Editorial

Citation

Pounder, J. and Clarke, M. (2010), "Editorial", Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Vol. 3 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebs.2010.34903caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, Volume 3, Issue 3

This edition of Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues (EBS) is squarely concerned with education with contributors “shading” into societal issues as they examine some key contextual and cultural issues.

Given the central purpose of EBS which is to provide an international forum for high-quality research papers emanating from the Middle East, a most pertinent issue is plagiarism that is of central concern worldwide and particularly in second language contexts. We thus begin with the paper of Debbie Wheeler, and David Anderson in which they argue for an approach to addressing and preventing plagiarism that is tailored to an educational setting. The whole area of assessment resonates when the issue of plagiarism is examined and Christine Coombe’s paper which offers a blue print for foreign/second language assessment design and administration supports her argument that second language teachers need to be “assessment literate”. Still in the area of assessment literacy, Sharif Moghaddam’s findings on cloze testing in an Iranian context indicate that performance on such forms of testing is strongly influenced by the congruence of test wording to the cultural schemata of those being tested.

John Raven and Karen O’Donnell move the ground from assessment to process and found in their study of Emirati students that digital storytelling can be a powerful vehicle for strengthening cultural identity. Similarly in an Emirati context and moving to educational content, Monica Gallant, Sudipa Majumdar and Damodharan Varadarajan found that their study of a selection of female students revealed a strong influence of entrepreneurship content in a business curriculum on females’ intention to engage in entrepreneurial initiatives after graduation.

Finally, the focus on education for students is moved by Barbara Harold and Lauren Stephenson to education for teachers and their paper provides an understanding and analysis of undergraduate student teacher programs, processes of professional learning and the development of research skills among pre-service teachers in the UAE.

We hope you enjoy this collection of high-quality and thought provoking papers.

James Pounder, Matthew Clarke