Student dropout, defined as the temporary or definitive suspension of the exercise of the right to education, is attributable to multiple variables classified into individual, academic, institutional, and socioeconomic determinants which may be exacerbated in the context of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. Consequently, this work aims to synthesize, from the available evidence, the behaviour and influence of the explanatory variables of school dropout in infant school, primary school and, high school in Colombia for the period 2014-2019 compared to the period 2020-2021 under the COVID-19 pandemic conditions. The research methodology consisted of a systematic review of 125 indexed articles for 2014-2019 and 32 reports related to dropout in Colombian Basic education for the 2020-2021 period. The systematic review of the 157 articles revealed that dropout was studied and explained in both time periods, mainly from the academic determinant whose most cited explanatory variables were: ‘teachers’, ‘curriculum’ and ‘methodologies used’. Moreover, it could be perceived that in the period 2014-2019, the socioeconomic variable was the second dropout determinant, considering ‘family income” as the most important indicator, while in 2020-2021 the “infrastructure” and the ‘political environment’ remained as the most dominant. Lastly, in 2020-2021, the variable ‘teachers’ was highly cited showing that their practice made students maintain their interest despite the physical distance.

Scientific culture has been a concern for decades in the developed world, giving rise to conceptual changes known as paradigms. The first one is the longstanding literacy paradigm, defined by the skills and knowledge acquired at the education institution. It has been followed by the public understanding of science paradigm, related to the scientific understanding and an allegedly subsequent positive attitude towards science. Lastly, the engagement with science paradigm or science and society paradigm involves people's implications about the science-technology controversies with significant social impact. This article reflects how science teaching has evolved along the years in line with the scientific culture's conceptual shifts. It is concluded that this triad of paradigms is thus of a school nature, given that educational fields have suffered from transformation processes under the same vision of the world (world view), which has also changed the concept of scientific culture. Individuals in a research community learn ways of thinking, feeling and acting and therefore cannot help feeling a liking for what is short-lived and has not taken roots, both inside and outside the school in our postmodern age

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.

In this article we present research on Slovenian primary school teachers' opinion about the interdisciplinary approach between fine art and science education. With the help of questionnaires, interviews, and analysis of lesson plans, we determined how primary school teachers use this type of interdisciplinary approach, how often and what their views are. We included 138 primary school teachers from every region in Slovenia. It turned out that primary school teachers in Slovenia use an interdisciplinary approach between fine art and science teaching quite often and consider it useful to achieve different aspects of pupils' development. The study revealed that most teachers find it difficult to consider the educational goals of both fields (fine art, science). They often use the connection between the subjects only on an associative level - they only mention the teaching content of one subject quickly and carelessly, without making meaningful connections and without achieving the goals of both subjects. Content taught in this way cannot be considered a cross-curricular approach in the subject sense.

The following article is a qualitative study that analyses the perception of parents and high school students regarding teaching in times of Coronavirus disease COVID-19, with the idea of recognizing the facilitators and barriers for the teaching-learning process in the pandemic. The above, in the understanding that due to the sudden appearance of SARS-CoV-2, educational systems around the world had to adapt to virtual teaching, as a result of the confinement to which the population has been subjected during the year 2020 and a good part of the year 2021. The research is based on the interpretative-comprehensive paradigm, with a qualitative methodology, which considered the realization of four focus groups with students and four focus groups with secondary school parents, from two public high schools located in the province of Talca, Maule region, Chile. The findings of the study are related to the adverse effects of the pandemic on student learning, as a result of connectivity difficulties, and the emotional impact on the quality of life of young people and their families. On the other hand, learning at home is related to limited pedagogical strategies and evaluative aspects that do not allow verifying the real learning of the students.

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.

This research aims to determine the relationship between school principals' cultural intelligence level and teachers' job satisfaction and intention to leave. The relational survey model was used in this study. The data of the research were collected from 800 teachers working in public middle schools in the central districts of Mersin Province in the 2020-2021 academic year. The data were collected through Personal Information Form, Cultural Intelligence Scale, Job Satisfaction Scale, and Intention to Leave Scale. The data were analyzed through correlation analysis, Structural Equation Modeling and Sobel Test. According to the results of the research, a strong, positive and significant relationship was found between the cultural intelligence level of school principals and the job satisfaction of teachers. A strong, negative, and significant relationship was determined between the cultural intelligence level of school principals and teachers' intention to leave. A strong, negative, and significant relationship was determined between teachers' job satisfaction and their intention to leave. It was found that the cultural intelligence level of school principals negatively predicted teachers' intention to leave. It was also determined that cultural intelligence levels of school principals negatively predicted teachers' intention to leave through job satisfaction, and teachers’ job satisfaction was a partial mediator of the relationship between the cultural intelligence levels of school principals and teachers' intention to leave. It was suggested that candidates with high cultural intelligence levels should be given priority in the appointment process of school principals.

The purpose of this paper is to explore if the learning of biographical writing contributes to the positive views and attitudes towards others of different groups. The paper used the Research and Development approach by designing and implementing a learning model of biographical writing. The subjects of this study were 200 seventh-grade students having different ethnic and religious backgrounds from nine junior high schools. The data-collecting method was pretest-posttest. The results of the study demonstrated that the average scores of the aspects of student empathy, student positive attitudes towards ethnic differences, and student positive attitudes towards religious differences increased in all the schools investigated. The increase of average score in the aspect of student empathy, positive attitudes towards ethnic differences, and positive attitudes towards religious differences could be classified into three categories: high, medium, and low. Most of the schools under study experienced medium and low increases of average score in all aspects.

The worldwide pandemic Coronavirus disease, affected every aspect of people’s lives due to being locked at their homes, therefore many difficulties began to appear, especially in education. Scholars were the leading group that has been affected the most due to the online lessons that began from one day to another, without any kind of previous training specifically in these types of contexts at home. According to some national diagnostical studies, most of the students could not achieve the minimum educational objectives in mathematics and language, which are the essential subjects in Chilean education. In this study, in which qualitative phenomenology analysis was used, the aim was to reveal the current state of students after a whole year of online lessons in terms of personal technological use and personal perceptions about e-learning. In this study, in which the criterion sampling was used, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adolescents from different sorts of schools who experienced online lessons using their previous personal knowledge in Information and Communication Technologies. The data were analyzed in Nvivo node tree, which revealed six main themes that define the experience and personal perception of the participants: adaptation to the new order, learning by their own, how to use better the technology, use of social media, new ways of personal knowledge sharing, importance of classmates. It is believed that the results obtained from this study will contribute to schools’ view of learning and teaching education in the 21st century and to improve students’ experiences in online lessons.

Writing is very important for learners; it is a dynamic and creative skill. Although studies on students’ problems when writing a dissertation among Native Speakers (NS) are widely done, studies on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are limited, especially those which examine problems faced while writing dissertations among Ph.D. EFL learners, in particular, Jordanian Ph.D. candidates. Studies on the supervisors' perspectives of writing a dissertation are scarce among EFL learners, particularly Arab learners. This study aims at focusing on supervisors' perspectives of writing dissertations among Jordanian Ph.D. students who are studying abroad. This study is a qualitative case study. The researchers interviewed nine Malaysian supervisors who supervised 21 Jordanian Ph.D. candidates. The results show that six main themes emerged from the supervisors' perspectives, and they are grammatical mistakes, lack of vocabulary and verbs reporting, personal effects, lack of motivation, writing apprehension, and the problem with generic thesis structure. This paper contributes with a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical perspectives on problems Ph.D. students face when writing a dissertation. The study also fills in the gap in the field of supervisors' perspectives of writing a dissertation. Based on the results found, the researchers suggest a number of recommendations and further research that might help supervisors understand the reasons behind such difficulties.

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.

Computational thinking (CT) is a method for solving complex problems, but also gives people an inventive inspiration to adapt to our smart and changing society. Globally it has been considered as vital abilities for solving genuine issues successfully and efficiently in the 21st century. Recent studies have revealed that the nurture of CT mainly centered on measuring the technical skill. There is a lack of conceptualization and instruments that cogitate on CT disposition and attitudes. This study attends to these limitations by developing an instrument to measure CT concerning dispositions and attitudes. The instruments' validity and reliability testing were performed with the participation from secondary school students in Malaysia. The internal consistency reliability, standardized residual variance, construct validity and composite reliability were examined. The result revealed that the instrument validity was confirmed after removing items. The reliability and validity of the instrument have been verified. The findings established that all constructs are useful for assessing the disposition of computer science students. The implications for psychometric assessment were evident in terms of giving empirical evidence to corroborate theory-based constructs and also validating items' quality to appropriately represent the measurement.

The emergence of digital technologies and a more global and digital society has brought about the need to develop and educate in Digital Citizenship, as well as to study how youth are taught to participate and learn citizenship in a digital age. This paper aims to explore the role of digital and socio-civic skills development, as facilitators for youth participation and analyses the relationship between sociodemographic variables (sex, age, educational level, and political ideology) with the participatory profile of participants. This is a study with a quantitative methodology, where, based on non-probabilistic convenience sampling, 534 young people between 16 and 35 years old from Spain, completed an online questionnaire regarding the development of digital and socio-civic skills. The results indicate how a participant’s participatory profile is related to other variables. In addition, significant differences are observed between the different participation profiles and digital and socio-civic skills, underlining that the development of digital and socio-civic skills are essential for educating in digital citizenship.

The field of education was distinctly affected by the development of information and communication technologies, as they can make education more efficient, interactive, and available. Today’s students call for new innovative educational approaches. Digital communication technologies are the organic part of their life and they are group-oriented and experienced users of these technologies. Information and communication technologies must be used in a new and more interactive way to motivate this new generation of students. One of the ways might be gamified learning. The gamification of education is an approach, which uses game practices and elements in a process of learning. Its main objective is to increase students' interest in learned topics and to motivate them to endure in learning. The gamification of the educational process is introduced in the curricula of several courses at our faculty. The paper aims to give a short overview of tools and methods of gamification of the education process. In addition to that, the implementation of gamification in our learning management system Moodle-supported business informatics course is presented.

The higher educational institution needs a group of dedicated and committed lecturers to endure the institution during these turbulent times. As the organizational commitment reflects the self-identification of an employee with the organization, it has far-reaching implications on multifarious aspects in the organization. This present study investigated whether job satisfaction could mediate the relationship between learning organization and organizational commitment. A total of 452 lecturers from Heilongjiang province in China participated in this study. Structural equation modelling showed that job satisfaction significantly mediated the relationship between the dimensions of learning organization and organization, specifically on the effect of continuous learning, connection, and strategic leadership. Job satisfaction is also found to be a stronger predictor of organizational commitment than learning organization. These findings are discussed thoroughly and recommended a holistic plan to be devised that could strengthen learning organization and job satisfaction of lecturers in various aspects of the organization.

Many researchers have separately developed instruments to measure environmental characteristics such as attitudes, values, and knowledge. However, there is no instrument used to measure all these aspects in one comprehensive instrument. This study is meant to develop and validate a green character instrument which reveals student behavior and awareness of the environment. The instrument consists of 40 statement items consisting of 5 aspects, namely private pro-environmental behavior, public pro-environmental behavior, environmental knowledge, environmental values, and environmental attitudes. It was implemented on 1,398 students from 15 universities in Indonesia. The instrument content validation was analyzed by three experts using content validity index (CVI). The construct validity was analyzed using exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and RASCH analysis. The content validity results obtained CVI scores ranging between 0.8 and 0.9 with a good category, while item reliability was in a fairly good category with a high level of separation index. Construct validation resulted in 34 items (4 items were eliminated after Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and 2 items were eliminated after RASCH analysis) spread over five constructs, namely environmental behavior, environmental knowledge, environmental values, environmental attitudes, and environmental habits. The resulting instrument has a good level of item difficulty, with a well understood response set which can be understood easily by respondents, and without bias. Therefore, it can be used to measure the students’ green character on both male and female.

The study of character becomes a very important discussion in the 21st century. So that the integration of character values is very important both in the process and in educational assessment. The purpose of this study was to test the validity and reliability of the character assessment instrument for 21st-century high school students. The research approach used was quantitative with a sample of 200 high school students. Data analysis carried out includes validity and reliability tests. The test results of the instrument showed that the construct of the student character assessment instrument was declared valid and reliable. The content validity test shows the value of Aiken's > .80 in the high category. In the construct validation test with EFA, all variables have a loading factor > .5. In the CFA test, the model is declared fit with the estimated standard loading value of .40 and the t-count value > 1.96. Meanwhile, while in testing the reliability of the instrument obtained composite > .70 Cronbach's Alpha reliability > .70 which means reliable. So that this instrument is declared valid and reliable to measure the character of students in high school.

Teachers´ life-long learning and occupational well-being is significant in promoting educational goals and professional development. The aim of the study was to determine which factors contribute to teacher educators´ commitment to work and give them energy for work and self-development. The research data consisted of 24 teacher educators in Oulu University of Applied Sciences. The research method of this case study was a qualitative, thematic content analysis, the research approach phenomenography. The most important single factor seemed to be the community of teachers, students and the administrative staff which are included in dialogue and collaboration. Emotions, meaningfulness, and interaction play an important role, often via pedagogical fellowship. Committed teacher educators take responsibility for workplace culture and transformation of teaching. Positive attitudes, motivation, reflection, and dialogue seem to be connected to professional capability and the ethos of teacher educators´ work.