ABSTRACT
International interest focuses on why pupils from East-Asia tend to outperform pupils from the West and scholars have proposed a number of possible explanations to account for these international trends. Using Vygotsky's theory (1978) as a conceptual framework to "construct" school achievement, this book puts forward culturally relevant context for understanding developmental aspects of children’s school achievement and their implication to classroom practice and education progress. Converging the two important lines of inquiry – the child factor and the sociocultural factor – this book showcases evidence-based scholarly works from across the globe that shed light on causes of academic achievement in different contexts.
The book brings together eminent scholars from early childhood, primary education, secondary and vocational education who expertly capture the vitality of development and processes of specific child factors and their interaction with their environment that explain their school achievement. Foregrounded in the five planes of cultural historical, institutional, social, personal and mental, the research explain how children think, learn and form the will to perform amidst the changing social and family environment, and challenging school and educational environment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part |9 pages
Introduction
part |44 pages
Cultural—historical plane
chapter |13 pages
Framing achievement when learning is unified
chapter |13 pages
A psychometric view of sociocultural factors in test validity
part |29 pages
Institutional plane
chapter |13 pages
Classroom chronotopes privileged by contemporary educational policy
part |89 pages
Social plane
chapter |13 pages
Examining the relations between a play motive and a learning motive for enhancing school achievement
part |40 pages
Personal plane
chapter |11 pages
When Lev Vygotsky meets Francis Galton
chapter |13 pages
Education for citizenship
part |39 pages
Mental plane
chapter |14 pages
Cognitive style and achievement through a sociocultural lens
chapter |11 pages
Cognitive perturbation with dynamic modelling
part |14 pages
Conclusion