This study was conducted to corroborate in understanding the teachers’ beliefs about assessment practices. The prior studies related to teachers’ assessment beliefs in mathematics have been done to assess teachers’ beliefs in the general context of mathematics teaching. This study developed an instrument to assess teachers’ assessment beliefs of mathematical thinking. The research aimed to develop and validate a scale of assessment beliefs of mathematical thinking by using the confirmatory factor analysis. The first draft of the scale contained 25 items. The sample of the study consisted of 537 mathematics teachers from public schools in Oman. The instrument was a questionnaire with a 5-point Likert scale. The scale was validated by asking a number of experts in mathematics educational measurement and evaluation. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis was applied to test the model of assessment beliefs of mathematical thinking scale using AMOS 25.0. All constructs had acceptable reliability. The model had a good model fit for the assessment beliefs of mathematical thinking scale which obtainable from the fit indices tests. The findings revealed that all fit criteria indices were realized. The results also showed acceptable validity and construct reliability for the scale.

This study is an endeavour to explicate the dissonance of the linguistic quality outcome of study abroad (SA) experiences by exploring the second language (L2) motivation of six academic sojourners in Manchester. A person-in-context approach revealed that developing intimate relationships with ‘native-speakers’, providing L2-mediated interaction opportunities with international students, and social approval were key determinants of the extent to which SA students were invested in social practices. Such social engagements were found to stem from second language motivation that is part of identity construction process. In addition, the thematic analysis of the narrative inquiries suggests that the global status of the English language defies the traditional conceptualisations of L2 motivation as most participants’ motivations were formed despite their negative or neutral attitudes towards the English community. The findings also endorse the role of the other as a robust motivational source by which learners can replenish their motivation stream, leading to social identity investment to construct their ideological selves. The paper concludes with a recommendation to re-interpret the conceptualisation of the Ideal L2 Self system because ‘native-speakers’ are rarely the closest parallels to L2 learners, and it should incorporate explicit intrinsic orientations. Furthermore, language institutions in SA contexts should direct their focus on establishing conversation clubs and hosting social events for SA students to provide a safe space for their identities to be developed, enacted and reconstructed.

Realistic Mathematics Education (RME) has gained popularity worldwide to teach mathematics using real-world problems. This study investigates the effectiveness of elliptic topics taught to 10th graders in a Vietnamese high school and students' attitudes toward learning. The RME model was used to guide 45 students in an experimental class, while the conventional model was applied to instruct 42 students in the control class. Data collection methods included observation, pre-test, post-test, and a student opinion survey. The experimental results confirm the test results, and the experimental class's learning outcomes were significantly higher than that of the control class's students. Besides, student participation in learning activities and attitudes toward learning were significantly higher in the RME model class than in the control class. Students will construct their mathematical knowledge based on real-life situations. The organization of teaching according to RME is not only a new method of teaching but innovation in thinking about teaching mathematics.

Foreign language teaching in the Slovenian educational context begins in the first grade (age 6). Many studies report a lack of qualified teachers at this stage of learning around the world and numerous authors emphasise the misconception that basic linguistic and didactic knowledge of teachers is sufficient for teaching children. All three Slovenian public universities are aware of this problem and offer pre-service and in-service programmes for (student) teachers who want to specialise in teaching English to young learners. In the present article, we focus on the subject-specific teacher competences for teaching English in the first three years of primary education; namely, linguistic, subject didactic and intercultural competences. We explore teachers’ self-assessment of these competences and their perception of certain elements pertaining to them. The study seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) What subject-specific competences do teachers consider essential for teaching English in the first cycle of primary education? (2) To what extent do teachers believe they have developed certain subject-specific competences? (3) What are teachers’ attitudes toward certain subject-specific competences that the teacher needs for teaching English in the first cycle of primary education? The results of the quantitative survey, in which 100 teachers participated, show that teachers perceive their subject didactic competence to be the most developed and their intercultural competence to be the least developed. Moreover, they consider that a basic level of English is not sufficient for teaching English in the first grades.

Students drop out of schools for many reasons, and it has negative effects on the individual and society. This paper reports a study using data published in 2015 from the Educational Longitudinal Study conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics to analyze the influence of parental involvement on low-achieving U.S. students’ graduation rates from high school. Findings indicate that both students and parents share the same perspective on the need for parental involvement in their academic progress. For low-achieving high school students, parental involvement in academic work is a positive factor influencing students’ graduation from high school.

In Austria, segregated German language support classes (GLSC) were introduced in the school year 2018/19 to intensively support students who had previously little or no contact with German, the official language of instruction. These classes have been widely criticised; however, a formal evaluation of their effects has yet to be published. In absence of this evaluation, this article describes the language support model as it currently exists in Austria and reviews existing evidence about its efficacy. The literature review synthesises findings from educational research undertaken in other contexts that offer insight into features of ‘good practice’ in language support models. The article then explores the extent to which GLSC comply with these features. As such, this review allows insights into ways of ensuring students’ language and socio-emotional development – all central aspects of academic success – in language support models. It therefore allows research-informed understanding of the effects of the newly implemented model of German support classes in Austria and makes recommendations for further development.

This research aimed to develop a historical thinking assessment for students' skills in analyzing the causality of historical events. The development process of Gall and colleagues and Rasch analysis models were used to develop an assessment instrument consisting of two processes, including the analysis of the framework of cause and consequence, the validity, reliability, and difficultness test. This research involved 150 senior high school students, with data collected using the validation sheet, tests, and scoring rubric. The results were in the form of an essay test consisting of six indicators of analyzing cause and consequence. The instruments were valid, reliable, and suitable for assessing students’ skills in analyzing the causality of historical events. The developed instruments were paired with a historical thinking skills assessment to improve the accuracy of the information about students' level of historical thinking skills in the learning history.

The school counselor’s role is increasingly challenging with various demands of students’ problems and the issue of Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic also affect students’ psychosocial and mental well-being. Therefore, school counselors need to equip themselves with high psychological well-being as a self-care factor to deal with burnout, instability, and work stress. This study aims to develop Psychological Well-Being Model among school counsellors. A total of 330 secondary school counsellors from four districts in Selangor were selected as the respondents using the group random sampling method. Data were collected through translated questionnaire instruments, namely Self Compassion Scale, Counselling Self Estimate Inventory, The Assessing Emotions Scale, Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale Revised, and Psychological Well Being-Ryff. Confirmation Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) show that there is a significant positive relationship between self-compassion, counselling self-efficacy, emotional intelligence, spiritual intelligence, and the school counsellor’s psychological well-being. The findings also showed that self-compassion, counselling self-efficacy, emotional and spiritual intelligence affected 76.5% (R2 = 0.765) of variance in psychological well-being. This study is one of the earliest in presenting the school counsellor’s psychological well-being model who can contribute to Malaysian education. The implications of this study suggest that the elements of self-compassion, counselling self-efficacy, emotional and spiritual intelligence, and psychological well-being should be applied in the curriculum at the counsellor training level in university so that counsellors have adequate preparation in providing effective services in schools. The Ministry of Education Malaysia, on the other hand, needs to cultivate psychological well-being interventions regularly so that counsellors can always manage various students’ issues in schools as well as maintaining psychological well-being in terms of personnel and professionals.

The positive effect of peer assessment and self-assessment strategies on learners' performance has been widely confirmed in experimental or quasi-experimental studies. However, whether peer and self-assessment within everyday mathematics teaching affect student learning and achievement, has rarely been studied. This study aimed to determine with what quality peer and self-assessment occur in everyday mathematics instruction and whether and which students benefit from it in terms of achievement and the learning process. Two lessons on division were video-recorded and rated to determine the quality of peer and self-assessment. Six hundred thirty-four students of fourth-grade primary school classes in German-speaking Switzerland participated in the study and completed a performance test on division. Multilevel analyses showed no general effect of the quality of peer or self-assessment on performance. However, high-quality self-assessment was beneficial for lower-performing students, who used a larger repertoire of calculation strategies, which helped them perform better. In conclusion, peer and self-assessment in real-life settings only have a small effect on the student performance in this Swiss study.

Research on instructional quality has been of great interest for several decades, leading to an immense and diverse body of literature. However, due to different definitions and operationalisations, the picture of what characteristics are important for instructional quality is not entirely clear. Therefore, in this paper, a scoping review was performed to provide an overview of existing evidence of both generic and subject-didactic characteristics with regard to student performance. More precisely, this paper aims to (a) identify both generic and subject-didactic characteristics affecting student performance in mathematics in secondary school, (b) cluster these characteristics into categories to show areas for quality teaching, and (c) analyse and assess the effects of these characteristics on student performance to rate the scientific evidence in the context of the articles considered. The results reveal that teaching characteristics, and not just the instruments for recording the quality of teaching as described in previous research, can be placed on a continuum ranging from generic to subject-didactic. Moreover, on account of the inconsistent definition of subject-didactic characteristics, the category of ‘subject-didactic specifics’ needs further development to establish it as a separate category in empirical research. Finally, this study represents a further step toward understanding the effects of teaching characteristics on student performance by providing an overview of teaching characteristics and their effects and evidence.

The effects of international phonetic alphabet (IPA) instruction on English as a foreign language (EFL) adult learners’ pronunciation have been well-recognized. However, not many studies on the topic were conducted in the Vietnamese context. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate (1) the impact of IPA learning on Vietnamese EFL adult learners’ pronunciation and (2) adult learners’ perceptions of the effects of learning the IPA system on their pronunciation. The study was designed as an experimental study, following a mixed-methods approach, using the pre-and-post-tests, questionnaires, and interviews to collect quantitative and qualitative data. Thirty-eight adult learners took part in this investigation; they were divided into two groups, nineteen in the control and nineteen in the experimental group. The experimental study lasted ten weeks before the questionnaires and interviews were administered with the participants in the experimental group. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in adult learners’ pronunciation in the experimental group. The participants in the experimental group also highly perceived the positive effects of learning the IPA system on their pronunciation. Pedagogical implications and suggestions were presented at the end of the paper.

The study aims to find out the influence of Mistake-Handling Activities to determine mathematical definitions knowledge, which can be regarded as a component of mathematics content knowledge, of teachers on the development of teachers in providing mathematical definitions. Within this framework, Mistake-Handling Activities were carried out with five volunteer mathematics teachers. Written opinions and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were used as data collection tools. During the application, focus group interviews were carried out, and the application was enhanced with discussions. The data were analyzed using the document review method, and codes, categories, and themes were also determined. The results revealed that Mistake-Handling Activities yielded certain emotional advantages such as increasing teachers’ interest and curiosity, critical thinking, self-confidence, awareness, and offering different viewpoints as well as yielding cognitive advantages such as recognizing their shortcomings, acknowledging the importance of knowing the definition of a concept, and using the definition.

This study aims to explore non-English speaking major student’s perceptions of Motivation and Grit and the relationship between these two factors and students’ English language performance at a public university in China. The research was conducted by quantitative research design to collect 624 non-English speaking Major students’ answers to multiple questionnaires at a public university in China. Data analysis is used by SPSS and AMOS. The study shows that Motivation and Grit all have a positive correlation with English language performance. One major conclusion of this study is Grit has the most significant effect on the English language performance of non-English speaking major students in multiple regression analysis and is also the best predictor of the relationship between these two factors and English language performance in the path analysis in Structure Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis. The finding also revealed that male students’ perception of motivation and grit is slightly stronger than that of female students. These findings highlight the need for English as a foreign language (EFL) teacher to understand students’ affective factors in learning English, and hence help them utilize different teaching methods to enhance students’ English learning and promote sustainable development of English learning in a public Chinese university.

In this research, the influence of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on 9th grade students’ mathematics achievement is analyzed through quantitative and qualitative methods. A posttest only with control group design was used to compare the mathematics marks of 9th grade students from the previous school year (before the pandemic, control group) and the current school year (during the pandemic, experimental group). Seventy-three students from a public high school in Spain attending class on alternate days participated in the study. Three focus group sessions were held with students, and five semi-structured interviews were conducted—two with teachers and three with students’ families. Results show statistically significant differences in students’ mathematics achievement, with students enrolled in 9th grade the previous (pre-pandemic) year outscoring their peers currently enrolled in 9th grade (during the pandemic) by 22.17%. An overall negative effect size of Hedge’s g = -1.11 was reported. Although significant statistical differences between groups were reported for both male and female students, the effect was 42.31% larger for male students (Hedge’s g = -1.11) than for females (Hedge’s g = -0.78). The qualitative information supported the quantitative results. Changes in educational settings, students’ lack of motivation, monotony, and students’ level of responsibility were qualitatively reported as factors that may explain this phenomenon. The main conclusion of this study is that the COVID-19 pandemic may be significantly and negatively affecting 9th grade students’ mathematics achievement.

Teacher leadership theory has underlined the essence of teacher collaboration (TC) in helping students learn better. Also, many studies and theories have argued that TC can be an effective way to provide learning feedback. Thus, this mixed-method study aimed to experimentally examine the effect of teacher collaborative metacognitive feedback (TCMF) on educational management (EM) students’ metacognition, to see the different effects on EM students’ metacognition as affected by TCMF and by individual teaching metacognitive feedback (ITMF), and to qualitatively probe into students’ perceptions of teacher collaboration. The quantitative study conducted a quasi-experimental method by involving 44 EM students. A valid and reliable scale of metacognition adopted from a previous study was utilized as the instrument of data collection. The qualitative study conducted interviews with 8 students selected purposively, and the data were analyzed interactively to reach credible information. This study revealed that TCMF positively and significantly affected EM students’ metacognition. TCMF contributed to EM students’ metacognition better than ITMF did. The students perceived that TC developed their collaborative skills, continuously supporting their critical thinking skills, intercultural communicative competence, and problem-solving skills. Limitations, implications, and recommendations for further research are discussed.

The purpose of the present study is to examine the contribution of professional learning community of pedagogical instructors, training teachers, and teaching students in clinical model for teacher education to their professional development. The prior is carried out through examining a variety of categories: namely, collaborative learning, personal responsibility, collective responsibility, reflective pedagogical discourse and action research, knowledge development and learning processes. Thirty-three members of the learning community constituted the study community. The research tool is a multiple-choice questionnaire that was developed for the requirements of the research and personal feedback on open-ended questions. The quantitative data collected by the questionnaire indicated that the learning community of the clinical model for teacher education contributed greatly to the professional development of all participants regardless of field of knowledge, role in the training process, and the curricular activities offered by colleges and schools. The findings revealed a negative relationship between the field of teacher education among the participants on the one hand, and professional development on the other hand.

Regardless of varied lingua-cultural ideologies enriching the theories of communicative competence (CC), the four CC dimensions (e.g., linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse, and communication strategies (CSs)) still become the main cores of English speaking (ES) classrooms. Of the four dimensions, CSs seem to be the most technical which deserve to be persistently studied. Hence, this study aimed to probe into ES lecturers’ performances of CSs, their efforts to improve students’ CC, and the impacts of their efforts on students’ learning according to students’ perspectives. Two ES lecturers and 10 students at a university in Indonesia were purposively selected to be the participants. They were observed and interviewed according to the study’s purposes. This study uncovered various CSs performed by ES lecturers according to several contexts, such as to understand spoken texts, to understand spoken recorded texts, and to overcome temporary communication difficulties. Various ES lecturers’ efforts were also revealed according to their functions to improve each dimension of CC. Most students perceived the lecturers’ efforts positively due to the impacts on their motivation, self-efficacy, collaborative skills, and metacognition. However, few students echoed negative perceptions about a lecturer’s native-speakerism-endorsed effort due to lingua-cultural issues. Implication, limitation, and recommendation are discussed.

Numerical thinking is needed to recognize, interpret, determine patterns, and solve problems that contain the context of life. Self-efficacy is one aspect that supports the numerical thinking process. This study aims to obtain a numerical thinking profile of Mathematics pre-service teachers based on self-efficacy. This study used descriptive qualitative method. The data obtained were based on the results of questionnaires, tests, and interviews. The results of the self-efficacy questionnaire were analyzed and categorized (high, moderate, and low). Two informants took each category. The results showed the following: informants in the high self-efficacy category tend to be able to interpret information, communicate information, and solve problems with systematic steps. Informants in the moderate self-efficacy category tend to be able to interpret and communicate information, but tend to be hesitant in choosing the sequence of problem-solving steps. Meanwhile, informants in the low self-efficacy category tend not to be able to fully interpret the information. As a result, the process of communicating information and solving problems goes wrong. Another aspect found in this study is the need for experience optimization, a good understanding of mathematical content, and reasoning in the numerical thinking process.

Lesson planning is considered to be an important and efficient tool for effective teaching and learning process. Preparations of effective lesson plan requires teachers to be competent in the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study investigated how the mathematics teachers’ PCK impact their competences on designing effective lesson plans. Twelve in-service mathematics teachers from public secondary schools in Unguja-Island (Zanzibar) of Tanzania were involved. The data were collected using the reviewing of the teachers’ mathematics lesson plan documents and teachers’ interview. The data were analyzed in both quantitative and qualitative mode based on the lesson plan framework guideline (LPFG) and the criteria for better planning of the sections jointly with PCK abilities indicators. The percentage average of occurrence of the sections in the teachers’ designed lesson plan (DLP) and the percentage of occurrence of different category within the sections of the DLP in relation to the criteria were determined. Also, the challenges faced by the teachers in their DLP were identified. The result of the analysis revealed that the PCK competences of mathematics teachers are not good enough to impact their DLP, as some of their designing lesson plan sections were occurred inconsistently. Also, the implementation of PCK competences for effective mathematics teaching found to be at developing stage, as some criteria related to it were not clearly observed in their DLP. The study recommends the demand of in-service training for mathematics teachers on the implementation of teachers’ competences particularly PCK in the lesson plan designing for effective classroom practices.

This study investigated student teachers’ teaching self-efficacy level and factors that predict it (using five-factor mentoring model). Two hundred and ten third and fourth-year student teachers (N=100/N=110; 93.8% females) were involved in the study and asked to complete a self-report questionnaire. The “Mentoring for Effective Primary Teaching” instrument and “Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale” were used to collect the data. Findings indicated that higher levels of student teachers' self-efficacy are positively associated with the level of mentoring experience during the teaching practicum. The results found that fourth-year students reported significantly higher levels of teaching self-efficacy than third-year students. This study reported that there is a significant mean difference in student teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs in terms of having parents in the teaching profession. A multiple regression found that mentor teachers’ personal attributes are the best predictor of student teachers' teaching self-efficacy beliefs.