The Smart School Project is one of the flagships of the Multimedia Super Corridor. The Malaysian government has established partnerships with the private sector through the Concept Request for Proposals (CRFP) process. This paper will critically analyze the concept of Smart School in the Malaysian environment and look into the issues relating to implementation of this concept as per the vision of the Ministry of Education Malaysia. The paper will go further to provide empirical proof with regards to the mind set and the response to the Teaching-Learning component of the Smart School Concept, from the view point of in service teachers.

Despite the steady decline in the relative cost of acquiring information and communication technology (ICT), the cost of owning and maintaining sustainable computer systems in schools is rising. Simultaneously, Ministries of Education (MoE) in sub-Saharan Africa are under pressure to invest in ICT. However, there is very little evidence upon which decision makers can base their decisions to allocate finances to ICT. This article is based on a survey of total costs of owning computer rooms in 62 schools across Botswana, Namibia and the Seychelles. It reveals that in Botswana and Seychelles, where government provided computer facilities to all post-primary schools, ICT expenditure per school is much higher than in Namibia where school computer facilities are funded from several sources including government, NGO and the community. It is argued that high expenditure is not necessarily associated with efficiency of resource usage, and that internationally benchmarked research is needed in order to support optimal MoE and school level decision making.

Using 6 longitudinal data sets, the authors estimate links between three key elements of school readiness--school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills--and later school reading and math achievement. In an effort to isolate the effects of these school-entry skills, the authors ensured that most of their regression models control for cognitive, attention, and socioemotional skills measured prior to school entry, as well as a host of family background measures. Across all 6 studies, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills. A meta-analysis of the results shows that early math skills have the greatest predictive power, followed by reading and then attention skills. By contrast, measures of socioemotional behaviors, including internalizing and externalizing problems and social skills, were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance, even among children with relatively high levels of problem behavior. Patterns of association were similar for boys and girls and for children from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds.