Australia is proud of its recent major achievement, i.e., the Australian Technical and Further Education’s (TAFE) curriculum development mechanism and teaching materials development. The widely used TAFE training packages have become an important basis for developing vocational education and training related courses and materials. The training packages were supervised and developed by industry to provide flexible and uniform training content and certification standards nationwide to ensure that those trained receive the professional skills and knowledge needed by industry. The training packages consist of primary parts that require national endorsement, including unit of competency, qualifications framework, and assessment guidelines, as well as auxiliary parts that do not require endorsement, such as learning strategy, assessment resources, and professional materials. This paper employs the development process and the structure of TAFE’s training packages to analyze the content TAFE’s professional materials to make Taiwan’s vocational education teaching materials more practical and more diversified to meet the needs of industry.

　　The aims of this study were to investigate the evolution and current situation system of school textbooks in Korea as well as analyze its characteristics and problems. Using documentary analysis and literature review, this study found the following features in Korean’s school textbook system: (a) a coexisting centralized textbook publishing system, review system, and approval system that coexist as well as a shift from the centralized textbook system to the approval system; (b) to deal with the different characteristics of and needs in each stage of education, elementary school textbooks are determined primarily by the national government, in secondary education, they are determined by the review system, and textbooks used in vocational education are determined primarily by approval system and the national government; (c) government is involved in textbook pricing, buying the least expensive textbooks; (d) the government has been promoting digital textbook policy in recent years. Of course, some challenges and problems need to be resolved. They are (a) as approve system has been developing too fast, textbook quality concerns have been raised; (b) after textbook price liberalization, textbook prices have risen sharply; (c) due to different ideologies, the content of history textbooks have repeatedly sparked controversy; (d) since digital textbooks have not been as effectiveness as expected, more effort is needed to enhance teacher acceptance and to promote effective teaching of digital textbooks.

　　Out of concern for international understanding and peace education, this study set out to investigate how Taiwan was depicted in Spain’s textbooks. Social studies textbooks in junior and senior high schools were selected. The analysis framework was adopted from IMPACT-SE and UNESCO, with some viewpoints from post-colonialism. It was found that Taiwan, though once a colony of Spain, was not treated as such in the textbooks. To be more precise, Taiwan seemed to only exist after 1949 as the Republic of KMT and was juxtaposed with Communist China, and the democratization process since the mid-70s was not mentioned. Secondly, given the aforementioned inadequacies, the contents of the textbooks were incomplete, if not incorrect. Thirdly, conflicts and wars were reported in such a way that it failed to acknowledge the significance of peace, let alone peace education. Finally, some implications were proposed for the future research and textbook writings based on the findings.

　　The purpose of this study is to compare geometry content of instructional materials in elementary mathematics textbooks of Taiwan, Finland, and Singapore. The instructional materials reviewed were Kang-Hsuan Mathematics, the WSOY LASKUTAITO in English, and the MCE My Pals are Here! Maths, textbooks used to teach mathematics in Taiwan, Finland, and Singapore, respectively. Content analysis was used and mathematical problems were the unit of analysis. These were classified based on their cognitive types, representational forms, and contexts. The findings of this study show that most of the problems were classified as ‘procedure without connection’ with only a few problems belonging to the category of ‘doing mathematics’. Most of the problem contexts and representative forms in all three countries were non-contextual problems and visual forms. The significant differences among three countries were on the presentation of example problems and the ratio between example and practice problems. On the presentation of the example problems, Taiwan and Singapore provided more detailed thinking and a guided process to help in problem solving, but brief descriptions and demonstrations were presented in Finland. The ratio between example and practice problems was about 1:3 in Taiwan and Singapore and 1:25 in Finland.