Re-engineering the Teaching of Thinking Skills at a Teacher Education University: The Malaysian Experience

Maria Salih

Critical and creative thinking skills were first introduced in Malaysia in the 1990s by the Ministry of Education then. A team of officials from the Ministry and some teachers from schools were sent to NCTT in Boston to be trained as trainers so that they can later propagate their expertise to a wider population of educators in the country. As a result, critical and creative thinking was incorporated into the school curriculum and the training of these skills was conducted to all the lecturers in the teacher training colleges in Malaysia with the intention that it will be disseminated to the beginning teachers and later all the students in school. It might seem that an understanding of the infusion method of teaching the various thinking skills and important habits of mind has not been understood by a majority of them. This can be observed through a minimal implementation of these thinking skills in the actual classroom resulting in few positive results to this end. If these thinking skills are not made explicit to the trainers, they cannot use them to think about important elements of curricular content and later to conduct metacognition. The invaluable thinking skills that was once present, is being revived again with the commitment of a newly established education university under a new Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia. Several representative examples of the infusion of instruction in skillful thinking into standard content instruction will be demonstrated and discussed. The positive evaluation of the instructional strategies and assessment in Thinking-based Learning has also led to the design of a special post-graduate programme on Teaching Critical and Creative Thinking into Content Instruction at the University.

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Do Households make choices: Children vs Schooling in Nyeri County, Kenya

Loise Gichuhi

Family size exerts a negative effects on investment in children’s education and thereby the education attainments. One expects that families with many children will tend to invest less in each and that families with fewer children will make greater investments per child. The underlying rationale for the argument is simply that given limited resources, parents with fewer children should be able to educate each child better. This negative association between fertility and human capital investment per child has been termed the quality –quantity trade –off. There is little evidence that exist in Sub-Saharan countries. The little evidence that exists indicates different findings between countries and also within the countries, urban and rural.

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The New Constitution, the Hope that “No Child is Left Behind” in Education

Boit Lillian C. and Nelson Mari E.

Education as a right was reaffirmed during the Jomtien World Education for all forums (1990) and during the African Regional Conference in Johannesburg, South Africa on A Framework for action in sub-Saharan African: renaissance (1999). The sub-Saharan countries agreed to develop successful education systems and reaffirm that education is a basic right that need investment for quality and agreed to remove all barriers to full realization of education for the African child. The new Kenya constitution as the supreme law of the land has in article 43, guaranteed education for all citizens for all children (53). This paper examines the rights of education in relation to the constitution of Kenya. 6 Katarina Tomasevski7 explains that a meaningful education must be available, accessible, acceptable and adaptable, after all, education is to prepare and equip citizens to function effectively in their environment and to be useful members of society…”9 . The above concerns can only be realized by legislating articles 43, 53, 54 and 55 of the Kenyan constitution. They are contained in the bill of rights and represent the rights of citizens of Kenya and especially the least able to provide for themselves and their full legislation will ensure that “ No Child is Left Behind” in the Kenyan education system.

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