Search Results (493)

University students often intend to exercise regularly but fail to translate intention into action. The present study tested which post-intentional processes distinguish successful from unsuccessful intenders in self-reported regular leisure-time moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) enactment. Chinese undergraduates from 10 universities completed a three-wave survey administered at roughly two-week intervals. Habit automaticity was assessed at Wave 1, intention together with action planning and coping planning at Wave 2, and self-reported regular-exercise status at Wave 3. Because the dependent variable was assessed using a single stage-based self-report item, the findings should be interpreted as explaining self-reported regular-exercise status rather than objectively measured MVPA volume, frequency, or intensity. Primary analyses focused on students classified as intenders under the prespecified threshold (n = 1119 of N = 1670) and used hierarchical logistic regression to predict Wave 3 active versus inactive status. Under the primary threshold, 43.23% of participants were successful intenders and 23.77% were unsuccessful intenders, yielding an intention-behavior gap of 35.48% among intenders. Confirmatory factor analyses supported treating action planning and coping planning as distinct constructs. Among intenders, stronger action planning, stronger habit automaticity, and stronger intention strength independently predicted greater odds of meeting the regular-exercise criterion at follow-up. Coping planning did not show unique predictive value once action planning, habit automaticity, and intention strength were considered simultaneously, and no planning × habit interaction was supported. The pattern was robust across three alternative intention thresholds. These findings suggest that, among already motivated university students, successful exercise enactment depends less on coping planning alone than on a combination of commitment, concrete scheduling, and emerging behavioral automaticity. Interventions for student physical activity may therefore benefit from emphasizing detailed action planning and repeated performance in stable contexts. Full article

Background/Objectives: College student health has become a global public health concern, with campus environments serving as critical resources for supporting healthy lifestyles. This study aimed to identify heterogeneous associations between health-related lifestyle parameters and health status among university students, as well as the relationships between these parameters and campus environmental factors. Methods: A two-stage analytical approach was applied to 909 student responses from five Chinese universities. Stage One employed hierarchical regression to identify lifestyle parameters significantly associated with health status. Stage Two used EFA-derived factors and LASSO robustness checks to examine campus environmental factors linked to these key parameters. Results: Six lifestyle parameters were significantly associated with student health: physical exercise frequency, physical exercise duration, active commuting frequency, nature contact frequency, healthy diet frequency, and self-rated health literacy. Each parameter exhibited distinct patterns of environmental association. Conclusions: These findings provide empirical evidence for redefining health-promoting campus design through targeted environmental interventions. Full article

Sustainable higher education governance requires durable institutional mechanisms that support student engagement, faculty participation in education, and organizational coordination. Against the backdrop of China’s “Three-All Education” framework, academic culture has become a broader governance issue involving student development, faculty engagement, and organizational operation. This study aims to examine the current conditions and associated factors of academic culture governance in resource-constrained undergraduate universities. Based on survey data from three undergraduate institutions in Gansu Province, China, including 6120 valid student questionnaires and 735 valid faculty questionnaires, this study combines group difference tests with multiple regression analysis. The findings show that the sampled institutions face three main challenges: insufficient continuity in students’ academic goal commitment, limited faculty educational engagement under research-oriented incentives, and weak organizational coordination. Regression results further indicate that clarity of learning goals is significantly and positively associated with students’ learning status; perceived research orientation is significantly and negatively associated with faculty engagement in education; and information sharing and clarity of responsibility are significantly and positively associated with organizational coordination. These findings suggest that sustainable academic culture governance depends on the alignment of student goal support, faculty incentive structures, and collaborative organizational operation. Full article

Background/Objectives: Climate change worry is an emerging concern in youth mental health, but little is known about how it is associated with positive psychological functioning among university students. This study examined whether climate change worry was associated with flourishing and whether this association showed a cross-sectional statistical indirect effect through anxiety and depressive symptoms, with physical activity specified as a first-stage boundary condition. Methods: A cross-sectional anonymous survey was conducted in 2026 using convenience sampling among students from four universities located in three provincial-level regions of China, covering southern, western, and central areas. After predefined quality control procedures, 2826 valid responses were included. Climate change worry, anxiety and depressive symptoms, flourishing, and physical activity were assessed using the Climate Change Worry Scale (CCWS), the Patient Health Questionnaire-4 (PHQ-4), the Flourishing Scale (FS), and the Physical Activity Rating Scale-3 (PARS-3), respectively. Pearson correlations and conditional process analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro, with 5000 bootstrap samples. Results: Climate change worry was positively associated with anxiety and depressive symptoms (r = 0.331, p < 0.001) and negatively associated with flourishing (r = −0.193, p < 0.001). Anxiety and depressive symptoms were negatively associated with flourishing (r = −0.486, p < 0.001). The cross-sectional statistical indirect effect through anxiety and depressive symptoms was significant (indirect effect = −0.1277, 95% bootstrap CI: [−0.1441, −0.1123]). Physical activity was statistically associated with a weaker first-stage association between climate change worry and anxiety/depressive symptoms (B = −0.0014, p < 0.001; ΔR² = 0.0064). The index of moderated mediation was significant (0.0014, 95% bootstrap CI: [0.0008, 0.0020]). Conclusions: Climate change worry was statistically associated with lower flourishing, primarily through higher anxiety and depressive symptoms. Physical activity was associated with a weaker first-stage association, but the moderation effect was small in practical magnitude. Given the cross-sectional and self-report design, these findings should be interpreted as conditional statistical associations rather than causal or protective effects. Full article

We applied conversational robots in language learning, building on the previously developed Japanese repeating (shadowing) system for beginners in an applied foreign languages program at a northern Taiwan university. The previous system, designed to support after-class practice, served as the foundation for the present project. In this study, the system is extended to create an image-based vocabulary learning tool for Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Vietnamese. The design concepts, integration of visual prompts, and the potential of conversational agents in this study enhance multilingual vocabulary acquisition. To evaluate the system’s effectiveness, a group of student participants tested and validated the prototype, providing feedback on usability, learning support, and overall performance. Full article

Graduate students face increasing academic and psychological pressures, making it important to identify educational practices associated with their mental health. This study examined the association between labor education and graduate students’ mental health by constructing a moderated mediation model. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1283 full-time graduate students in Chinese universities. Structural equation modeling and PROCESS analyses were used to test the hypothesized relationships. The results showed that labor education was positively associated with graduate students’ mental health. Bootstrap analyses further supported three sequential mediation pathways: self-efficacy and psychological resilience, meaning in life and time management ability, and problem-solving ability and emotion regulation ability. These indirect pathways collectively account for approximately 40% of the total effect. In addition, supervisor support was found to strengthen the positive association between labor education and self-efficacy, while peer support strengthened the positive association between labor education and problem-solving ability. These findings suggest that labor education may function as a resource-building educational practice in graduate training and that academic social support may condition its association with students’ psychological and behavioral resources. This study contributes to research on graduate student well-being by linking labor education with psychological resources, cognitive appraisal, behavioral adaptation, and academic social support. Full article

Background: Even though South Korea had eliminated measles in 2006, a localized cluster of measles occurred in a university dormitory in Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea, in 2024, involving 22 international students. This study aims to explore measles transmission and to inform future preventive measures. Methods: In a cross-sectional study, 299 international students from two local universities underwent a self-reported questionnaire survey and targeted serological testing by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay two months after the cluster of measles cases. Statistical analysis used Pearson’s chi-square test, Fisher’s exact test, multivariate logistic regression, and Firth’s penalized logistic regression. Results: The overall seropositivity was 79.6%, and 78.0% among participants aged ≤30 years. Among multivariate analyses, nationality was independently associated with seropositivity (aOR up to 8.35 for Chinese students). Conclusions: These findings underscore the immunity gaps among international students, with seropositivity remaining below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity. Targeted serological screening and catch-up vaccination may help to improve immunity in mobile populations. Full article

Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly embedded in higher education, yet evidence on its implications for students’ academic engagement and psychological experiences remains mixed. One possible reason is that prior research has often focused on how much students use AI and their general confidence in task completion, while paying less attention to how they use AI and how they attribute AI-supported achievement. To address this gap, this study distinguishes reflective from thoughtless AI use, examines academic impostor syndrome as a self-evaluative mechanism linking AI use styles to academic engagement, and tests perceived AI policy clarity as a contextual moderator. A two-wave survey of 478 Chinese university students showed that reflective AI use was negatively associated with academic impostor syndrome, whereas thoughtless AI use showed the opposite pattern. Academic impostor syndrome, in turn, was negatively associated with engagement and mediated both pathways. Perceived AI policy clarity amplified these patterns. These findings suggest that GenAI integration should be understood not only as a question of adoption or efficiency, but also of interaction quality and competence attribution. The study highlights the importance of cultivating reflective AI literacy and developing institutional policies that are clear yet psychologically attuned to students’ self-evaluative concerns. Full article

As global education steps into a new era marked by core literacy and sustainable development, teacher literacy has become a critical pillar for fulfilling United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) and advancing Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Guided by the Educator Spirit and based on the logical framework of dual professional roles and four professional relationships, this study constructs a teacher literacy model for Chinese teachers in the new era, which consists of seven dimensions: disciplinary literacy, general literacy, learning support literacy, holistic education literacy, communication and collaboration literacy, development and improvement literacy, and teacher ethics literacy. Adopting systematic literature review and international comparative research methods, this study integrates mainstream international teacher literacy frameworks issued by the European Union, OECD, UNESCO, the United States and Australia with China’s educational policies and practical experience to establish the proposed model. It further elaborates how the model directs sustainability-oriented teacher education, facilitates transformative teaching approaches, boosts interdisciplinary teaching practice, highlights social justice and global citizenship awareness, and embeds sustainable development principles into curriculum design and teaching practice. This model can effectively tackle prevailing practical dilemmas including teachers’ weakened professional identity, vague professional development paths, unitary evaluation systems, inadequate digital teaching competence, insufficient interdisciplinary integration capacity, deficient ESD literacy and inefficient collaborative education mechanisms. It can systematically support teachers in carrying out sustainability-oriented teaching, innovating curriculum design, conducting transformative teaching and promoting students’ sustainable learning while practicing social justice and educational equity and cultivating global citizenship awareness in educational scenarios. It also provides a theoretical basis and practical guidance for promoting the transition of Chinese teachers toward high-quality, professional and sustainable development, and also offers localized solutions with distinctive Chinese characteristics and universal international implications for the implementation of global ESD initiatives and the achievement of SDG 4. Full article

Developing translation competence among non-English-major students at Chinese universities remains a pedagogical challenge, especially given the rising demands of cross-cultural communication. This quasi-experimental study examined whether first-year medical students at a Chinese university could improve their translation skills using the constructivist–objectivist theoretical approach (COTA), which combines constructivist learning theories (e.g., active student participation, collaboration, analysis of real-world issues) with objectivist learning methodologies (e.g., sequential skill development, explicit knowledge transfer). In total, 110 students participated in this mixed-methods study. The research methods included (a) pre- and post-tests of students using College English Test Band 4 criteria to evaluate vocabulary, grammar, and accuracy; (b) student perception surveys; (c) semi-structured interviews with instructors; and (d) classroom observations of students, using Gagné’s nine instructional events to ensure faithful implementation of the COTA framework. The COTA-trained students showed statistically significant improvements in translation skills compared to the control group. Additionally, increased student participation and engagement, positive attitudes toward learning, instructors’ ability to implement COTA effectively, and areas for future development were identified in the qualitative findings. These results suggest that integrating constructivist and objectivist teaching philosophies can benefit curriculum designers, language and translation instructors, and policymakers aiming to enhance translation education in Chinese universities and other Asia-Pacific institutions. However, the modest sample size from a single institution limits generalizability, and future studies with larger, more diverse samples are recommended. Full article

Background: University students often face significant psychological challenges and lifestyle disruptions that may compromise their mental resources and health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Although associations between physical activity (PA) and mental health have been widely reported, few studies have integrated different PA intensities, sedentary behavior, and psychological resources jointly related in one analytical model. Objective: This study investigated the relationships among vigorous (VPA), moderate (MPA), and light (LPA) physical activity, sedentary behavior (SB), resilience (RES), self-esteem (SE), and HRQoL in a sample of Chinese university students. Methods: A cross-sectional survey included 1560 university students from six universities in China, with a mean age of 19.43 ± 1.15 years; the sample comprised 434 males (27.8%) and 1126 females (72.2%). Relationships among the variables were tested using path analysis within a structural equation modeling framework. Results: Greater PA engagement was related to higher RES, SE, and HRQoL, whereas SB was not significantly associated with RES. All three PA intensities were positively associated with RES, although the magnitude of these associations varied. In addition, RES was also related to higher SE and HRQoL, and SE was related to higher HRQoL. Conclusions: These findings suggest that PA is associated with psychological resources and HRQoL among university students. Longitudinal and intervention studies are needed to determine the directionality and mechanisms underlying these relationships. Full article

Driven by Emerging Engineering Education and basic education reform, cultivating engineering literacy in pre-service teachers is vital for nurturing innovative talent. This qualitative multiple-case study examines current practices in nine leading Chinese normal universities, primarily through document analysis of institutional policies and curricula, supplemented by faculty interviews and a pre-service teacher survey in a subsample of institutions. Thematic analysis reveals prominent predicaments: a fragmented curriculum, monolithic training models, misaligned resources, and low student motivation. These issues stem from ambiguous conceptual positioning, weak institutional design, and a shortage of specialized faculty and platforms. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a systematic Four-in-One breakthrough framework encompassing Top-Level Design, Platform Foundation, Faculty Empowerment, and Project-Centric Cultivation. Central to this framework is a dual-track drive model, which integrates hands-on engineering practice with pedagogical application, enabling future teachers to develop engineering thinking and the competency to translate it into effective classroom teaching. While the proposed framework requires further empirical validation, this approach offers a theoretical and practical pathway for reconstructing teacher education and building a high-quality teaching workforce. Full article

Chinese universities are expanding outward, with more campuses now located on the urban fringe. Their boundaries are often open, and the surrounding land uses are mixed. This study examines four spatial attributes, edge definition, night-time lighting, visibility, and environmental maintenance, and how they relate to students’ perceived safety and environmental satisfaction. We draw on crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and the stimulus–organism–response (SOR) framework to develop a mediation model: spatial attributes are associated with satisfaction through perceived safety. Survey data were collected from 411 students across two suburban campuses and were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Visibility and environmental maintenance both strengthen perceived safety, whereas edge definition and night-time lighting do not exhibit significant effects. Perceived safety, in turn, strongly predicts environmental satisfaction and serves as a key design priority in rapidly urbanizing campus settings, and is further translated into reusable spatial design patterns for campus safety assessment and targeted environmental intervention, and may also inform broader discussions of urban wellbeing in suburban contexts. Full article

This study conceptualizes universities as socio-technical systems and investigates the efficiency dynamics of student cultivation processes in Chinese universities under the external shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Employing DEA-Malmquist and panel regression analysis of 40 Chinese universities from 2018 to 2022, we treat each institution as an integrated system of interrelated elements that collectively determine cultivation performance. Results indicate that while most institutions achieved optimal scale, their cultivation systems require improvement in pure technical efficiency and technological progress, suggesting performance depends more on internal configurations than resource volume. Regional analysis reveals that a higher proportion of eastern universities demonstrate lower systemic efficiency compared to central and western institutions, challenging assumptions about resource-rich environments automatically yielding superior system performance. Notably, no statistically significant direct pandemic impact on cultivation efficiency was identified, suggesting that efficiency patterns remained relatively stable during the pandemic period, which may reflect certain adaptive responses rather than direct evidence of systemic resilience through rapid reconfiguration of teaching and management processes. These findings imply that enhancing university cultivation systems requires targeted interventions in internal management structures and systemic integration of technological innovations, contributing to understanding how higher education systems respond to environmental perturbations and informing the design of resilient educational institutions. Full article

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping higher education by changing how students access knowledge, complete academic tasks and engage in innovation. At the same time, unequal access to AI-related competencies may reproduce existing educational inequalities, which raises important concerns for Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4). Drawing on cultural capital theory and research on digital inequality, this study examines whether family cultural capital is associated with university students’ innovative capacity through AI literacy. In this study, AI literacy is defined as students’ ability to understand, evaluate and use AI critically and responsibly across different contexts. Survey data were collected from 1020 Chinese university students and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with split-sample validation. The results indicated that family cultural capital remained significantly associated with innovative capacity although its two dimensions operated differently. Cultural resources had a significant direct effect on innovative capacity and also positively predicted technical application skills but not awareness of the social impact of AI. Embodied cultural capital did not have a significant direct effect on innovative capacity, but its total effect was significant, and it positively predicted both dimensions of AI literacy. Mediation analysis further showed that technical application skills significantly mediated the relationship between both dimensions of family cultural capital and innovative capacity, whereas awareness of the social impact of AI did not show a significant mediating effect. These findings suggest that family cultural capital continues to matter in the AI era not only through direct advantage but also through its conversion into AI-related competencies. The study highlights the need for higher education institutions to strengthen equitable support for practical AI capability development in order to promote inclusive innovation and advance SDG 4. Full article