Education Sciences

School principals face unprecedented occupational stress and burnout, intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding how working conditions influence principal wellbeing is essential for developing effective support systems. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources framework and stress and coping theories, this study examines the relationships between working conditions and principal wellbeing, investigating COVID-19 stress as both a mediator and moderator. Using structural equation modeling, we analyzed survey data from 184 Utah principals collected during the pandemic. Results indicated that job resources were consistently related to lower emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, and higher personal accomplishment and job satisfaction. Workload was positively related to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization and negatively related to job satisfaction but was unrelated to personal accomplishment. COVID-19 stress partially mediated relationships between working conditions and burnout outcomes, contributing to both strain (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization) and enhanced sense of accomplishment. Stress also moderated the protective effects of job resources on burnout, with principals experiencing increased pandemic stress requiring substantially more organizational support to maintain comparable wellbeing levels. COVID-19 stress neither mediated nor moderated the associations between working conditions (workload and job resources) and job satisfaction. These findings suggest that principal wellbeing can be supported through multiple pathways involving both organizational improvements and stress reduction strategies, with crisis periods requiring enhanced resource allocation to maintain leadership effectiveness and sustainability.

This cross-sectional study explores the connections between resilience, work engagement, proactive strategies and personal resources among Italian kindergarten and primary school teachers. It specifically seeks to determine if and how personal resources can foster teachers’ work engagement, resilience, and proactive strategies at work. The study was conducted using a sample of 183 full-time, in-service kindergarten and primary teachers at public schools in Italy. Data were collected through self-report questionnaires, including the Brief Resilience Scale, the Ultra-Short Measure for Work Engagement, the Proactive Strategy scale, the Self-Compassion Scale, the Life Orientation Test-Revised, the Experienced compassion at work scale. Data were analyzed using a path analysis model. Results indicated that teachers’ self-compassion was positively associated with the use of proactive strategies and perceived received compassion was strongly related to work engagement. Moreover, higher levels of self-compassion were linked to greater work engagement. Teachers’ optimism and self-compassion were both positively associated with resilience, whereas self-criticism showed a significant negative association. Our research supports the need for educational policymakers and school leaders to focus on personal resources and work-related well-being.

This study examined the value of Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks as an ecologically valid tool for assessing bilingual children’s morphosyntactic competence. Seventy Greek–Turkish bilinguals and Greek monolinguals (aged 8–12) completed tasks assessing expressive vocabulary, morphological awareness, and SRep. Monolinguals significantly outperformed bilinguals across all tasks, with near-ceiling scores in grammaticality in SRep tasks reflecting earlier acquisition of core Greek structures. In contrast, bilinguals’ performance was significantly lower and varied across conditions: while scores were relatively higher on simple SVO, coordination, and wh-clauses, difficulties emerged in clitic left dislocation, complement clauses, and adverbial clauses—domains of greatest typological divergence between Greek and Turkish. Importantly, SRep performance on grammaticality did not vary with age, despite strong age effects on vocabulary and morphology, suggesting that SRep tasks indexes morphosyntactic knowledge rather than general maturational growth. Regression analyses showed that monolinguals’ SRep performance was best predicted by morphological awareness, whereas bilinguals relied more heavily on expressive vocabulary, reflecting their reduced exposure to Greek and reliance on lexical resources. These findings confirm the fairness and sensitivity of SRep for bilingual assessment, while highlighting the interplay of typological differences and input in shaping bilingual children’s morphosyntactic abilities.