Search

Integrating twenty-first century competencies into the curriculum has become an important issue for education reform worldwide. This study examines and compares twenty-first century competencies demonstrated in mother tongue curriculum standards in China, the United States and Finland. It identifies key similarities and significant differences among them. It shows that the Finnish Curriculum has a more balanced distribution of twenty-first century competencies. While communication and critical thinking are stressed in all three, critical thinking is prioritised in the American Curriculum. In addition to communication and critical thinking, the Chinese Curriculum emphasises citizenship based on national identity, metacognitive strategies and aesthetics. The American Curriculum focuses on information and ICT literacy, and the Finnish Curriculum highlights personal and social responsibility concerning cultural awareness and citizenship. The significant differences between these three Curricula are related to the countries' tradition of curriculum theories – the Chinese integrate Western theories and the Confucian tradition, the American follow the Anglo–American curriculum and the Finnish have roots in Bildung-Didaktik. Curriculum objectives should take into consideration both subject knowledge and skills and the student as a whole person. Additionally, different curriculum traditions should be considered and learned during the curriculum design process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the global expansion of International Baccalaureate (IB), tensions have emerged between IB and the national education systems. This poses challenges to international education governance in many countries. In mainland China, IB programmes have rapidly become more prevalent since their introduction in 1991. However, new policies have imposed censorship and restrictions on international programmes regarding international education as a potential threat to China’s educational sovereignty, cultural identity, and educational equity. Shanghai has the highest number of IB schools and the strictest policies in mainland China. To understand China’s international education policy governance, this study traces the policy evolution of Shanghai’s IB education through document analysis and interviews. Furthermore, this study examines the responses, perceptions, and demands of non-governmental stakeholders regarding current restrictive policies. Results show that the development of IB education in Shanghai has undergone three stages of policy transformation: support, regulation, and restriction. Against this policy transformation, non-governmental stakeholders believe that IB education is a “necessity”. Therefore, this study suggests that IB education governance in China should incorporate the elements of network governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the perceptions and experiences of a teacher and students in a Shanghai public primary school when digital games were used in a second‐grade math class. The participants included one teacher and 45 students. Data collection methods included classroom observation, focus‐group and individual interviews, and document analysis. Digital gameplay, when used once daily over a 6‐day period, was found to enhance student engagement and interest in learning; many students, however, were concerned about its effect on academic achievement and eyesight. The teacher employed a "making thinking visible" approach using pencil and paper and problem‐solving strategies to help students understand the game's mathematical principles and master mathematical knowledge. Obstacles included large class size, difficulty evaluating learning outcomes, balancing fun and learning, and effective game–classroom integration. This study found that exam‐oriented education and traditional teacher‐centred teaching in China influenced participants' perceptions and experiences of digital game‐based learning. Lay Description: What is already known about this topic: Digital game‐based learning is effective and leads to a more relaxed learning environment that promotes students' engagement, interest, motivation, and confidence.Learning with digital games helps students acquire mathematics knowledge more effectively than traditional classroom lectures.Digital game‐based learning is helpful in math class as it makes students feel challenged and more capable, thereby improving self‐efficacy and task persistence. What this paper adds: Mathematics teachers and students have a contradictory attitude that shows both approval and concern towards game‐based learning.In the Chinese context, exam‐oriented culture is an important factor that influences the teacher's and students' perceptions and experiences of digital game‐based learning.While digital game‐based learning helps students' engagement and interest in math, it also faces numerous challenges such as large class size, balancing fun and learning, and effective game–classroom integration. Implications for practice and/or policy: Digital game‐based learning may be more effective when combined with pencil and paper to write down the process and make thinking visible.Fun and learning should be balanced in digital game‐based learning.Teachers need training and support for digital game‐centred programmes to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its exceptional mechanical properties, 18CrNiMo7-6 alloy steel is one of the preferred materials for producing critical components, such as high-speed heavy-duty gearboxes. To study the relationship between cylindrical grinding parameters (e.g., workpiece speed, wheel speed, and grinding depth) and responses (i.e., grinding force, temperature, and surface residual stress), dimensional analysis and finite element simulation of cylindrical grinding were performed in this paper. A mathematical model for predicting the grinding force and residual stress of cylindrical grinding was proposed, and numerical and experimental verifications of cylindrical 18CrNiMo7-6 alloy steel were carried out. The numerical verification results showed that the maximum relative errors of the model for predicting the grinding force and residual stress were 7.9% and 11.2%, respectively. The experimental results revealed that the maximum absolute errors were 1.31 N and 33.7 MPa, respectively. To consider the simplification between finite element simulation and experiments, a modified model was proposed, with the errors of 5.4% and 8.6% for grinding force and residual stress, respectively. The results of this study indicate that the proposed model can guide practical grinding operations and help optimize machining parameters, improve production efficiency, and achieve high-quality machining results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-lingual event retrieval is an information retrieval task aimed at cross-lingual event retrieval among multiple languages to find text or documents related to a specific event. Specific to Chinese-Vietnamese cross-language event retrieval, it involves using Chinese as a query to retrieve Vietnamese documents related to the query event. The critical issue is how to efficiently align query and document representations with limited resources. Existing cross-language pre-training models are trained on large-scale multilingual corpora, but their training goals do not include explicit language alignment tasks. Due to the uneven distribution of training corpora between different languages, these models have The problem of language bias. Therefore, this linguistic bias is also inherited in cross-lingual retrieval based on these models. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Chinese-Vietnamese cross-lingual event retrieval method based on knowledge distillation. This approach enables the model to learn good query-document matching features from monolingual retrieval by transferring knowledge from high-resource to low-resource languages. By enhancing the alignment between queries and documents in different languages in a shared semantic space, the method improves the performance of Chinese-Vietnamese cross-lingual event retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]