This article reports the results of a case study involving two ethnic Chinese students, one from Malaysia and one from Indonesia, who chose to pursue higher education in Hong Kong. By placing the students at the centre of an investigation of the social, political, economic and educational contexts of their home countries and host territory, the study sought to gain a holistic understanding of cross-border mobility. The findings suggested that the students’ personal backgrounds and dispositions mediated the external push-pull factors involved in their decisions. The data showed that the two students’ cross-border mobility allowed them to redefine their ethnic identities and create global academic and professional identities. The implications of the purposes of cross-border mobility and methods for examining student mobility are discussed.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

Several education hubs have emerged in Asia and the Middle East in recent years with a specific focus on cross-border higher education. Through considerable efforts in policy planning and generous funding, these hubs aim to transform a country or city into an eminent destination for education, research, and training. The inherent design of these hubs raises many questions about higher education's contribution to international relations as large numbers of local and foreign actors congregate. Specifically, some education hubs are leveraging cultural heritage and colonial legacy as an instrument of soft power by emphasising shared cultural identities and values. By engaging in cultural diplomacy, education hubs seek to exert influence on the international stage. However, assumptions about shared identities and values as well as the prevailing political climate of the local society present serious challenges for policy implementation. Alternatively, an education hub can also engage with international actors based on an enduring faith in the venture of science to propel the knowledge economy - another kind of norm that underpins soft power. This paper compares Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong as education hubs that engage in soft power and cultural diplomacy.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2015.1037551]

This article presents information on 2 international educational effectiveness studies, one completed and the other ongoing. The 2nd study is, to a large degree, a reaction to a methodological problem encountered in the 1st study, the lack of an internationally valid instrument measuring teacher effectiveness. This article presents 4 reasons for conducting the 2nd study (International System for Teacher Observation and Feedback (ISTOF)) and then details the overall work plan for ISTOF-I (2004 - 2006) and ISTOF-II (2006 - 2007). The sample of 20 fully participating country teams in ISTOF is very diverse with representatives from nearly all geographic areas of the world (North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia), many of which have never participated in teacher or school effectiveness research. This article summarizes progress made on the development of the ISTOF protocol, including the generation of components and indicators of teacher effectiveness. In many ways, the study is already a success, due to the diversity of the participating countries and their generation of major parts of the protocol during ISTOF-I. Nevertheless, this article concludes with a discussion of some of the major challenges that the research team will face as it begins ISTOF-II.
[Copyright of Educational Research & Evaluation is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13803610600874067]

Since the '50s, the once highly unified culture is now fragmented, leading to a variety of cultural derivatives, such as mainland Chinese culture, Hong Kong Chinese culture, Singaporean Chinese culture and Malaysian Chinese culture. Although still called Chinese culture, they have their distinctive forms. Communities like the mainland Chinese, the Hong Kong people, the Chinese Singaporeans and the Chinese Malaysians differ considerably from one another in such cultural aspects as behavioural approach, thinking mode, mental attitude and vocabulary. This paper examines some features of major Chinese-background discourses in Asia with a particular focus on educational aspects and issues.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]