Peer-reviewed Articles

Bromley, P., Nachtigal, T., & Kijima, R. (2024). Data as the new panacea: trends in global education reforms, 1970–2018. Comparative Education, 60(3), 401-422.

This paper investigates changes in the promissory visions articulated in education reforms around the world. We use structural topic modeling to inductively analyze the content of 9,268 reforms from 215 countries and territories during the period 1970–2018 using the World Education Reform Database. Our findings reveal a decline in traditional management-focused reforms and a rise in reforms related to data and information. We also find an expanding commitment to educational access and inclusion, but reforms framed explicitly in ‘rights’ language diminish. We argue that the rise of data-centric reforms and the retreat from rights-based approaches may both reflect and contribute to a broader erosion of the liberal world order.

Kijima, R., & Lipscy, P. Y. (2024). The politics of international testing. The Review of International Organizations, 19(1), 1-31.

How does quantifying and ranking national performance influence state behavior? Cross-national assessments in education, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) promoted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have become increasingly prominent in recent years. However, cross-national assessments are politically contentious, and their impact remains underexplored. We argue that assessment participation has a meaningful, positive impact on education outcomes and evaluate three hypotheses related to elite, domestic, and transnational mechanisms. Our mixed-method approach draws on a panel dataset covering all cross-national assessments and all countries as well as an original survey of education officials directly responsible for planning and implementation in 46 countries. We find that assessment participation increases net secondary enrollment rates even after accounting for potential self-selection. The magnitude of this increase is large: on a global basis, it is equivalent to improved access to higher education for 27-32 million students annually. The empirical evidence suggests elite-level mechanisms are primarily responsible for these findings.

Kijima, R., & Lipscy, P. Y. (2023). Competition and regime complex architecture: Authority relations and differentiation in international education. Review of International Political Economy, 30(6), 2150-2177.

What are the determinants and consequences of regime complexity? We argue that characteristics of international issue areas – network effects and entry barriers – affect the degree of feasible competition, with important consequences for authority relations, institutional differentiation, and substantive outcomes. Competition tends to erode the dominance of status quo institutions, diminishing hierarchy. Differentiation under competition varies according to power and material resources: Powerful states seek to shift the status quo by introducing undifferentiated institutions, while actors with limited resources tend to target differentiated niches. Variation in substantive outcomes depends on the initial configuration of institutions, particularly which actors are originally empowered and thus stand to lose from competition. We develop this theory and test four hypotheses by examining the regime complex for international education, a substantively important but often neglected issue area.

Classen, J., Vea, T., Kijima, R., Yang-Yoshihara, M., & Ariga, S. (2023). Interactional role negotiation among co-facilitators in an online design workshop. Classroom Discourse, 1-19.

Research has demonstrated the important role of co-teacher communication and planning, but relatively little is understood about co-teacher interactions during the act of teaching itself and how these interactions relate to educators’ positionings and ongoing identity development. This paper presents a case study of interaction between two co-facilitators of a team of Japanese youth during a week-long, synchronous, online workshop on human-centred design. One co-facilitator had several years of experience, and the other was a first-timer. Using positioning theory and discourse analysis, we show that the co-facilitators developed a relatively stable pattern of instructional authority delegation, or the social order that guides who has rights and responsibilities over which forms of instructional decision-making. We describe the delegation between the co-teachers in this study as involving ‘instructional content authority’ and ‘instructional language authority’, established through interactions of positioning early in the workshop. Then, we examine an interview activity later in the workshop that seemed to disrupt the established pattern. This work extends research on co-teacher communication and teacher learning to understand co-teacher interactions during live teaching, with potential implications for co-teacher preparation and the learning of less experienced co-teachers.

Bromley, P., Furuta, J., Kijima, R., Overbey, L., Choi, M., & Santos, H. (2023). Global determinants of education reform, 1960 to 2017. Sociology of Education, 96(2), 149-167.

Since post-World War II and especially throughout the 1990s, the globalization of a liberal international order propelled a wave of education reforms around the world. However, recent challenges to the legitimacy of the liberal order may undercut the prevalence of education reform across countries. To reveal how global changes are influencing education, we draw on a newly constructed data set of 6,696 education reforms in 147 countries from 1960 to 2017. Using dynamic negative binomial panel regression models, we find declining levels of reform in recent decades. We also find evidence of changing dynamics of influence among prominent organizational actors: World Bank lending is less associated with education reform over time, whereas the influence of international nongovernmental organizations has grown. This suggests a shifting system of governance, where formal coercive pressures become less palatable and the normative influences of civil society grow stronger. Overall, our findings indicate that education reform arises as a macro-global process as much as a response to local needs and conditions.

Wingard, A., Kijima, R., Yang-Yoshihara, M., & Sun, K. (2022). A Design Thinking Approach to Developing Girls’ Creative Self-Efficacy in STEM. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 101140.

The importance of creativity is increasingly being recognized as a critical skill for innovation in the STEM fields. Educational interventions have emerged that integrate 21st century skills, such as creativity, problem solving, and collaboration into STEM education. Design thinking is a popular framework that educators have applied in a variety of disciplines to teach these 21st century skills. This qualitative study focuses on the process by which adolescent girls develop creative thinking skills and apply them to problems in the STEM fields during a human-centered design thinking program. The findings show that participants feel that their self-efficacy toward their abilities to think creatively and work collaboratively to solve complex problems in STEM improved after participating in the design thinking program.

Kijima, R., Yang-Yoshihara, M., & Maekawa, M. (2021). Using design thinking to cultivate the next generation of female STEAM thinkers. International Journal of STEM Education, 8(14).

Countries around the world have struggled to implement education policies and practices to encourage more female youths to pursue Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). This has resulted in a persistent and sizeable gender gap in science and mathematics subjects in some countries. Using mixed-methods sequential explanatory design, this paper explores an educational intervention—specifically, a three-day design thinking workshop—in Japan, designed to change female youths’ perceptions regarding STEM topics. Framed using a constructivist approach to learning, the workshops aimed to engender creative confidence, empathy, and global competence among youths.

The findings show that female youths who participated in the workshop had increased interest in engineering, greater creative confidence, more positive perceptions of STEM, higher levels of empathy and pro-social factors, and a more varied outlook on career options. We argue that this short intervention had a strong influence on the female youths’ mindsets, self-images, and perceptions of STEM.

This study provides empirical support that a short, three-day intervention can produce positive change in how female youths relate to STEM. In gendered societies, an innovative method like design thinking has the potential to revitalize education curriculum in ways that spur female youths’ confidence and creativity, enabling them to imagine a career in the field of STEM.

Bromley, P., Overbey, L., Furuta, J., & Kijima, R. (2020). Education reform in the twenty-first century: declining emphases in international organisation reports, 1998–2018. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 19(1), 1-18.

The liberal and neoliberal world order is increasingly under attack. Global levels of democracy have been declining for over a decade, accompanied by rollbacks in some kinds of rights. We examine the implications of increasing criticisms of the (neo)-liberal era over time for educational reform discourse around the world by drawing on a unique primary dataset of 473 reports produced by international organisations between 1998 and 2018. Extending insights from neo-institutional theories of organisations, we argue that globalised models of education reform is on a decline as a result of growing attacks on the (neo)-liberal cultural system that has affected education policies around the world. Empirically, we find no evidence that reform emphases continue to grow since the 1990s, and support for arguments that predict stagnant or falling levels of reform discourse.

Kijima, R., & Sun, K. L. (2020). ‘Females don’t need to be reluctant’: Employing design thinking to harness creative confidence and interest in STEAM. International Journal of Art & Design Education.

There is great gender gap in mathematics and science among countries around the world, but the gender gap is one of the largest in Japan. In order to address this issue, we evaluated an educational intervention to empower the next generation of female youths by employing design thinking to ignite their interests in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) fields. In this article, we explain the rationale for the intervention, describe the unique three-day curriculum employing design thinking, and share the results from the intervention. There are four key findings of our study. After participating in the workshop, the middle school female students showed greater interest in STEAM fields, demonstrated increased levels of creative confidence, cultivated a greater sense of empathy for others, and exhibited greater appreciation for collaboration. This study highlights the possibilities and opportunities for using design thinking to encourage female youths to become more interested in STEAM fields.

Book

Yang-Yoshihara, M., & Kijima, R. (2019). Sekai wo Kaeru STEAM Jinzai (Learning in the 21st Century: Design Thinking and STEM Education). Tokyo: Asahi Shimbun Press, p.1-255.

Book Chapters

Kijima, R. & Bromley, P. (2024) “Education reform and the global learning crisis: When does reform help?” Handbook on Comparative Education. (accepted, to be published in Spring 2025)

Kijima, R., & Lipscy, P. (2020). International assessments and education policy: Evidence from an elite survey. In B. Simmons & J. Kelley (Eds.), The Power of Global Performance Indicators (pp.174-202). Cambridge University Press.

Kijima, R. & Leer, J. (2016).  Legitimacy, state-building, and contestation in education policy development: Chile’s involvement in international assessments. In W. Smith (Eds.) The Global Testing Culture: Shaping Education Policy, Perceptions, and Practice (pp.43-62). Oxford Studies in Comparative Education: Symposium Books.

Kijima R. (2010). Why participate? Cross-national assessments and foreign aid to education. In A. Wiseman (Eds.) The Impact of International Achievement Studies on National Education Policymaking (pp. 35-61). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.