Many countries offer government scholarships for international higher education and expect the recipients to contribute to national development. While there are many benefits from these scholarship programmes, they have been criticized as expensive. We examine the perceived contribution of Kazakhstan’s two government scholarship alumni to the development of the nation. Drawing on Kirkpatrick’s model of evaluation, we explore the influence of government scholarships on Bolashak and Nazarbayev University alumni and their contribution at organizational and societal levels. Our findings show that both groups of alumni play important roles in developing local talent and contributing to the improvement of systems, practices, and policies within their workplaces and to wider socio-economic changes. Alumni are fostering social developments bringing attention to issues of environmental protection and political engagement. However, our findings also illustrate that underdeveloped industries, limited job opportunities in some fields, low salaries, bureaucratic management culture, and resistance to change limit alumni contributions. We argue that the problem is at the system level and that the national economy is lagging in human capital development. Our findings emphasize the critical importance of developing the economy in tandem with education and human capital development to reap greater benefits from the knowledge of international education graduates.

There is constant pressure on governments and policy makers to raise the standard of education, and to develop appropriate curriculum and pedagogies for students. It is no easy task. This book presents eight specific case studies of education reform implementation which capture how the design and implementation choices of policy makers are shaped by national and historical contexts. They offer real examples of the choices and constraints faced by policymakers and practitioners. The cases are a mix of nationally and locally mandated reforms with five examples from nations where the state initiated and guided reforms. The concluding synthesis chapter highlights commonalities and differences across the cases and disparate responses to shared concerns. Providing a breadth of real-world research, it will assist policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders interested in system change.

When a researcher tests an educational program, product, or policy in a randomized controlled trial and detects a significant effect on an outcome, the intervention is usually classified as something that “works.” When expected effects are not found, there is seldom an orderly and transparent analysis of plausible reasons why. Accumulating and learning from possible failure mechanisms is not standard practice in education research, and it is not common to design interventions with causes of failure in mind. This chapter develops Boruch and Ruby’s proposition that the education sciences would benefit from a systematic approach to the study of failure. We review and taxonomize recent reports of large-scale randomized controlled trials in K–12 schooling that yielded at least one null or negative major outcome, including the nature of the event and reasons (if provided) for why it occurred. Our purpose is to introduce a broad framework for thinking about educational interventions that do not produce expected effects and seed a cumulative knowledge base on when, how, and why interventions do not reach expectations. The reasons why an individual intervention fails to elicit an outcome are not straightforward, but themes emerge when researchers’ reports are synthesized.

These case studies have been prepared by people who have been around and close to the action. In some cases, they were designers, in others, evaluators or action researchers and sometimes they acted as advisers. In all cases the authors sustained an enduring engagement with one or more aspects of the reform in question. They are not innocent bystanders, nor are they unquestioning champions of the programmes. They do offer rich accounts; situating policies and actions in national and historical contexts and identifying choices and constraints faced by policymakers and practitioners. Our overarching instruction to the authors was to illuminate a much under-researched and underdeveloped area, the implementation of educational reform. In selecting the cases we opted for a mix of nationally and locally mandated reforms with five examples from nations where the state initiated and guided reforms, which is the norm for most countries. But because of the impact United States and United Kingdom examples have had on the field of education reform in the last fifty years we offer two cases where the choice and pursuit of better learning strategies has been the decision of a school or a school district. We did not emphasise or suggest that authors look closely at student outcome data or graduate destinations or international benchmarking exercises, rather our interest is in implementation, on how ideas were

The use of international scholarship programmes is part of a long-standing approach to human capital development in many developing and middle-income countries that finance studies at universities abroad and locally. Yet, many scholarship alumni struggle to thrive in their home country and encounter numerous difficulties in their transition to the job market. This paper examines the employment experiences of Kazakhstan's government scholarship alumni in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields and identifies the challenges they encounter navigating the labour market. Our analysis of 45 interviews demonstrated that although alumni hold a positional advantage in the job market and many succeed, there are also many alumni whose employability and career success are impeded by an intersection of socioeconomic and cultural factors, intergenerational clashes and scholarship programme regulations. The implications for scholarship programmes and government policy goals are discussed.

The ways information about national education policies is exchanged and interpreted is a field of comparative education that is under-developed. What discussion and analysis there is seems to ignore the insights and models prevalent in other domains. We looked to fields like political science, and economic and social development for concepts to strengthen the analysis of education policy mobility between nations. We found an abundance of metaphors most of which fail to capture key elements of policy diffusion including the notion that ideas change as they cross cultural boundaries. We observe that policy transfer can be purposefully initiated by the host as well as a product of coercion or external incentives. Our principal conclusions are that common framings of traveling education policies are linear, one-directional and marked by an air of beneficence. They overlook the importance of context and the actions of sovereign nations in policy formation.

To raise university research productivity, the government of Kazakhstan introduced a requirement for university faculty members to publish in journals with a nonzero impact factor in order to qualify for promotion. A survey of faculty members at six universities was conducted to explore their response to the policy. The results suggest that a promotion-linked publication requirement may lift faculty research productivity if it is accompanied by support structures and if universities have control over the promotion process.

This paper2 looks at the different norms of practice between mathematics teachers in two countries, Kazakhstan and England. These differences pose challenges and opportunities for the implementationof a new secondary curriculum in Kazakhstan; a curriculum that has been shaped by and is grounded in prevailing practice in English educational system. The paper draws on survey data from the 2011 TIMSSexercise and relates it to our observations of classrooms in Kazakhstan over the last 5 years. The analysis draws on various cross-national studies of teachers’ work and studies of subject departments. Thepaper concludes with a discussion of the implications for successful curricula change and how it can be supported by an understanding of prevailing norms of practice. The paper also illustrates the continuedvalue of cross-national comparison of educational practices especially for relatively new nations. It questions the popular notion that global waves of policy solutions have washed, unimpeded and unchanged,across national borders.Key words: Comparative studies, teacher education, teaching practices, TIMSS.

The first overseas campus established by a renowned Chinese university- Xiamen University Malaysia is a flagship of China’s international engagement strategy in higher education. How XMUM adjusts and adapts to the local environment will be an exemplar for other Chinese universities.