Educational Reform in Oman: System and Structural Changes

This chapter gives a historical perspective of the Sultanate of Oman educational developments: system and structural wide changes. The significant and structural changes were on the basis of creating a basic and post-basic education. Structural changes within the Ministry included the establishment of the directories throughout the different states. System wide changes included a complete overhaul of the curriculum leading to a more practice-based and attuned to the work place and pedagogical approaches. The Ministry gave each state in Oman a level of autonomy to its directories. The greatest challenges facing the Ministry of Education and it’s reform is bringing the educational outcomes to a level that are benchmarked to international standards and Omani students able to draw on the twenty-first century and technological skills to operate in a globally connected world. The chapter finally concludes on the most pressing challenges to face them and increase student outcomes

Early Admission Call-Up: A Strategy And Marketing Perk For Attracting Better Students To A College In Lebanon

The purpose of this study was to determine whether an early call-up strategy helps in attracting better students to a private university in Lebanon. Early admission call-up was administered to the top 25 percentile-ranked students of main feeder schools at a private university in Lebanon. Admission data was accrued for students who applied for admission from 2000 to 2006. The early admission call-up was made in the spring of 2006 and compared to the top 25 percentile-ranked students of previous years that were not treated with the early-admission call-up. They were also compared to those below the 25 percentile score cohort group. The results showed that students who were treated with the call-up enrolled at higher rates than those at the top 25 percentile rank in previous years. It was also shown that those at the top 25 percentile score had a higher high school averages as compared to the previous years. Early admission call-up provides a strategic marketing perk to enrolling above average students at a private university in Lebanon

The state of history teaching in private-run confessional schools in Lebanon : implications for national integration

History curriculum gravitates towards understanding differences among pluralistic societies. However, the Lebanese case has exacted a range of differences promulgated by the number of confessional-run private schools, with little control over their administrative or curricular policies. Since the establishment of the Republic in 1926, public policy gave the private schools their own constitutional prerogative maintaining their own educational programmes, each with a distinctive value system. This paper looks at the policies towards history curriculum by the seven major confessional schools in Lebanon. Through textual analysis of history books, reviews of policies, and interviews with students, educational decision-makers, and history teachers, the paper argues that confessional schools have propagated their own line of discourse for history teaching, without accommodating for a pluralistic discourse of integration.peer-reviewe

Critical Thinking and Qatar’s Education For a New Era: Negotiating Possibilities

In this essay, the authors use Foucauldian concepts to examine the State of Qatar’s unprecedented educational reform, Education For a New Era. One of the key components of this comprehensive reform centers on the development of students’ abilities to engage in critical and independent thought. Evoking Foucault’s concepts of regime of truth and metanarrative, the article examines the seemingly contradictory relationship between the Qatari Regime of Truth and the development of students’ critical thinking skills. The authors discuss the importance of embracing a language of possibility raising important educational issues and offering suggestions as to how educators might address these complex issues to increase the likelihood of the success of Education For a New Era

How Critical Thinking is Taught in Qatari Independent Schools’ Social Studies Classrooms: Teachers’ Perspectives

Qatar is in the midst of a massive systemic education reform Education For a New Era. A key aspect of the reform is the expectation of teachers to develop students’ critical thinking skills. In this paper, an open-ended questionnaire and follow-up interviews revealed several aspects of critical thinking including how it is defined and taught, where in the curriculum does critical thinking flourish, and challenges and limitations of the teaching of critical thinking from the perspectives of social studies teachers in preparatory and secondary Qatari independent schools.Qatar University Internal Grant # QUEST-CED-ESD-10/11-

A Literacy Exercise: An Extracurricular Reading Program as an Intervention to Enrich Student Reading Habits in Qatar

This paper evaluates an extracurricular reading activity in Qatari schools. The paper presents a two-month extracurricular reading program designed for fourth grade students. The methodology used triangulation of the data to analyze, in detail, the students’ primary perceptions towards reading, teacher self-efficacy, teacher instructional behavior and home literacy measures. The program was implemented in four randomly selected schools. The reading program was announced to each school, and students in the four schools were asked whether they wished to enroll contingent upon receiving parental consent. There were 248 students in the treatment group (students enrolled in the English and Arabic reading program), and 176 students were recruited for the control group (not enrolled in the reading program). The main design was a randomized subjects pretest-posttest control group design and analytical  split-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) design. The findings of this study suggested that students in the reading program demonstrated greater interest in reading than those who did not enroll in the reading program, even when factoring out the effects of parents and home environments. The extracurricular program was significant to the extent that it has improved students’ reading habits. An increase in breadth and depth of such programs shall increase language literacy and numeracy in schools and can improve the school culture towards a more student-teacher interactions and engaging activities