This study aimed to describe the profile of the students’ social skills of Bengawan Solo nature elementary school. The study was qualitatively conducted as a case study. The participants were teachers and students who were chosen by employing a purposive sampling technique. The data were obtained through observations, questionnaires, interviews, and document analysis. This study employed an interactive model data analysis included: data validating, data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The conclusions of the study comprise: (1) the cooperation aspect, students can collaborate well; (2) the assertion aspect, students can get along with new friends and communicate with others; (3) the responsibility aspect, students understand their role and responsibility to the God, themselves, others, and society; (4) the empathy aspect, students can feel others' feeling and problem; (5) the self-control aspect, students can control their mental state so that they can avoid anger and bad influences.

The article deals with mathematical literacy in relation to mathematical knowledge and mathematical problems, and presents the Slovenian project NA-MA POTI, which aims to develop mathematical literacy at the national level, from kindergarten to secondary education. All of the topics treated represent starting points for our research, in which we were interested in how sixth-grade primary school students solve non-contextual and contextual problems involving the same mathematical content (in the contextual problems this content still needs to be recognised, whereas in the non-contextual problems it is obvious). The main guideline in the research was to discover the relationship between mathematical knowledge, which is the starting point for solving problems from mathematical literacy (contextual problems), and mathematical literacy. The empirical study was based on the descriptive, causal and non-experimental methods of pedagogical research. We used both quantitative and qualitative research based on the grounded theory method to process the data gathered from how the participants solved the problems. The results were quantitatively analysed in order to compare the success at solving problems from different perspectives. Analysis of the students’ success in solving the contextual and non-contextual tasks, as well as the strategies used, showed that the relationship between mathematical knowledge and mathematical literacy is complex: in most cases, students solve non-contextual tasks more successfully; in solving contextual tasks, students can use completely different strategies from those used in solving non-contextual tasks; and students who recognise the mathematical content in contextual tasks and apply mathematical knowledge and procedures are more successful in solving such tasks. Our research opens up new issues that need to be considered when developing mathematical literacy competencies: which contexts to choose, how to empower students to identify mathematical content in contextual problems, and how to systematically ensure – including through projects such as NA-MA POTI – that changes to the mathematics curriculum are introduced thoughtfully, with regard to which appropriate teacher training is crucial.

Continuous changes in social demand and development provide an acute and continuous pressure on universities. The question is whether higher education institutions (HEI) in Ecuador deliver graduates with the competences to provide timely economic, ecological, and sustainable solutions. Additionally, HEIs should prepare graduates to find employment in a society characterized by greater uncertainty, extensive use of information technology, speed, risk, complexity and interdisciplinary work. To face this challenge, universities need lecturers to possess a mix of aptitudes, attitudes, and professional development in teaching, research, and services. Unfortunately, knowledge is sparse about the readiness of their pupils to function effectively in a rapidly changing and increasingly globalized environment. Accordingly, this study uses an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach to explore the impact of lecturers’ aptitudes, attitudes, and professional development on teaching and student learning at the University of Cuenca. Lecturers’ perceptions about their aptitudes and their attitudes are higher than the students’ perceptions. Faculty representatives believe that untenured lecturers have a better attitude and aptitude than the tenured lecturers. A third part of lecturers have achieved one of the required criteria in research development. Students from biological sciences are more satisfied with their lecturers and the competence development that they receive than the students from social sciences or engineering. Understanding the likely implication of the variables, aptitudes, attitudes and professional development, on the quality of teaching and learning is fundamental for the design and carrying out of educational reforms.

The purpose of the study is to identify how the instructional model influences students’ reflective disposition and how the students perceived the intervention. The study addressed the research questions through the ‘Artistic Reflection Scale’ for student pre-school educators that consisted of four domains such as students’ observation skills, critical analysis skills, evaluation skills, and the occupation application of artistic reflection, and the course satisfaction questionnaire. The study found that the technology of artistic reflection and image creation was effective in fostering students’ artistic reflective thinking comprising observation skills, critical analysis, their art output evaluation skills with a focus on sharing their reflective experience with the preschoolers. The artistic reflection scale was proved to be a reliable instrument in measuring students’ reflective thinking skills. The study found a change in the artistic reflective skills of the experimental group students was substantially greater than in the students of the control group. After the intervention, there was a shift from the basic level of artistic reflection to the higher levels in the experimental group students, and the proportion of the students being at this stage reduced, while the other proportions increased.

The aim of this study is to find out the influence of online project collaborative learning and achievement motivation on problem-solving ability in the area of citizenship. This study uses a quasi-experimental design. The total of study subjects is 71 students of higher education; consist of 36 students as the experimental group and 35 students as the control group. Data of problem-solving ability is obtained by using an essay test, while data of achievement motivation is obtained by using a questionnaire. Data analysis is done with ANOVA (Analysis of Variance). The study results show that online based-project collaborative learning strategy has a positive influence on civic problem-solving ability. There is a difference in civic problem-solving ability between students with high achievement motivation and students with low achievement motivation. Online project collaborative learning strategy and achievement motivation interact in influencing the civic problem-solving ability of students. It is recommended that further study corroborate this finding by testing again the effectiveness of using online-based project collaborative strategy in the aspect of problem-solving in a similar field of study.

As a part of learning process, project-based assessment (PBA) is determined to be a potential approach in higher education evaluation that focuses on developing the important objectives related to critical thinking, team working and problems solving skills. The aim of the paper is to find out students’ reflection and teachers’ beliefs towards using this project-based assessment method in teaching Intercultural Communication Competence (ICC). To collect the data, a project-based assessment design was applied for 124 English major students at B University in the 9 weeks ICC course. This project was implemented from the beginning of the course, and at the end of the course, learners’ products were performed with specific activities regarding culture knowledge competition, online cultural community activities, talent performance, situational judgment ability, and eloquence skills. In addition, a set of questionnaires were delivered to the participants, plus the interviews with 36 teachers who have taught culture-related subjects from the universities in Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. The findings revealed that although there were certain challenges, using project-based assessment in teaching culture had satisfactory effects on students’ intercultural competence, problem- solving skills, critical thinking, and learning motivation.

This study addresses the effectiveness of learning via educational software. Recent decades have seen the integration of technologies, which are changing teaching and transforming teachers into mediating, facilitating, and guiding figures by means of digital learning methods that serve as a major tool in schools, colleges, and universities. The current study focuses on instruction provided within the Israeli Air Force and examined the effectiveness of instruction provided via educational software in terms of learning products: Bloom’s revised taxonomy, Te’eni’s affective-cognitive model of organizational communication and the STEM model. We randomly divided the learners into three groups who studied the same topic: one group studied with the educational software only, the second with the educational software together with an instructor, and the third with an instructor who used a presentation. The learners took a test and four months later they took another test to examine the effectiveness of the instruction over time. The research results show that the recall levels and performance levels on the tests were almost identical in all groups, but in the categories of understanding and applying the addition of an instructor strongly contributed to achievements: Those who received instruction via educational software achieved the best results in the understanding category, while those who studied with an instructor who used a presentation achieved the best results on the test with regard to application of the studied material. The findings of this study can illuminate the effectiveness of using educational software in learning processes in all educational systems.

Creative thinking is the highest level of the kind of high order thinking. In observations at the schools in Indonesia, teachers overly equate all levels of achievement of students' creative thinking to obtain higher order thinking skill improvements in mathematics learning. This condition results in an imbalance in learning practices. Therefore, this research fills the gap of this imbalance by describing the student’s creative thinking profile as a high order thinking skill in the improvement of mathematics learning. These results can contribute knowledge to educators to manage teaching strategies that can improve mathematics learning which refers to high order thinking skill for all levels of their creative thinking. This research is qualitative descriptive research. The subject were junior high school students in Malang, Indonesia. Data collection methods are tests, observations, and interviews. Data analysis is conducted by reducing data, present data, and conclusions. These research results are descriptions of student’s creative thinking profiles as a high order thinking in mathematics learning improvement, namely students have problems planning problem solving; students take a break to make plans; identify the essence of the problem, provide original ideas, provide alternative problem-solving plans, combine previous ideas with problem questions; operate and implement their plans by creating various original solutions.

This study investigated the influences of social constructivist approaches on history teachers' opinions of social science education. The purpose of the study was to examine the effectiveness of social constructivist approaches and explore the views and practices of teachers in their current use of teaching approaches in social science education. For this study, a qualitative study approach was employed. The study was conducted at intermediate secondary schools in the city of Erbil. For open semi-structured interviews, eight teachers of social science education were purposely selected from eight intermediate secondary schools of grade ninth, and eight social science classes were observed. The results revealed that despite significant changes of the system of education, many challenges were identified in implementing social constructivist approaches in social science education such as the environment of fear, the shortage of proper public infrastructure, lack of care, and resources. Also, the study revealed several barriers like absence of sufficient well-designed teaching guidelines, lack of adequate clear instructions, inadequacy classroom teachers' autonomy, and no freedom. Lastly, the study ends up by specifying several conclusions.

Problem-solving is considered one of the thinking skills that must be possessed in 21^st-century education because problem-solving skills are required to solve all problems that arise. The problem-solving stages that can be used are Polya's four steps, namely, understanding the problem, devising a plan, carrying out the plan, and looking back. Problem-solving skills are essential for solving word problems. Word problems based on arithmetic operations are divided into three types: one-step, two-step, and multistep. This qualitative research aimed to see problem-solving skills viewed from the type of word questions and elementary school students’ third, fourth, and fifth grades. A purposive sampling technique with 22 third-grade students, 28 fourth-grade students, and 21 fifth-grade students was used. The data were collected using documentation, testing, and interview methods. The findings of the study showed that fourth-grade students’ problem-solving skills are better than those of third-grade students, and the problem-solving skills of fifth-grade students are better than those of fourth-grade students. The percentage of Polya's steps always decreases because not all students master problem-solving. Based on the types of questions, the percentage of the one-step word problem is better than that of the two-step while the percentage of the two-step word problems is higher than that of the multistep.

The main topic of the presented article is the pedagogical concept of self-reflection of students of Social Education. The authors understand the pedagogical concept as primarily educational determinants that influence and shape students’ self-reflection. To identify this aim, the authors formulate the main research question: How do social education students reflect on themselves as students, and what are the determinants of study self-reflection for social pedagogy students? The authors used the qualitative research strategy, specifically The Grounded Theory, through which sixty self-reflecting essays were analysed. These written self-reflections were further complemented with six in-depth interviews in which we acquired clarifying information on self-reflection and self-assessment of social education students. It was ascertained that students’ self-reflection is shaped through an awareness of internal and external study factors, which subsequently influence the overall concept of their study, motivation to perform, study style, and self-assessment.

Understanding phylogenetic trees representing evolutionary relationships of living organisms is essential in school biology. Traditional instructions based on lectures and textbooks with pictorial presentations have been proven ineffective to promote students’ understanding of the concept. This study, therefore, developed a game-based learning activity called the VERT card game to enhance students’ learning of the phylogenetic taxonomy of chordates. The VERT card game was designed to lay the foundation for different characteristics of chordate classes, as well as to allow students to construct and interpret their evolutionary relationships based on the phylogenetic tree. The effectiveness of the VERT card game was verified by a pre-test and post-test design with 109 middle school students in Thailand. The statistical result revealed that students’ mean scores increased significantly in the post-test, compared to the pre-test, indicating their improved understanding. In addition, after participating in the learning activity, the student participants were found to increase their self-efficacy to learn evolutionary biology statistically. Also, it showed positive views towards the usefulness of the developed card game as a large number of them expressed that they would like to use it for their lesson reviews and wished to have this form of learning activity in other topics in biology.

Critical thinking skills are one of the thinking skills needed to live in the 21st century and the era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0. This study aims to develop a Virtual Classroom Critical Thinking (VC2T) Model, which is valid, practical, and effective to improve students' critical thinking skills. VC2T model has six steps: problem orientation, formulation, group discussion, analysis, result discussion, and reflection. This study is a Research & Development (R & D) involving 33 high school students in Surabaya, Indonesia. Before being tested, the VC2T Model was designed based on the theory of Plomp and Nieveen and then validated by 3 (three) experts in physics education. Data were analyzed using validity by experts, implementation of teaching with the VC2T Model, paired t-test, calculation of n-gain, effect size and percentage of student responses. The results showed that the VC2T Model is: (1) valid with an average validity score of 4.14 in the high validity category; (2) practical with an average score of implementations teaching of VC2T Model 4.26 in the outstanding category; and (3) effective as indicated by increasing of students' critical thinking skills scores which are statistically significant at alpha .05, the average n-gain is .38 in the medium category, the effect size of 6.93 is in a strong category and the average students' response is 87.59 % with outstanding category.

The current study explored the potential effect of using the flipped class strategy in developing grammatical concepts among fifth-grade primary school students in Irbid, Jordan during the academic year 2019/2020. The study followed the quasi-experimental design, which was applied to a sample of 52 female students, who were divided into a control and an experimental group. The control was taught traditionally and the experimental group was taught grammar through using a flipped classroom strategy respectively. The study developed a list of suitable grammatical concepts for the study sample and a test to measure the Arabic grammatical concepts: declension, case marking, case ending, representation in a sentence, and extraction. After performing the appropriate statistical analysis, the results of the study showed the presence of significant differences between the experimental and the control groups in all grammatical concepts in favor of the experimental group. The researcher recommended applying the flipped class strategy in teaching the grammatical concepts for female fifth graders.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The increase of English language learners (ELLs) in the United States of America (USA) public school classrooms and the diversification of the global education landscape urges initial teacher preparation programs to equip mainstream teachers with appropriate skills, knowledge, and dispositions to teach ELLs. This paper reports findings from a focus group study on elementary teacher candidates' (TCs') field experiences with ELLs. Based on interviews with four groups of TCs who completed their two practicums with ELLs, the study illustrates how mainstream TCs perceive their field experiences as future teachers of ELLs. The findings suggest that TCs recognize dissonances and develop care toward ELLs through their engagements in ELL-specific field experiences. The study also demonstrates how the recognition of dissonances led to changes in TCs' beliefs and values, which was observed through their imagination. Informed by their field experiences with ELLs, TCs began forming professional agency as future teachers by imagining specific teaching strategies, methods, and approaches they would like to implement with ELLs. Implications and future directions of teacher education programs are also discussed.