Student dropouts led to a squandering of the education budget. The education system and society are significantly affected, particularly in terms of potential development. To ensure vocational students graduate and secure satisfactory employment in line with the field of study. Implementing a comprehensive system that encompasses promoting, supporting, preventing, and resolving various student issues is essential. This system includes close, meticulous care and support, timely and appropriate interventions, enhancement of life skills, guidance, and holistic student development. This research found that the risk factors in the teaching and learning process account for 90.78 percent of the reasons scholarship students drop out of the education system; there are instances of absenteeism, inappropriate behavior, and a dislike for the teacher and the subject they are teaching. Additionally, the care and support system for vocational students at risk of dropping out consists of four components: Component 1: living care; Component 2: dropout protection; Component 3: counseling and advising; and Component 4: transfer to support. The empirical evaluation of the care and support system for students concluded that the overall assessment was highly suitable. The information should be utilized for planning and policymaking in educational institutions.

This study delved into Terry Borton’s reflective model and 7E instructional model to produce comprehensive and guided tools that fit as observation and reflective tools for enhancing learners’ engagement and outcomes in Mathematics lessons. The aim was to gather insights that can inform strategies to adapt Borton’s model to produce tools to be used to observe and analyse 7E model-based Mathematics lessons to contribute to improved student outcomes. Literature information was used to explore, analyse, and synthesise the study’s related existing theories and models to provide a deeper understanding of constraints and prompt question descriptors to produce 21st-century tools to observe and reflect on a Mathematics lesson. After comparing different prompt question descriptors from different literature and Borton’s model, concise descriptors were retained for educational purposes to be analysed, considering the 7E model phases, to produce the guided tools. As a result, two products. “Classroom Observation-Guided Tool”, which includes a guided tool table with a last column for the observer to write comments during class. This column is used to identify gaps in student engagement and learning practices across the 7E phases, which may have been misused. The “Post-Lesson Discussion Guided Tool”, to make a positive post-lesson discussion session, enabling teachers to identify areas for improvement in student engagement to achieve better outcomes next time. Other researchers can study the applicability of 21st-century observation and reflection-guided tools to other subjects, exploring their long-term impact on teacher professional development to improve overall student achievement across all school subjects.

Vocational education plays a pivotal role in nurturing talent and supporting national development. However, challenges such as outdated talent development concepts, insufficient teacher training, and a lack of attention to soft skills cultivation from both schools and students have hindered the comprehensive development of secondary vocational students. This study aims to explore the direct effect of perceived teachers’ transformational leadership on the soft skills of 324 secondary vocational students in China and to examine the mediating role of students’ self-efficacy in this relationship. Using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), the results show that teachers’ transformational leadership has a significant positive effect on students’ soft skills (β = 0.33, p < .01). Moreover, self-efficacy partially mediates this relationship (indirect effect β = 0.07, p < .05), accounting for 22.6% of the total effect. These findings suggest that teachers’ inspirational motivation, individualized consideration, and intellectual stimulation directly foster students’ communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills, while also indirectly strengthening them by enhancing students’ confidence. Practically, the study underscores the need for teacher training in transformational leadership and for policy initiatives that integrate soft skills into vocational curricula.

Team-based learning (TBL) is a popular form of collaborative learning designed to increase student engagement and motivate students to learn. A growing body of research, particularly in the health sciences, has demonstrated that TBL has positive impacts on student performance and classroom dynamics. However, much less is known about the student outcomes associated with TBL courses in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, fields in which active learning is especially important for student success and retention. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of the student outcomes associated with TBL in undergraduate STEM education. Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method, we identified 55 empirical and qualitative research articles published between 2005 and 2024 that reported on TBL implementation practices and student outcomes. Importantly, we found that most studies described increased student performance and improved measures of classroom dynamics when TBL was compared to lecture-based teaching approaches. These findings provide further evidence that TBL is an effective instructional method and suggest that TBL can be implemented successfully across a wide range of student populations and undergraduate STEM disciplines.

University teaching staff are increasingly engaged in innovative sustainability-related initiatives aimed at improving teaching-learning processes while fostering their own academic development. However, the literature has only tentatively explored the impact of this participation on academic development. This work, therefore, aims to analyse the dimensions of the sustainability-oriented learning environment known as Ocean i3 that influence the academic development of university teaching staff. It is based on a case study approach that enables an in-depth and contextualised analysis of this complex phenomenon in a real-world setting. Interviews and a focus group were used as data-collection instruments while inductive content analysis guided the interpretation and discussion of the findings. The results suggest that the complexity of the educational choreography—including project design, institutional context, the teaching team, and the active involvement of staff and students— plays a key role in the academic development of university teaching staff. The study concludes that these dimensions should be strengthened in innovative sustainability-oriented learning environments in order to promote teachers’ academic development.