This open access book focuses on trends in educational inequality using twenty years of grade 8 student data collected from 13 education systems by the IEA’s Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) between 1995 and 2015. While the overall positive association between family socioeconomic status (SES) and student achievement is well documented in the literature, the magnitude of this r…
Adult Learning and Education The graduate student guide in adult education explores theories of adult learning and adult education participation. It provides a frame of reference for understanding the development of a rapidly evolving field and for enhancing knowledge and competencies in this professional domain. The publication is divided into two sections: a section on adult learning theories…
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: China, India, Russia, Turkey, South Africa and South Korea. It describes how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of the national higher education systems in these countries. It…
This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequen…
This open access book illustrates a new type of formative intervention for in-service teacher training in entrepreneurship education. The book describes a Change Laboratory and shows how teachers and workshop assistants develop the idea of a multidisciplinary project entailing the design of a self-service and parking lot in a dismissed area close to the city centre. The multidisciplinary projec…
Education in Asia Pacific countries is being transformed by globalisation and the market economy. Most economies within the region have flourished due to increased regional capital flow, trade and other forms of economic and political interaction. The Asia Pacific also has rich and unique traditions, which create cultural diversity as well as common challenges, including obstacles of language a…
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book describes the history, structure and institutions of open and distance education in six countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US. It discusses how open and distance education is evolving in a digital age to reflect the needs and circumstances of national higher education systems in these countries, and explore…
Our oceans need a strong and effective environmental rule of law to protect them against increased pressures and demands, including climate change, pollution, fisheries, shipping and more. The environmental rule of law for oceans requires the existence of a set of rules and policies at multiple governance levels that appropriately regulate human activities at sea and ensure that pressures on th…
The book begins with an analysis of the technological infrastructure environment and of the manifold regulatory theories developed in the Internet Governance context. Based on this foundation the transnational normative ecosystem is outlined, followed by a detailed discussion of the substantive Internet Governance principles (such as legitimacy, participation, transparency, accountability). The…
Latin America is considered the most unequal continent in the world. Paradoxically, the development of resource-intensive social systems has done little to change the social imbalance. The author traces this paradox using Argentina as an example, uncovering the underlying conflicts of power and interests, and identifying successful strategies for implementing inclusive policies. As the first st…
This open access book offers a new, capital-theoretical perspective on the macroeconomic relationship between desired wealth and investment, and it presents new empirical data on private wealth and its composition in the OECD plus China area. The authors argue that a free economic and social order can only be stabilized if the wealth aspirations of individuals are met under conditions of price …
This open access short reader provides a state of the art overview of the discrimination research field, with particular focus on discrimination against immigrants and their descendants. It covers the ways in which discrimination is defined and conceptualized, how it is measured, how it may be theorized and explained, and how it might be combated by legal and policy means. The book also present…
In this collection of essays, we reflect on what it means to practise the social sciences in the twenty-first century. The book brings together leading social scientists from the Asia-Pacific region. We argue for the benefit of dialogue between the diverse theories and methods of social sciences in the region, the role of the social sciences in addressing real-world problems, the need to transc…
This open access book seeks to create a forum for discussing key questions regarding theories on teaching: Which theories of teaching do we have? What are their attributes? What do they contain? How are they generated? How context-sensitive and content-specific do they need to be? Is it possible or even desirable to develop a comprehensive theory of teaching? The book identifies areas of conver…
This open access handbook, Ten Crises systematically traces the economic history of China from 1949 to 2020, unravelling the complex domestic and global factors leading to the cyclical crises identified by WEN and his research team, and examining the corresponding counteracting policies and measures by the government to resolve or defer the crises. The book offers profound insights into Chinaâ…
This Book Series is devoted to examining and solving the major methodological problems social sciences are facing. Take for example the gap between empirical and theoretical research, the explanatory power of models, the relevance of multilevel analysis, the weakness of cumulative knowledge, the role of ordinary knowledge in the research process, or the place which should be reserved to “…
This is the first volume to offer an in-depth look at (lethal) violence in the Balkans. The Balkans Homicide Study analyses 3,000 (attempted) homicide cases from Croatia, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Romania and Slovenia. Shedding light on a region long neglected in terms of empirical violence research, the study at hand asks: - What types of homicides occur in the Balkans? - Who are the perpe…
The growth and health of our digital economies and societies depend on the core protocols and infrastructure of the Internet. This technical and logical substructure of our digital existence is now in need of protection against unwarranted interference in order to sustain the growth and the integrity of the global Internet. The Internet's key protocols and infrastructure can be considered a glo…