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.

In contemporary school systems, the concept of a teacher is defined as a socially and emotionally intelligent, pedagogically, and psychologically competent school leader. This would mean that not only the teacher's subject knowledge is sufficient, but also good knowledge of general pedagogical-psychological skills, knowledge, and management of the didactic approach, etc. Social and emotional skills/intelligence (SEI) restore the value of teachers as creators of learning and connect education to the larger social world in which SEI plays the most important role. This paper highlights the importance of social and Emotional Intelligence (SEI) in teacher education, examining the current state of research and the most important role of SEI in students' personal, social, and academic achievement, as well as teacher effectiveness and personal growth. By presenting the scientific evidence of SEI in teaching and teacher education, this study assesses the SEI level of student teachers at the University of Primorska, Faculty of Education, Slovenia. SEI is examined, through its main components: Self-awareness, Self-management, Social Awareness and Social Skills. In conclusion, this paper aims to show the need to develop SEI in future teacher education in Slovenia.

Speaking skills have always been regarded as the most difficult skill out of the four skills that learners should master in language learning. The importance of learning speaking skills has also been highlighted by many researchers in recent years. With the use of technology in this modern era, learners can learn speaking skills through various resources. Therefore, there is a need to identify the learning strategies used by learners for speaking skills in the new learning environment. In this review, the most frequently used strategies in language learning for speaking skills has been examined. The articles reviewed were from 2017 until 2021 across two databases, ERIC and Google Scholar. The PRISMA 2020 methodology is used in the review. From the review, it was found that meta-cognitive and cognitive strategies were most frequently used for learning speaking skills, followed by compensation and social strategies. The least used strategies by learners were memory and affective strategies. The findings help teachers to look for the most suitable teaching method in the current learning environment. For future research, an extensive review of the use of learning strategies for other learning skills could be carried out.

The purposes of this study were to explore factors and indicators of life and career skills and to develop a life and career skills in the 21st century test for undergraduate students. This research employed a mixed-method study adopting an exploratory design: instrument development model to generate research tools. This study was divided into two phases; Phase 1 was to explore factors and indicators of life and career skills in 21st century, by using a qualitative method to analyze relevant documents; Phase 2 was the development of a life and career skills in 21st century test by adopting a quantitative method to collect data from students studying in 12 universities of the north-eastern region of Thailand via the test. In the second phase, the data were analyzed by descriptive statistics and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Results revealed that the skills consisted of 6 factors and 35 indicators, and the test comprised 105 items. The quality of the test has been examined by five expertise, the reliability of all test items is acceptable, and all 6 factors demonstrated good construct validity. Factor loadings of six factors were 0.7940 -1.7816. This study can be implemented to measure the life and career skills of undergraduate students in any university to obtain data for establishing a policy and plans for maximizing students’ potential to achieve their careers and a happy living in 21st century after their graduation.

This study aimed to describe the creative thinking process of students with active learning styles in proposing and solving problems on geometry material. The research instruments were Honey and Mumford's Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ), problem-solving and submission test sheets, and interview guidelines. The LSQ questionnaire was distributed to students majoring in mathematics education at a university in Malang, Indonesia, with a total of 200 students. Students who have an active learning style and meet the specified criteria will be selected as research subjects. Based on research on creative thinking processes in proposing and solving problems in students with active learning styles, it was found that there were differences in behaviour between subject 1 and subject 2 at each stage of creative thinking. However, based on the researcher's observations of the behaviour of the two subjects at each stage of their thinking, there are similarities in behaviour, namely, they tend to be in a hurry to do something, prefer trial and error, and get ideas based on daily experience.

Literacy ability is an individual's ability to reason, formulate, solve, and interpret mathematically to solve problems related to daily life. Executive function is a cognitive aspect that has a relation with mathematical literacy. One of some aspects that affects the low mathematical literacy ability is the aspect of executive function. This study aims to investigate the characteristics of mathematical literacy based on the executive function aspects of 15 years old students. A qualitative method with a descriptive approach is employed in this study. The present research applies interview guidelines, questionnaires, and students' mathematical literacy tests as the instruments. Research subjects are junior high school students in grade VIII from two different schools. The result shows that the students' executive function influences mathematical literacy ability. Students' mathematical literacy ability is not fully achieved by fulfilling all the indicators involved. Another aspect found in the research is the low critical thinking ability impacts the achievement of mathematical literacy ability indicators.

This paper investigates the quantitative literacy and reasoning (QLR) of freshmen students pursuing a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)–related degree but do not necessarily have a Senior High School (SHS) STEM background. QLR is described as a multi-faceted skill focused on the application of Mathematics and Statistics rather than just a mere mastery of the content domains of these fields. This article compares the QLR performance between STEM and non-STEM SHS graduates. Further, this quantitative-correlational study involves 255 freshman students, of which 115 have non-STEM academic background from the SHS. Results reveal that students with a SHS STEM background had significantly higher QLR performance. Nevertheless, this difference does not cloud the fact that their overall QLR performance marks the lowest when compared to results of similar studies. This paper also shows whether achievement in SHS courses such as General Mathematics, and Statistics and Probability are significant predictors of QLR. Multivariate regression analysis discloses that achievement in the latter significantly relates to QLR. However, the low coefficient of determination (10.30%) suggests that achievement in these courses alone does not account to the students’ QLR. As supported by a deeper investigation of the students’ answers, it is concluded that QLR indeed involves complex processes and is more than just being proficient in Mathematics and Statistics.

Online learning during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has awakened and affirmed the necessity of learning based on digital technology. The article was aimed to analyze the effectiveness of online learning at bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees of Islamic Religious Education as a reference to develop a learning pattern post-COVID-19 pandemic. The research employed a mixed-method design with a concurrent triangulation model. The samples were taken using stratified random and purposive sampling. Meanwhile, the data were collected through questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and forum group discussion. A descriptive analysis and one-way analysis of variance were used to analyze the quantitative data, while interpretative descriptive for the qualitative data. The research showed that online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees of Islamic Religious Education have been effective. In detail, online learning at the doctoral degree was the most effective among all. On the other hand, face-to-face learning is still necessary. Therefore, the learning pattern developed post-COVID-19 pandemic combines face-to-face and online learning (hybrid learning). The formulation is adjusted to the characteristics, educational purpose and orientation, level of ability, readiness, and learning autonomy of the students at each educational level.

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 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 online flipped classroom has become increasingly applied to provide students with active learning. This search aimed to investigate the effectiveness of video lectures in an online flipped learning on students’ learning outcomes, students' video evaluation, and their experience in an online flipped classroom. This study employed mixed-method research implementing a quasi-experimental design using quantitative and qualitative data collection: pre-test and post-test, a questionnaire and interview. The participants were 78 Indonesian undergraduate students taking English as a foreign language (EFL) content course at one of the universities in Indonesia. The findings revealed that the students’ learning outcomes in the flipped classroom outperformed those in the control group. The students’ evaluation of the video lectures was high, and their evaluation was consistent with how they positively perceived the video lectures in the flipped classroom. This investigation showed the roles of video lectures on the students' participation and active learning in the flipped classroom during Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic time.

This paper is a quasi-experimental investigation into the effectiveness of using analogy in teaching new and unfamiliar physics concepts to students enrolled in a British curriculum school in the United Arab Emirates. The students (N = 34) were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the control group (N = 17) following the traditional teaching method, and the experimental group (N = 17) using the student-centered analogical method. The students relied on previous class knowledge to construct models, which in turn helped them explore new ideas and derive new knowledge. Pre-tests and post-tests were given to the two groups, where the post-test (test 6) results confirmed that the experimental group showed a more consistent outcome of high grades, no failure, and good homogeneity of results. On the other hand, the control group kept fluctuating around the same level in the all-study’s tests (pre-test and repeated measures (tests 2,3,4 and 5). The effect size of the intervention was very large and practically important, at Cohen’s d = 2.35. As a result, analogy-based pedagogies have demonstrated impact on students' learning performance and perceptions. Consequently, the result is capable of providing significant insights for educational policy and curriculum development.

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.

This study aimed to investigate essential employability skills for English as a foreign language (EFL) students in the Mekong Delta for the context of the 21st century. It was also to determine the similarities and differences between the important employability skills from the perspectives of the employers and EFL students. In this study, a questionnaire was delivered to EFL students who were juniors and seniors at a university in the South of Vietnam, majoring in English Education and English Studies (English Interpreter). At the same time, interviews were realized on both EFL students and employers. The findings showed that both EFL students and employers highlighted the attributes of self-confidence, receptiveness to feedback, and the use of body language in communication. The types of employability skills are similarly recognized among employers and EFL students in the same fields of employment. However, a significant difference was also found among employers on different job-specific skills. The results also indicated that EFL undergraduates were all highly aware of preparing the employability skills for their future professions.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether emphasising the managerial domain of the preservice preschool teachers’ curriculum is capable to improve their management and leadership skills. This study used the mixed-method methodology that combined the exploratory design and the experimental design. It included three basic phases such as feasibility assessment of making changes to the curriculum, intervention, and controlled observation, followed by the analytical phase. It was proved that the university curriculum upgraded the training approach by using the guided interim directorship. This change addressed the Professional Standard requirements for the preschool heads as well as job requirements. The intervention produced a positive shift in students’ skills of micromanagement, long-term planning, communicating vision, emotional control, and mentoring. There was a shift from the basic level of management skills before the intervention to the intermediate level of the skills after the intervention. The number of students with a superior level of skills increased by 11.54% as well. The students’ comments concerning the integration of the managerial component into the curriculum were complimentary. The observers’ reports suggested that they appreciated the students' work which was the outcome of the updated curriculum.

The embodiment of teacher leadership has currently shifted onto the practice of teacher collaboration due to its potential to solve students’ problems such as low critical thinking skills. Accordingly, this study quantitatively aimed to examine the effect of teacher collaboration on educational management students’ critical thinking skills as well as their critical thinking retention. Subsequently, it qualitatively investigated the students’ perspectives on teacher collaboration. 60 students selected randomly took part in the experimentation, in which 30 students were taught with teacher collaboration, and other 30 students were taught with individual lecturing. 10 students taught with teacher collaboration were further selected purposively to be interviewed for the qualitative investigation. Descriptive statistics alongside paired and independent t-tests were deployed to analyze the experiment results, and an interactive model was adopted to analyze the qualitative findings. The experiment showed that teacher collaboration had a more positive and significant effect on students’ critical thinking skills than its counterpart did. The students taught with teacher collaboration enjoyed good retention of critical thinking skills as well. The students perceived that teacher collaboration improved their collaborative skills, awareness, and metacognitive skills in learning. Implication, limitation, and recommendation are discussed.

Learning by teaching is a technique where students teach an actual class to facilitate active learning. This paper reports ongoing research involving undergraduate students at an established university in Indonesia. The objective of this quantitative study was to find out the effect of this teaching technique in improving students’ 21st century skills. The sample was selected using a cluster sampling technique, where 25 students who were English as a Foreign Language pre-service teachers were assigned to an experimental group, and the other 23 students were treated as a control group. The students in the experimental group were asked to conduct a workshop in groups to students from the same department at a different university. Each group selected one of the topics in their course syllabus. A pre-test measuring the students’ soft skills was conducted before the course started and after it finished. The results show that soft skills, which include accountability, communication, innovation, problem-solving, teamwork, professional working, and networking skills, improved significantly among students in the experimental group, but the improvement was not evident in the control group. Therefore, learning by teaching should be embraced as an alternative teaching technique when soft-skill development becomes a target of instruction.

This study aimed to describe the differences in students' creative thinking skills in a problem-based learning model with scaffolding in the biochemistry course. This study was designed using a quantitative explanatory research design with a sample of 113 students of the Jambi University Chemistry Education Study Program. In this study, the researcher used the experimental class and control class. The sampling technique used is total sampling and purposive sampling. The research data was taken by observation, test, and interview methods. The quantitative data analysis used was the ANOVA test and continued with the Post-Hoc Scheffe’s test. The findings of this study indicate that the results of the ANOVA test indicate a significant difference in the average creative thinking results in terms of psychomotor aspects with the acquisition of significance scores of 0.000. In addition, the results of this study indicate that class A students have higher creative thinking skills than class B and class C. This is because class A students use a problem-based learning model integrated with scaffolding in their learning.

Problem-solving process requires information processing, and the information processing is related to working memory capacity (WMC). This study aims to determine the effect of WMC on students' mathematical abilities and to describe the ability of the students with high and low WMC in solving mathematical problems. This research used mixed method with Sequential Explanatory Design. The quantitative data were collected through the provision of OSPAN tasks and math tests to 58 students aged 15-17 years, while the qualitative data were collected through interviews based on mathematical problem-solving tasks. The results showed that WMC had a significant effect on students' mathematical abilities (R=0.536; p=0.000). Researchers found differences in students' mathematical problem-solving abilities with high and low WMC. Students with high WMC can remember and manage information well which supports the determination of more advanced problem-solving strategies and have better attention control so that they find varied appropriate solutions. Students with low WMC experienced decreased attention control as the complexity of the tasks increased, missed important information in problem solving strategies, and did not recheck their work, leading to wrong solution/answer. The mathematical performance of students with high WMC outperformed the mathematical performance of students with low WMC.