Editorial

Citation

Brian Roberts, P. (2010), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 24 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2010.06024caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 24, Issue 3

Dear readers, welcome to a further issue of the International Journal of Educational Management, which I hope you find enlightening. On behalf of the publishers and editorial board I encourage you to become involved by either submitting papers or possibly as an active board member. This issue has the usual international flavour, which I hope you find helpful in your academic work. On this occasion the writers are from Singapore, the USA, and the UK (with one UK writer originally based in Pakistan and another in Israel).

In the first contribution, Dr Pak Tee Ng and Dr Charlene Tan from The National Institute of Education, Singapore, have studied the tertiary education landscape in Singapore. The paper analyses the Singapore government’s recent attempts to make Singapore a “Global Schoolhouse” by transforming its tertiary education sector. It examines the government’s attempt to promote greater diversity and autonomy in the tertiary education landscape. It also examines the government’s systems of state funding and accountability for the tertiary education sector. The findings indicate that despite the government’s promotion of greater diversity and autonomy in the tertiary education landscape, the government maintains centralised control through systems of accountability to and funding from the state. The example of the University of New South Wales’s sudden pull-out from the system is used as an example of this control by the authors.

In the next paper, which is by Hunaiti et al., from Anglia Ruskin University, the purpose is stated as the provision of assessment guidelines that help to implement research-based education in science and technology areas. The authors’ findings indicate that assessment could be improved within this field in order to contribute to the learning process, rather than merely measure and categorise a student’s performance after the event. They argue that certain ways of teaching and of structuring the class and an assignment are more conducive to creating an atmosphere in which students will want to receive feedback to improve their learning and performance rather than a mark as a reward.

The third paper is a contribution from Jane Hemsley-Brown and Izhar Oplatka on marketing in universities – a comparative study of two national higher education systems. After an online survey of academics in the UK and Israel, both indicated that their HE institution was oriented towards meeting students’ needs and desires and cared for their well being, teaching and learning. In addition, the respondents alluded to their contribution to internal marketing, i.e. to the promotion of their university through their own tasks and performances. As marketing orientation frequently underpins the development and implementation of successful organisation-environment relationships, the current paper is a first attempt to trace the contextual determinants of this orientation, by comparing its frequencies and elements in two different HE systems.

The study by Saadia Tayyaba, working out of Oxford University, is a national study on achievements in middle-grade mathematics in Pakistan. The study sample consisted of 14,440 students from 770 schools across the country. Gender information was gained from the work on tests. Analysis revealed that 61 per cent of the variation in mathematics achievement was due to systematic differences in the average achievement of students attending different schools. At the student level, gender, location, some home background and homework variables contributed to mathematics achievement. At the school level, availability of learning resources and higher physical facilities were found to be associated with increase in achievement scores. Amount of instruction, availability of separate classrooms, percentage of classes in open air or corridors, and class size did not show any statistically significant relationship with mathematics achievement.

Professor Ray Calabrese from Ohio State University, has worked with former colleagues from Wichita State University using the technique of appreciative inquiry to create a sustainable rural community. The findings of the work suggest that the appreciative inquiry 4-D cycle promoted greater respect and value of participants’ strengths and assets through shared personal narratives; participants transformed their rural school district’s culture from defensive isolationist and reactive to one that embraced internal and external collaboration, greater levels of trust and hope; participants increased social capital between the school district and community agencies as well as with school district stakeholders. Does it work? Well, yes, as participants were transformed from those with no hope into conduits of hope for their communities.

Last but by no means least, Teresa Wasonga from Northern Illinois University, presents work on “co creating leadership dispositional values and context survey”. The purpose was to develop this by examining the self-perceptions of school leaders, teachers, and staff, on the practice of co-creating leadership behaviours and conditions that facilitate the practice. Two components of co-creating leadership were delineated (i.e. dispositions and context). Dispositions consisted of seven factors (trust and trustworthiness, humility, active listening, resilience, patience, collaboration, and cultural anthropology). Context consisted of three factors (deep democracy, quality relations, and evolving power).

Professor Brian Roberts