The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between learning preferences of East Asian and American higher education students. A review of the literature revealed a body of qualitative studies suggesting a stereotypical perception of an Asian learning preference influenced by cultural variables and the historical roots of Confucianism. The pedagogical implications of this stereotypical perception are obvious to faculty engaged in teaching and learning with Asian international students in America or abroad. The authors surveyed 233 higher education students from Hong Kong and America using the VARK Questionnaire. The authors used a two-way contingency table analysis and chi-square statistical tests to conduct their cross-cultural comparison on their variables of interest including age, gender, and country.
[Copyright of Journal of Criminal Justice Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10511250903200485]

Reflecting on a personal experience of 'pre-professional' university education and reluctant engagement with Cultural Studies as an academic project, this article examines the now ambiguous role of undergraduate education under neo-liberal management regimes. Arguing that a 'new class politics in knowledge' is emerging with the transnational policy-sharing and international student exchange schemes with which diverse governmental cultures are responding to globalization, Morris suggests that the undergraduate classroom is becoming a 'frontier' of struggle over the future. Teaching cultural studies to undergraduates in a liberal arts environment is one way in which the discipline's emphasis on local knowledge can be put to institutionally creative uses.
[Copyright of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649370802184775]

Differential gender performance in standardized mathematics assessment has long been a heated topic. Gender gaps of varied magnitude have been identified on large-scale assessments in the United States. To continue the investigation, this study examined male and female performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 mathematics along four in-depth dimensions (strand, content topics, competency cluster, and item format). Furthermore, to identify the shared and unique patterns of gender differences, students from Hong Kong were brought into the comparison. Males in both counties demonstrated superior performance, particularly on complex multiple choice items. Females scored higher on probability, algebra, and reproduction items. Hong Kong students showed a larger gender gap than U.S. students. However, the within-country gender differences were considered small compared with the significant between-country performance differences. (Some PISA participants are not countries, but education systems representative of countries (e.g., Hong Kong). However, for purpose of simplicity, instead of using "countries/systems" every time, the generic term "countries" was used to refer to countries or systems.) Hong Kong students predominantly outperformed U.S. students, including items that measure complex mathematical reasoning, an area well documented to favor U.S. students.
[Copyright of International Journal of Testing is the property of Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15305050902733547]