The purpose of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to identify: (a) the topic of the study, (b) the research methods used, and (c) the results of research on Mathematics education in Malaysia. This study discusses the use of teaching aid (TA) in the field of syllabus and geometry for Form 2 students. The use of TA is considered highly successful and relevant for educators to improve the quality of the teacher’s instructions and students’ understanding. Therefore, using the rules of optional reporting items for systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA), a review system was carried out to determine the appropriate strategies and variables for the field. Four stages constitute the PRISMA paradigm used in this study: identification, screening, qualification, and admission. Using criteria opted by researchers from multiple searches, including Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Scopus, and Emerald, over 20 papers were identified for additional investigation. The data were then analysed quantitatively to describe the research's findings. From the results, two main research themes were found, namely (a) learning to use TA; and (b) the field of measurement and geometry of Mathematics. The results of the article analysis indicate that Mathematics education in Malaysia is currently at a moderate level and is ineffective at fostering students' understanding and interest. These results are anticipated to serve as the foundation for teachers, students, schools, and the Ministry of Education to undertake more engaging and interactive learning, particularly in the subject areas of mathematics and geometry.

This exploratory and descriptive study aims to theoretically promote the schema of pseudo-thinking processes in mathematical problem-solving by students. The participants in this study were 36 eighth graders and one math teacher. The researchers collected the data using tests and interviews. The results showed that the structure of pseudo-thinking based on the processes of assimilation and accommodation is theoretically composed of five hierarchical components, namely (a) the structure of the problem, (b) the structure of the subject's thinking, (c) the analytic process, (d) the integration of structures or substructures, and (e) the complete integration of structures. When the subject integrates incomplete substructures into existing thinking schemes, assimilation or accommodation becomes imperfect, resulting in cognitive disequilibrium. The results of such a thought process are called pseudo-thinking. Pseudo-thinking processes can be refined and improved into actual thinking processes through reflection and scaffolding. Assimilation and accommodation occur through defragmentation or organization to rearrange the internal schema so that full structural integration occurs. In the end, the subject experiences cognitive equilibrium so that it becomes an actual student thought process.

The pedagogical and didactic guidance of teachers has been linked, in the relevant literature, to the school management’s adoption of the model of pedagogical leadership as well as to the assurance of a series of factors that influence it. This study aims at investigating the pedagogical role of the principal in Greek primary schools. Data were collected through an anonymous questionnaire completed by 133 Greek primary school head teachers. Results show that head teachers consider that their pedagogical role has mainly to do with the pedagogical climate, psychosocial and pedagogical guidance of the school unit. Additionally, the research results show that head teachers carry out their pedagogical role cooperating and communicating mainly with the members of the educational community of the school. Another noteworthy finding of the present study is that the factors that support head teachers in their pedagogical leadership role, are hard to exist in hierarchical educational realities such as Greece. The originality of the paper draws attention to the school's socio-economic environment, which significantly influences school leadership. Conclusions on the implications of the study are made and directions for future research are suggested.

This study aims to evaluate cognitive conflict in constructing mathematical concepts, based on thinking errors. The data were collected through observations of words or sentences, leading to the derivation of qualitative outputs. Furthermore, the results showed that the two selected subjects experienced cognitive conflicts regarding thinking errors in mathematical concept construction. This selection process was conducted through the provision of the questions obtained in the first semester of mathematics, at Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia. These questions consisted of several indicators, with each of them having three components, namely the main, tracking, and supporting items. Based on the results, two subjects experienced thinking errors in constructing the concept of algebraic root form addition. This emphasized the errors in placing concepts (misplaced), pseudo-thinking, and misanalogy. A conflict was also observed between the initial concept knowledge of using variables in algebraic addition and the new principles understood through the root summation in algebra. Furthermore, there was also a conflict between the concept understanding he had in terms of the addition operation of the root form and a new understanding of the addition operation of the root form in algebra.

Knowledge-based economy is an economic model students need to be prepared for a future economic model that uses knowledge as its main resource. Therefore, this study developed and validated instruments for constructing knowledge-based economy readiness among undergraduate students. This study used an online questionnaire with 120 respondents of economic education students in educational universities in East Java, Indonesia, for exploratory factor analysis and 417 respondents for confirmatory factor analysis. Then, statistical analysis was conducted using exploratory factor analysis in SPSS and confirmatory factor analysis in AMOS. This study first developed five factors of knowledge of economics, readiness for economic challenges, readiness for education, readiness for infrastructure, and readiness for innovation, consisting of 27 items. However, one item was removed because the loading factor was below .50. Consequently, 26 items were retained because the loading factor was significantly greater than .50. The Cronbach's alpha value for each item of the knowledge-based economy readiness construct was >.60 and met all goodness of fit index criteria, which means that it meets the requirements and can measure the construct of knowledge-based economy readiness. Since this study meets the validity and reliability requirements of the constructs leading to knowledge-based economy readiness, these results will help students prepare for the current and future knowledge-based economy. They can be used in developing economic education curricula in higher education.

Many education and learning experts currently recommend the flipped classroom model as an alternative to learning after the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aims to explore the impact of the flipped classroom model on social skills and problem-solving skills for cadets. This research used a sequential mix method involving 50 maritime students in semester 7 of the Engineering Study Program at the Maritime Sciences Polytechnic Makassar, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Researchers used two main instruments, namely problem-solving skill tests and interviews. Furthermore, in the quantitative analysis, the researcher ran paired sample t-tests and one-way Multivariate Analysis of Covariance (MANCOVA) using the SPSS 25.00 program. In addition, researchers also analysed qualitative data from interviews using thematic analysis techniques. The results showed that the flipped classroom model proved to have a positive effect on the problem-solving skills of maritime students. Other findings state that the cadets also respond positively to the flipped classroom model. Researchers recommend that teachers use the flipped classroom model, especially in dealing with learning in the post-pandemic era, like today.

This study investigated the influence of CThink4CS² Module on computational thinking (CT) skills of form four chemistry students. The CThink4CS² Module integrated CT with the Engineering Design Process (EDP) in chemistry class. This study utilized quantitative research methods and quasi-experimental design. Quantitative data were collected using the Computational Thinking Skill Test (CTST) which consisted of algorithmic reasoning, abstraction, decomposition, and pattern recognition constructs. A total of 73 students were in the treatment group (n=39) and control group (n=34). Experimental data were described by means of descriptive analysis and inferential analysis employing two-way MANOVA analysis. The results of the analysis indicated significant differences in CT skills between groups; students in the treatment group demonstrated better results compared to those in the control group. The paper provides insight into the integration of CT and EDP as effective pedagogical strategies for inculcating CT skills.

In teaching, students' representations could constitute an obstacle to the construction of scientific knowledge and are often considered stable cognitive structures whose organization is sought to be inferred through questionnaires and interviews. This study aims at identifying and analyzing high school students’ representations related to the concept of biodiversity. To meet this objective, a semi-structured interview and a questionnaire were used to collect data. 202 Moroccan students participated in this survey (46.5% from rural areas and 53.5% from urban areas of the "Direction Provinciale" of education of Guelmim city in Morocco). The results of the interview indicated that only 1.82% of the students gave a definition that consists of the three biodiversity dimensions, namely the species, the ecosystems, and the genetic diversity. The questionnaire results revealed a low to medium correlation between their representations and their acquired knowledge related to the concept of biodiversity dealt with in Moroccan school programs (from the discipline of "scientific activity" in the primary cycle and that of "life and earth sciences" in the secondary cycle). The results further indicated a low presence of supervised activities related to biodiversity within the school and therefore a low degree of influence on the students' representations. It was concluded that there was no effective transmission or adequate assimilation of the concept of biodiversity among the students surveyed.

Interculturality, inclusion, and diversity are generally associated with bilingualism in countries with different socio-cultural identities, but rarely with school coexistence among students hailing from different backgrounds. The present systematic review is framed in a descriptive-qualitative approach since its main objective is to provide an account of the relationship between welcoming, school coexistence, and the integration and inclusion processes in schools in countries receiving foreign migrant families. For this purpose, Web of Science, SCOPUS, EBSCO, and SCiELO databases were searched using a reference chain, and according to search results, 26 empirical studies retrieved from those databases published between 2010 and 2020 were analyzed. The main findings indicate that the inclusion process is developed through the acculturation and disciplining devices of foreign children to the dominant national logic, which marks a hierarchical difference between nationalities. They also highlight the recognition of cultural diversity under the logic of folklorization and a vision that focuses on academic achievement rather than on the particularities that cultural diversity can contribute to social relations and learning within the school.

This qualitative study explored the possibility of implementing the happy school model (HSM) in the context of Vietnamese higher education, with a focus on the socio-cultural perspectives of nine tertiary English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers at different career stages. Through semi-structured interviews, thematic analysis, and theoretical underpinning by constructivist paradigm and humanistic education theory, the study illuminated multifaceted insights. Key themes emerged, including aligning the HSM with holistic student development, recognizing challenges and potential benefits, balancing traditional Confucian values, and adapting the model to Vietnam’s unique socio-cultural and economic landscape. The findings provide valuable guidance for educational innovation in Vietnam, highlighting complexities of aligning a new educational paradigm with existing practices and cultural norms. While the study’s focus on a specific cultural context and limited participant pool presents certain limitations, the insights offer rich contributions to the broader global dialogue on education and human development. Future research directions and practical implications are also discussed, making this study a valuable resource for educators, policymakers, and researchers interested in the intersection of universal educational principles and specific cultural contexts like Vietnam.

This study illustrated an alternative way to evaluate students’ academic learning. It involved the joint and intertwined application of the natural semantic network technique, computer simulations, and semantic priming experiments to assess the cognitive changes in knowledge structures due to academic learning in two groups of psychology students. The experimental group was enrolled in a course on computational cognition, while the control group was oblivious to this course. The results indicated that the cognitive assessment tools discriminate the cognitive changes produced as a result of general training undertaken in a psychology degree versus the influence of a specific course. After the course, the experimental group increased their technical vocabulary, changed their conceptual valuation of definers related to computational theories of mind, and reorganized the relations among definers according to the computational cognition approach. Also, this group presented a higher connectivity index between the concepts of the semantic network, their conceptual activation level and conceptual co-activation pattern changed, and their access level to the evaluated schema’s concepts improved. In contrast, the control group did not show significant changes in their cognitive patterns after the course. These findings suggest that cognitive tools may be helpful in the diagnosis of academic learning.

This study aims to explore the relationship between proactive behaviors, teaching performance, and organizational support among vocational college teachers. Based on the theory of organizational support, we conducted a survey of 373 teachers from four vocational colleges in Shanxi Province, using scales for proactive behaviors, organizational support, and teaching performance. The results indicate that: (a) There is a significant correlation between teachers' proactive behaviors and teaching performance; (b) There is a significant correlation between teachers' proactive behaviors and organizational support; (c) Organizational support plays a significant mediating role in the relationship between teachers' proactive behaviors and teaching performance. This study enriches the application of organizational support in vocational colleges, providing empirical evidence for improving teachers' proactive behaviors in higher education institutions, which could be useful for central or local education policy decision-makers and implementing units. Additionally, this model could be further applied beyond vocational education to other contexts or policies, demonstrating both theoretical and practical significance.

The field of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instruction has gained recognition worldwide, particularly in non-native English-speaking countries. However, traditional teaching methods fall short of meeting the needs of today's EFL learners. In response, the Production-Oriented Approach (POA) has emerged as a new pedagogical approach to address these challenges. Despite its significant impact on EFL education, there is a lack of reviews on the POA. This study conducted a systematic review to explore the POA's effectiveness, challenges, and future trends. Using the PRISMA framework, 31 articles from reputable databases (Web of Science, Education Resources Information Center, Scopus, and Google Scholar) were analyzed, covering the years 2018 to 2023. The study's comprehensive analysis, employing Nvivo, revealed that the POA has immense potential for enhancing English learners' language skills, particularly in reading, speaking, writing, and translating. Moreover, the study highlighted the POA's positive influence on learners' affective factors, including motivation, confidence, critical thinking, and self-directed learning abilities. Nonetheless, the POA faces challenges for both teachers and learners, particularly during the transition from traditional methods and the associated increase in workload. Despite these challenges, this study unequivocally establishes the POA as an effective pedagogical approach for teaching EFL. Additionally, it identifies research gaps that must be addressed to sustain and improve EFL education in the future through further development of the POA.

This research concentrated on observing academic student teachers’ teamwork, especially its effectiveness and their attitudes to collaboration and transformation, as well as their reflective, written self-assessments in relation to teamwork. Teams have been studied widely, but these kinds of special contexts are rare. The target group was higher education teachers, the context was an introduction of a new pedagogical program, and the teams acted under the guidance of mentors and occasional lecturers. Besides the content analysis, the study method was a deep analysis of the essays. The most effective positive influencers proved to be social exchanges, including mentoring, peer support, input for learning and the experiences of wellbeing. Individual distrust of working methods in teams, and emotional suspicions of their self-efficacy in transformational settings emerged as latent factors, revealing mainly the difficulty of changing traditional mindsets. The analyses offered individual and community-wide opportunities to steer education in the future.

The 21st century marks a world where scientific, humanistic, technological, and societal issues are integrated. The complexity caused by the reciprocal effects among technology, engineering, cultural, and social values raises new ethical problems. This study addresses recent increased attention to the relationship between ethical awareness and engineering identity factors. Participants in this study were 246 undergraduate engineering students enrolled in a research university located in the northeast U.S. Bivariate correlation and ordinary least squares regression were conducted. Bivariate correlations showed that ethical awareness was positively correlated to engineering interest, engineering recognition, and engineering performance/competence, which are the three factors of engineering identity. The OLS regression showed the r2 value for the computed regression equation indicated that there was a non-zero relationship between the set of all independent variables (engineering identity factors, gender, ethnicity, years in school, and first-generation status) and the dependent (ethical awareness) and that the final set of independent variables accounted for approximately 22% of the variation in the dependent variable, Ethical Awareness. Undergraduate engineering education is a key to ensuring engineers will uphold the ethical values of the profession. This study contributes to the practical value of engineering ethics awareness by affirming that engineering identity is sound and should be applied in practice.

The research on the pedagogical knowledge of teachers in technological education arises from the need to address the problem of pedagogical practices, which are traditional. The classes are at the graduate level, focusing on lecturing the student while the student remains with a passive attitude. It is believed that making explicit that teachers' pedagogical knowledge will allow reflection and awareness, thereby transforming pedagogical practices. Therefore, the objective is to understand the teachers’ constructions on pedagogical knowledge in technology programs in Plant Operations and Industrial Instrumentation of the Faculty of Engineering in order to reconstruct it theoretically, as well as identify its characteristics and trace action routes for teacher training. In this way, it allows education to be accessible to low-income and resource-poor populations, whose purpose is to strengthen the productivity and competitiveness of the economy through the training of human talent according to the needs of the working sector in a unique context. This research uses grounded theory as a methodological tool for data processing. In this sense, data collection procedures such as in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 teachers and seven of them were related to the industry. Whereas, 9 were linked to the teaching(educational) sector including elementary, high school and college level. The results showed differentiated, and socially constructed pedagogical knowledge that responds to teachers’ nature in a particular context. These results contribute to consolidate a broad vision about the pedagogical knowledge’s characteristics that the teacher builds.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a twelve-week Inquiry-Based Science (IBS) program on enhancing science process skills and scientific knowledge among preschool children in Morocco. Conducted in a quasi-experimental setting, it involved 105 children (M = 60.46 months, SD = 4.32), with 37 in the IBS group and 68 in the control group. The program utilized the 5Es instructional model and the Engineering Design Process (EDP) to engage children in active, hands-on learning experiences. Statistical analysis demonstrated that the IBS group achieved substantial improvements in both science process skills and scientific knowledge relative to the control group, with between-group effect sizes (Cohen’s d) ranging from 1.02 and 2.31. These findings highlight the significant impact of structured inquiry-based approaches in early childhood education. The study underscores the need for integrating such methods into the preschool curriculum to foster scientific understanding and skills from a young age, thereby better preparing Moroccan children for future academic and professional challenges. The results advocate for educational stakeholders to consider adopting inquiry-based learning frameworks to enhance the overall quality of early childhood education in Morocco.

Since the 1990s, there has been a global trend in the search for quality in school systems that have materialized in the educational policies of the most developed countries. This article analyzes the treatment given to the concept of quality in the educational reforms approved in the last fifty years in Spain. The objectives of this study were: (a) to analyze the presence and recurrence of the term ‘quality’ in each of the laws and (b) to identify the factors associated with quality in these laws. To respond to these objectives, a bibliographic study was carried out using a content analysis approach to the texts of the different laws, as well as a review of the existing literature on the subject in question. It was, therefore, an eminently qualitative research approach. Among the findings found, it is worth highlighting the high presence of the term ‘quality’ in the legislative texts analyzed since the beginning of the new millennium, as well as a continuity in the educational reforms of evaluation policies of the educational system in coherence with the demands produced by supranational organizations at a global level.

Teachers’ access to technology in this day and age could have a positive effect on the teaching and learning of English first additional language (EFAL). This qualitative interpretive case study explored how limited access to technology resources affects the teaching practices of Intermediate Phase EFAL teachers in rural schools in Limpopo, South Africa. This study, underpinned by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), conducted semi-structured interviews to collect data from ten EFAL teachers who were purposively sampled. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. The study revealed that three of the ten EFAL teachers sampled integrated technology into their teaching despite challenges such as insufficient projectors, lack of learners’ smartphones and data bundles, and Internet connectivity. However, the other seven sampled participants did not use technology, citing a lack of digital tools and knowledge as a contributing factor. The study concludes that the lack of resources contributed to limited or no use of technology and the motivation to integrate technology into their lessons. Based on these findings, it is recommended that technological resources that can help EFAL teachers with digital teaching be made available so that they can integrate them to assist learners in developing language skills. Furthermore, in-service training and ongoing support should be provided to EFAL teachers to give them knowledge and skill to use available technology resources effectively.

The viva examination or ‘defence’ is a pivotal moment in a student’s or researcher’s career. It marks the conclusion of one stage and the beginning of another, whether during the study period or when competing for research funding. Unlike many other formal assessments, the viva is an oral performance. Its form may strongly depend on the domain of science or knowledge sector, on the university or even on faculty. The rituals of interaction between jurors and candidates may differ in many cultural contexts. Yet, the core elements of the defence are the debate, the use of evidence, and the justification for a statement or opinion delivered orally, are common to all. Accordingly, although a successful defence is about content, it is also about language and attitude. In academic education, there is insufficient preparation for this moment when one is in front of jurors, a commission, and even a wider audience. We draw on our combined experience in our own careers and in their coaching of students to present an analysis of the ‘viva’ process. Our findings may help candidates position themselves in the viva context and offer practical advice on how to prepare, define an attitude, and structure answers and responses in general.