Education Sciences

Efforts to improve student retention and degree achievement in STEM disciplines has increasingly highlighted the importance of faculty professional development and the adoption of evidence-based teaching practice. Despite teaching being a core faculty responsibility, formal pedagogical training is rarely required, and many faculty develop their teaching approaches based on their experiences as students or graduate teaching assistants. This quantitative study examines STEM faculty perceptions of receiving encouragement as students and their relationship with dimensions of their professional identity. Our findings suggest that encouragement aligns with faculty student- and self-related professional identity dimensions. These results underscore the need for structured professional development and early training in evidence-based pedagogy, including the cultivation of encouragement practices, to foster more inclusive, supportive, and effective learning environments in STEM.

Professional skills training and academic success are key challenges for contemporary educational systems, particularly within higher education. The labour market increasingly demands well-prepared graduates with specific competencies that are still insufficiently embedded in university curricula. In this context, acquiring new professional skills becomes a decisive factor for students’ employability and competitiveness. At the same time, academic success remains a crucial indicator of educational quality, and its improvement is an urgent priority for universities. In response to these demands, our study evaluates cognitive-emotional competencies—emotional intelligence, creativity, and subjective well-being—in a sample of 300 university students from the Community of Madrid (Spain), analysing their influence on academic success with the aim of enhancing it. A non-experimental, cross-sectional research design was employed, using standardised self-report measures (TMMS-24, CREA, SHS, OHI, SLS, and OLS), innovative data mining algorithms (Random Forest and decision trees), and binary logistic regression techniques. The results highlight the importance of creativity, life satisfaction, and emotional attention in predicting academic success, with creativity showing the strongest discriminative power among the variables studied. These findings reinforce the need to integrate emotional and creative development into university curricula, promoting competency-based educational models that enhance training quality and students’ academic outcomes.

This study examines the performances of gifted and talented high schoolers in transforming computational thinking skills and mathematical knowledge into creative STEM project production. A mixed-methods sequential explanatory research design involving 112 participants was employed. In the first quantitative phase, the Computational Thinking Skills Scale was administered to assess problem-solving, creative thinking, algorithmic thinking, cooperative learning, and critical thinking skills. Latent profile analysis yielded three CTS profiles: high (29%), moderate (51%), and basic (20%). The qualitative phase used a case study to examine, latent profile participants’ project production experiences of computational thinking in problem-solving, cooperative learning, critical thinking, creative thinking, and algorithmic thinking, as well as the domain, outcomes, and dissemination of projects over 23 weekly sessions. The results indicated that while three latent profiles demonstrated comparable performances in problem-solving and cooperative learning, differences in creativity of project products and dissemination were associated with variations in algorithmic, critical, and creative thinking skills. Algorithmic and logical designs, mathematical models, prototypes, and patent applications produced by gifted high school students reflected the transformation of computational thinking skills into creative project productivity.

Reading comprehension (RC) can be predicted from language comprehension (LC) and decoding, and all three constructs are responsive to structured teaching. Culturally responsive instruction, which explicitly connects students’ lived experiences with school experiences, can also effectively support literacy learning. However, little is known about how structured and culturally responsive approaches work in tandem, and whether positive effects may occur through the path of LC or decoding, or directly on RC. Further, does culturally responsive teaching support transfer from local, personalized learning materials to standardized measures? This study investigates the impact of structured and culturally responsive teaching on standardized measures of RC, LC, and decoding among 263 students in grades 1 through 3. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: (1) generic structured teaching approach that used mainstream materials, (2) a structured culturally responsive approach that centered students’ interests, cultures, and sense of belonging, and (3) a waitlisted business-as-usual control group. Over 10 weeks, students received small-group teaching focused on decoding and LC. Bayesian multilevel ANCOVA models indicate all groups grew, with differential positive effects for LC for the culturally responsive treatment group. The findings suggest benefits to integrating cultural relevance into structured literacy teaching and that a multifaceted approach may be effective. Implications and limitations are discussed.