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.

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 purpose of the study was to identify what neuropsychological effect online learning had on psychology students and how it could be moderated. The study was descriptive and combined qualitative and quantitative methods to address the research questions. The study relied on three phases such as baseline study, experiment, and reporting. The experiment utilised neuropsychology tests adopted from the NeurOn platform. It was found that the Psychology students’ perceptions of e-learning and their emotional reaction to them were found not to be appreciative. The practices in breathing exercises, meditation, or yoga were proved to be able to moderate the impact of online learning on the experimental group students’ attentional capacities, memory processes, and cognition abilities. The above findings were supported by the results obtained for the neuropsychology tests and the experimental group students’ self-reflections yielded from the use of the MovisensXS App. The students confirmed that breathing exercises, meditation, or yoga reduced study stress and burnout caused by e-learning and improved their academic performance. The focus group online discussion also showed that integration of breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga helped the experimental group students keep emotional balance, concentrate on their studies easier, remember more information, and meet deadlines in completing assignments. The education scientists are suggested to study how the e-learning curriculum could be reshaped so that it used relaxation practices on regular basis.

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.

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 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.

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.

This study aims to explore the pattern of external representation of suspending objects in a static fluid. The study used a qualitative descriptive method involving 57 elementary, junior, senior school, and university students. Data collection implemented a 30-item test covering the dominant context of suspending and partially floating and sinking.  Some of phenomenographic steps were adapted in data analysis. Based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that there is a dominant external representation pattern, where there is a simplification of the depiction of suspending objects. Suspending position tends to be locked in a limited area, namely in the middle of the depth of the liquid. In the context of suspending objects' cuts, the cuts were generally represented by an upward shifting pattern. Factors that influence the pattern of representation are the involvement of intuition in conceptualizing the phenomena presented, and the conceptual aspect of density has not been integrated into the reasoning process for compiling external representations, both diagrams, and texts. Research limitation is presented in this article.

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 Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has caused an inevitable shift from face-to-face to distance learning, a phenomenon known as panic-gogy. Parents are the main students’ companions while studying at home. Although various studies show the constraints in this condition, few employ phenomenology that accurately describes people’s experience regarding a situation. Therefore, this study aimed to describe parents’ experience during distance learning mathematics using a phenomenology approach. The participants comprised 71 35-50-year-old parents of junior high school students. A Google form with open-ended questions was used as the main instrument in data collection. Data were analyzed using NVivo-12-assisted thematic analysis in coding, while source triangulation was used to strengthen the data trustworthiness. The results showed that students did not learn the content well due to poor explanations by the teacher. Furthermore, they did not study well at home due to signal constraints and quota limitations. This study recommends blended learning by combining limited face-to-face and online learning.

This study presents an inquiry-based teaching approach using a rich methodology involving STEM (science-technology-engineering and mathematics) projects, developed using a cooperative way to work between schools and research centres. We describe the teaching pattern scenario with students, teachers, and scientists. We also illustrate the learning process, conducted through two inquiry-based problems in Biochemistry, the mutagenesis process and the transgenesis effects caused by inoculation of bacteria. The teaching sequence, as well as the scientific knowledge and students’ competencies involved, are shown. We then analyse the students' and teachers' perceptions in this scenario regarding the development of students' STEM learning through their inquiry skills promoted and concerning predictors to vocational careers involved (students’ identities as potential scientists, scientific attitudes, social implications towards science or students´ agency). Finally, we add some conclusions and contributions to teaching STEM education, related to factors of the design teaching scenario that bring connections with the interests and motivations of students, such as the relevance of the projects to evoke understanding of processes or causal relationships of content or the teacher's professionalisation supported by a proper allocation between scientists and teachers.

Reflective learning in community-based education (CBE) activities requires the role of a supervisor. The ‘intensive supervision’ based on Kolb's experiential learning can provide guidance for facilitating reflection on CBE experiences through discussion. Accordingly, supervisors must receive training on providing constructive feedback sessions to assist students in reflecting. This study aimed to determine the effect of training on facilitating reflection using experiential learning methods based on the concept of 'intensive supervision' for CBE supervisors. The study design used a training program evaluation with the Kirkpatrick model of levels 1 and 2. The training on facilitating reflection was divided into workshops and mentoring sessions based on the experiential learning cycle. The questionnaire was developed to assess tutoring performance before and after the training based on the perceptions of supervisors (n=10) and students (n=43) and observers' observations during the supervisor tutoring. Descriptive and comparative data analyses were employed. The trainees showed positive reactions to the training. The students’ and supervisors’ perception questionnaires showed a significant difference in the performance of the supervisors who were assessed before and after training. Our results indicated that most of the supervisors’ ability to facilitate reflection changed following the ‘intensive supervision' method. This training helps supervisors learn how to become facilitators and students to feel more assisted in the learning process.