conclusion is that culture cannot be the sole explanation for Chinese students' CT performance at universities abroad. The evidence strongly suggests that, while CT elements can indeed be found in ancient Chinese culture, many other factors, especially students' previous learning experiences, are of more immediate relevance and likely to affect performance. As a result, a holistic approach is suggested. The review also suggests that there is at times a lack of clear definitions and/or explanations of the scope of the key concept - culture - in the current literature.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2010.546400]

The development of adequate collocational knowledge is important for foreign language learners; nonetheless, learners often have difficulties in producing proper collocations in the target language. Among the various ways of learning collocations, the DDL (data-driven learning) approach encourages independent learning of collocations and allows learners to directly use corpora and tools to search for proper collocations. Concordancers have been one of the key tools in the DDL approach. However, based on the findings of empirical studies, many existing web concordancers have not been very helpful in retrieving collocations. To help EFL students and teachers quickly locate proper collocates, this article introduces a web-based collocation retrieval tool, WebCollocate, which is based on a large part of speech-tagged Gutenberg corpus. To determine if the new tool can facilitate the searching of collocations, this tool and the Hong Kong Polytechnic web concordancer were used by two groups of college EFL students to find proper collocates in a translation task. The results showed that the students who used the WebCollocate tool found more proper English collocates. In addition, a group of 35 pre-service English teachers were also invited to evaluate the effectiveness of this collocation tool. These EFL teachers indicated that they could easily find proper English collocates with the help of WebCollocate. However, they also suggested that the search options and the presentation of search outcomes of this tool can be further improved. It seems that a more dedicated collocation retrieval tool can facilitate collocation teaching and learning, but the functions of this tool can be further enhanced. The findings of this study can be useful for language teachers, researchers, and developers of corpus-based tools.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2010.526945]

The science-technology-society agenda has evolved over time to meet emerging educational aims in the light of changes in society and the environment. There is increasing emphasis on students' decision-making on socio-scientific issues (SSIs) not only to highlight the intricate relationships between science, technology, society, and the environment, but also to allow students to incorporate multiple viewpoints into the development of critical reasoning and responsible citizenship. Most research emphases have been on the rationality of reasoning rather than on the internal psychological context that underpins reasoning. This paper explores how these various aspects of reasoning interact in decision-making on SSIs in health contexts through case studies of recent issues in this field. The case studies reveal the negotiation of multiple influences in addressing SSIs in health contexts and the potential interactions between the psychological processes of individuals, science, and sociocultural perspectives. A tentative model to address these interactions emerges from this explorative study and has implications for the use of health-related issues in promoting SSI education.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2011.613417]

Since 2004, the Hong Kong government has sought to build a regional education hub and develop an education industry. However, the rationales and intentions behind this move and the implications these have for the nurturing of local human capital and economic capacity are not always clear. This article seeks to contextualize Hong Kong's economic development within the global economy. Various related official policy documents are examined to decipher the role of the Hong Kong government and to ascertain how the development of a regional education hub and an education industry features in its plans. It is analysed that up till 2009, the goal of attracting foreign and Mainland human resources and talent, as a way to facilitate the inflow of human capital into Hong Kong, has overridden the goal of a viable and self-sustaining education industry. The article questions whether such a policy orientation is in the best interests of Hong Kong and whether developing Hong Kong into an education hub should be mainly seen as being a way of upgrading and revitalizing local higher education in order to better serve the local economy, which is under pressure to transform into a knowledge-based economy and to develop new growth poles.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.594418]

There is a clear need for new research into the work and life outcomes for graduates of Australian international education. Drawing upon divergent post-study transitions, this article aims to present a multi-faceted, qualitative foundation for the consideration of both positional and transformative impacts of international education on graduates' post study lives and careers. We compare three divergent study and life pathways for international students via three case studies of different models of Australian international and transnational education provision. The findings show that positional and transformative outcomes were often intertwined in surprising ways in participants' stories. The pathways that they followed after graduation were strongly influenced by their engagement with international education as a life as well as a learning experience. All three case studies also suggest that concepts of the prestige of the Western degree need further consideration.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2011.562369]