The paper presents an educative experience organized in a postgraduate course in a faculty of education with the aim of facilitating students’ “affective self-understanding”. Affective self-understanding is a reflective practice that allows people to comprehend their own emotions in order to gain awareness of them. Students were spontaneously engaged in a laboratory, where they were invited to reflect on their emotional lives. The educative experience was subdivided into different phases requiring writing and analysis tasks. At the end of the experience, students were asked what they thought they had learned, what had been difficult, and what had been the most important phase for learning. Students’ answers were analyzed on the basis of grounded theory through an inductive process of analysis. The theoretical framework of the research is the cognitive theory of emotions. According to this theory, an emotional education is possible because we can understand emotions by identifying their cognitive component and the actions they induce.

Children from southern and northern Brazil have a basic knowledge of plants, which they observe during their everyday life. Children ages between 3 to 10 years old (kindergarten & primary school), but the majority of them in the age group of 4-5 (total 145) were asked to draw what they think is a plant (total sample=332). Afterwards, a equal number of boys and girls randomly chosen were interviewed individually (mix ability) to list plants they said they knew and where they had seen them. Then they were asked to give exemplars of the local plants which they had seen. These data from the exploratory study show that pupils are in touch with their environment and recognize plants that are part of it. The everyday experiences of these children in school and out of school, at home and in leisure activities with family and friends, contribute to their knowledge about plants and such knowledge is complemented in the preschool and primary school classes by appropriate teaching. Educational implications of these findings are discussed.

This research paper explores the concept of ‘cost sharing’ which became more prominent in Zambia education with the advent of democratic form of governance in 1991. As a way of responding to the ever diminishing tax revenues, government through the education policy of 1996, allowed higher education institutions including public universities to introduce cost sharing as way of improving financial vibrancy, accountability and cost effectiveness. This paper therefore, uses students’ perceptions to examine the cost sharing policy which has now been existence for almost two decades. More specifically, it explores underlying factors which can make cost sharing more effective and sustainable. In exploring these prospects and challenges, a self administered questionnaire based on convenient sampling was used to collect data from 729 respondents in Zambia’s three biggest public universities. The findings revealed that the current cost sharing policy was appropriate but lacked the government support in its implementation. The study further highlighted the need for re-engineering the current policy by providing details on the implementation process. The study highly recommends that a true cost-sharing model be implemented in an effort towards making public universities more effective and sustainable.

Entrepreneurship has been an intriguing issue as an indicator of economic development and social welfare particularly being focused on last decades. Furthermore, the issue of immigration has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Nowadays, the quality of the workforce and it's training processes are not getting only progressively important but as well the participation of migrants in the labor market will be a great problem in the future. Migrant’s entrepreneurial tendencies and career expectations designation are the main objectives of this research. This research was designed as a comparative qualitative model, and the structured written interview technique was used in order to collect the data. Randomly sampling study groups were formed according to methods of maximum diversity. The sampling group was formed by the participation of 12 Syrian migrant high school students who live and get trained in Altindag, a district of Ankara, Turkey and 13 Syrian migrant high school students who live and get trained in Kreuzberg, a district of Berlin, Germany. The collected data were analyzed by content analysis technique. The results of the research reveal that immigrant students have a high level of entrepreneurship in Germany, the nonetheless low level of the expectations of future career prospects in Turkey. Thus, the absences of sociocultural and economic areas where they will use entrepreneurial tendencies are a serious obstacle to them. Moreover, participants argue that they do not want to stay in Turkey anymore, and most of them intend to emigrate to Europe or another country if they can do so. Unlike Germany, many of the participants in Turkey neither know what they want to be nor how they want to live in the future and nor have they made any career planning.

The purpose of this study was to develop a scale for assessing teachers’ self-determination instruction and to test the validity and reliability of this tool. The subjects included 315 teachers recruited from elementary and junior high schools nationwide in Taiwan. The Teaching Self-Determination Scale (TSDS) developed in this study aimed at assessing the extent to which educators teach students knowledge and skills related to self-determination. The 24-item TSDS is comprised of four subscales including Self-Realization, Psychological Empowerment, Self-Regulation, and Autonomy. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, t tests, and factor analyses. Findings showed that the TSDS has satisfactory psychometric properties. The internal consistency reliability coefficients (Cronbach’s α) ranged from .76 to .93, while the test-retest coefficients ranged from .71 to .87. Findings of the exploratory factor analysis showed that the four TSDS subscale factors can be reasonably extracted, which can explain 59.7% of the total item variance. The confirmatory factor analysis results further indicated a good fit between the measurement model and the sample data (GFI = .96, AGFI = .91, RMSEA = .08, NFI = .97, RFI = .93, IFI = .98, TLI = .95, CFI = .98). Suggestions are provided for future research.

According to Bronfenbrenner’s socio-ecological model, school is an essential microsystem of the developing child. Schools provide important developmental contexts for children and adolescents, as they constitute environments that might either foster or evoke students’ emotional instability. In particular, less is known about the precise and dynamic interplay of students’ socio-environmental aspects in school (i.e., sense of school belonging, social relationships with teachers and peers) and emotional instability (i.e., depressive symptoms, perceived stress, feelings of loneliness) during adolescence. To close this gap, this study examined within- and over-time cross-lagged associations based on data from a quantitative questionnaire-based survey of adolescent students (T1: N= 1088; Mage = 13.70, SD = 0.53) from 23 secondary schools in Brandenburg, Germany. Results of latent cross-lagged panel design supports the mutual relations for within-time associations, which is in line with Bronfenbrenner’s model. However, only the over-time association between school belonging and teacher-student relationship was found to be reciprocal.

Chorus education, which is being practiced within the framework of music education’s branch of voice training, has significant impacts on an individual’s philosophy of life, self-confidence level and socialization. An individual assesses his own life satisfaction level cognitively in terms of many aspects. Chorus education can be seen as the most prominent and contributing aspect as it helps people feel satisfied and happy and moreover, it makes their life more meaningful in various ways. The study aims to interpret the effect of choral participations of middle school students on their life satisfaction. Accordingly, in this research, ‘satisfaction with life scale’ developed by Diener, Emmons, Laresen and Griffin  - later translated in Turkish by Koker - has been used. To that end, middle school students’ satisfaction with life has been investigated through comparisons done within the context of factors such as; gender, age, grade, previous musical instrument experiences as well as choral participation. As a result of the research, it has been identified that the life satisfaction does not vary significantly according to gender, age, grade or previous musical instrument experiences; yet it has been found that that there is a positive effect of choral participation on students’ life with satisfaction.

Once a privilege for the members of the elite, writing is now a staple of everyday life accessible to the masses. Despite its significance for individuals’ economic, psychological, and educational well-being, it may not always be utilized to its full capacity. This is partly due to reductionist approaches to writing without full consideration of its various manifestations in life. This paper will argue that writing is more than the inscription of letters and symbols on paper (or on screen). The common misconception that highly developed artistic skills are a must for one to be a “good” writer often prevents individuals from engaging in rewarding learning experiences in and outside of formal education contexts. The realization of the ways in which writing in fact is a part of our daily lives and therefore cannot be divorced from learning throughout life will reduce concerns about a possible lack in writing skills. It will also be maintained in this paper that there is complementarity between lifelong learning and writing; just as lifelong learning requires the utilization of writing skills, greater involvement in writing and enhancements to one’s writing skills support lifelong learning skills. This paper will also propose that an emphasis on writing across curriculum in formal education settings as well as outside of formal education will help prepare individuals for engagement in continuous learning throughout life.

The purpose of the present study is to test a hypothetical model in order to examine the association between students’ sense of classroom belonging along with four other university class-level variables including faculty-student relationships, connected classroom climate referring peer relationships, loneliness and classroom identity. It is intended to draw attention of teacher educators to the importance of creating sense of community at classroom level through this study in order to improve the quality of teacher education. With this aim, pre-service teachers attending the faculty of education were selected as sample of the study (N= 1425). Each measures used in this study was adapted for college-level students through confirmatory factor analysis in order to test specific predictions concerning each measure’s structure and the results revealed that  all measures have adequate psychometric properties. The model examined with structural equation modeling was an excellent fit with the data, and the results indicated that the fitted model explained 50% of the variance in classroom identity; 47% of the variance in sense of classroom belonging; 14% of the variance in classroom climate; and 9% of the variance in loneliness. Results and implications are discussed.

The paper is part of the qualitative research project Educational Aspirations, Opportunities and Challenges for Immigrants in University Education in Iceland, conducted in Iceland’s three biggest universities. The main goal of the paper is to investigate immigrant students’ experiences of communication with teachers during the learning process and their perspectives on multicultural group work. Furthermore, the paper explores immigrant students’ experiences of learner-centred approach and culturally responsive teaching methods applied by some teachers. The data was collected through focus group interviews and qualitative, semi-structured individual interviews with immigrant students. The theoretical framework is mainly based on the constructivist theory, which emphasises the importance of communication and the learner-centred approach. Additionally, the theoretical framework includes multicultural education theory, which puts an emphasis on applying culturally responsive teaching methods in classrooms with diverse student populations. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the participants’ experiences of communication with teachers and peers were mostly positive. However, culturally responsive teaching is still a rare phenomenon in Icelandic universities. When it comes to the participants’ perspectives on group work, the experiences ranged from being highly positive to negative.

In recent years, cyberbullying, which can be considered as a new form of bullying, has emerged as a result of developments in the field of technology and communication. Cyberbullying has become a social problem which has affected individuals’ lives negatively. The key to success in the elimination of cyberbullying and its negative effects lies in cyberbullying sensitivity. The present study aims to analyze teachers’ cyberbullying and cyber victimization experiences and levels of cyberbullying sensitivity based on some variables which are supposed to develop awareness regarding cyberbullying. Using survey as a research model, the present study focused on 346 teachers working at schools affiliated with Ministry of National Education in Tasova District located in Amasya (Turkey). “Personal Information Form”, “The Revised Cyberbullying Inventory for University Students” and “Cyberbullying Sensitivity Scale” were used as data collection tools. SPSS package program was used for data analysis and frequency and percentage values of demographic variables. Independent T test was used for gender and marital status variables, and One-Way ANOVA test was used for age and level of education variables. The findings of the present study revealed that most of the participants used social media websites actively and spent at least 2 or 3 hours on these websites on a daily basis. Teachers usually have a Facebook and/or Instagram account, and benefit from social media for research purposes and playing games. It can be stated that teachers have a significantly high level of cyberbullying sensitivity. However, it was also indicated that even though participants worked as a teacher, they still did cyberbully and suffered from cyber victimization in the past. While a significant difference was observed only in the dimension of cyber sensitivity in terms of marital status, age and level of education, a significant difference wasn’t observed in the dimensions of cyberbullying, cyber victimization and cyber sensitivity in terms of gender.

This article presents an empirical study on the perceptions of university students toward the development of the teaching practicum, using the CourseSites platform as a communication and support tool for their training. The opinions of the students were collected through a questionnaire. The sample consisted of 1500 students who were registered in the degrees of Early Childhood Education, Primary Education and Pedagogy (2008-2018). A descriptive, inferential and multi-level analysis was conducted, which confirmed that future teachers had activated their professional competences, as they had the chance to share their internship experiences with their faculty members and with their own classmates.

If the challenges of today's world are to be met, then there is a need to give more prominence to emotion in education, i.e.  indulging the personal, emotional and spiritual aspects of teaching, and promoting the teachers’ social-emotional competencies along with the schooling influence. In this respect, structuring the contents of in-service programs has gained vital importance in all fields of education including English Language Teaching (ELT). This action research study involved 17 EFL instructors to enhance their emotional literacy regarding learning in self and in others and consequently develop behaviors that would be caused by finding out about emotional intelligence. Relatedly, it was aimed to set up a framework of a teacher development program that the instructors at a foreign language school at a state university in Turkey improve their emotional literacy skills and create opportunities to impart these skills to their students as well as to people in their personal lives. The article reports on the participants’ and the researcher’s views regarding the maturation of an emotional literacy improvement program for in-service professional development purposes in ELT context.

This study investigates the emotional responses of EFL student teachers to various affective situations during practicum and their coping strategies to enhance positive emotions and reduce negative emotions. Seventy female EFL student teachers participated in this study. To collect quantitative and qualitative data, two instruments were used: an emotional reflective diary and semi-structured interviews. The results of the study revealed that the practicum is an emotionally positive experience. The frequency of occurrence of pleasant affective situations was more than that of unpleasant ones. In the decreasing order of frequency, the most frequent emotional responses were happy, angry, and stressed and the least frequent ones were lost, influential, and shamed. Furthermore, the results indicated that student teachers adopted many regulation strategies to manage their emotions. The study recommends that teacher education programmes increase the focus on teachers’ emotions and training student teachers to manage their emotions to build future professional identities.

The objective of this research is to describe the practice of mindful leadership at the IABS - Plum Village Buddhist Monastery Upper Hamlet, France, looking at the abbot's pattern and role in developing and managing the Institute of Advanced Buddhist Studies and the monastery. This research uses the approach of qualitative research with the method of a single case study. The research data collection uses the techniques of observation, interview, and documentation study. The research procedure used in this research consists of several research steps utilizing the case study method of Robert K. Yin: research planning, research design, research preparation, research data collection, research data analysis, and doing the research report. The research analysis is done by pattern matching. The data validity testing through data source triangulation and technique triangulation. The result of this research shows that mindful leadership can develop the ability to develop compassion and attention without judgment. The study shows that a leader has compassion towards global issues and can accept with openness. A leader who practices mindfulness for a long time can direct towards openness of one’s self to others. The leader can lead with compassion and care and also understand hi members well. The ability to develop this compassion shows the ability to listen without judgment, not blame, and not discriminate.

In this study we aimed to investigate the role of hope, secure attachment with the parents, and satisfaction levels of the basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence and relatedness) of university students in predicting their happiness levels. A total of 558 university students were recruited and 70% of them were female and 30% of them were male. Ages of the participants ranged from 18 to 29. The data were collected in classroom settings using personal information form, the Oxford Happiness Scale, the Attachment with the Parents Scale, the Basic Psychological Needs Scale, and the Dispositional Hope Scale. Results indicated that that the satisfaction levels of the competence needs were the most powerful predictor of happiness among university students. The satisfaction levels of autonomy, relatedness needs, and a secure attachment to the father, along with hope contributed little to the explanation of happiness; whereas, a secure attachment to the mother was not a predictor of happiness of the university students. The findings were discussed within the framework of the developmental characteristics of university students and the characteristics of collectivist societies.

The purpose of this research is: 1) to develop the model and produce the assessment of creative curriculum-based learning program multiple intelligences (MI), 2) to know the characteristics and impacts of developed product models. Research using multi-years by method R & D (Research and Development) with two phases; First phase: 1) Preliminary survey stage, 2) definition stage, 3) design phase, 4) trial stage, and 5) development stage; The second phase: 1) the instrument design stage through the Forum Group Discussion, 2) the product trial phase of 100 children in Sleman Regency, 3) wide-scale implementation of 200 children in Yogyakarta Province, 4) the evaluation phase with construct analysis and achievement of research subjects' performance, 5 ) the stage of measuring the effectiveness of the product with user perception. The subject comprises 200 children of early childhood and 20 kindergarten teachers in 10 kindergartens in the Yogyakarta province in Indonesia, by the approach of Reflective Measurement Theory (RMT). The results showed that: 1) the MI-based creative curriculum assessment model was developed to meet valid, reliable and conformity criteria of an empirical data model, 2) The implementation of the assessment model had fulfilled the requirements worthy of using three criteria  aspect; 1) The results of the assessment using creative instruments based on multiple intelligences on children get "very good" results, 2) the readiness of the teacher in learning is included in the "good" category; 3) teacher performance appraisal shows the "very good" category, and 4) the benefits of the products developed are in the "very good" category. It was concluded that the developed product had tested empirically and practically so that it was useful in learning in early childhood.

Mathematics is one of the most challenging subjects for many students. A similar problem is faced by special needs students, such as students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Various instructional strategies are implemented by specialists to help ASD students understand mathematics in schools. To explore the impacts of an instructional strategy of mathematics on ASD students, the authors conducted a review of literature from 2011 to 2017 using various databases including ProQuest Digital Dissertations and Theses Full Text, Google Scholar, and Science Direct. A total of 39 articles were found. Most of the instructional strategy aimed to assist ASD students in solving mathematics problems. The implications of the study are also discussed in this literature review, which indicates that teachers need to use the appropriate instructional strategy to meet the needs of students with ASD and maximize their mathematics learning outcomes in schools.

Self-efficacy and critical thinking represent two vital components for university graduates in the 21st century learning. However, several studies reported that these two important outcome predictors were unsatisfactory. This study aimed at investigating the effects of problem-based learning (PBL) on pre-service teachers’ self-efficacy and critical thinking. A quasi-experimental nonequivalent pretest-posttest control group design was utilized. A total of 44 pre-service elementary school teachers (aged 19-22) at a private university in Indonesia were assigned as experimental (n = 22) and control (n = 22) groups. The experimental group learning received PBL, while the control group learning with traditional college instruction. The Self-Efficacy Scale (SES) and the Critical Thinking Questionnaire (CTQ) were administered before and after the intervention in both groups. Independent and paired samples t-tests were employed to analyze the pretests and posttests data. The results indicated that PBL was more effective in increasing self-efficacy and critical thinking of pre-service elementary teachers than traditional teaching. It is suggested that PBL should be used more frequently in science learning to further enhance students’ self-efficacy and critical thinking skills in higher education.

Vocational orientation is a concerned topic in the Vietnamese new general education program. However, the current high school vocational programs have not yet met the need for innovation in the student competence development orientation, thus leading to high school vocational orientation has not been effective. This study proposes a vocational school-based program approached from a new individual guidance. By using the pre-experiment and post-experiment questionnaire to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed program to the quality of vocational orientation, the results showed that students’ awareness of vocational school-based programs changed in a positive direction. The proposed program proves its effectiveness when applied in schools by combining the practical career experience and vocational counseling, or the combination of individual experience and social interaction in choosing a suitable career. This finding overcomes the disadvantages of the old vocational school-based program and can be applied to adapt the student competence development orientation in the Vietnamese general education program.