Search Results (4)

This paper addresses the current state of civic education legislation in higher education. While state-level legislation that aims to improve civics in colleges and universities in the United States is laudable, such laws run the risk of meeting students too late and so must be coupled with renewed legislative focus on civic education at the elementary and secondary level. Civic education aims to make good citizens, to cultivate students’ love of their country, and this may be difficult to effect by the time students reach college. Laws mandating and forbidding certain content from being taught in history and civics classes is also considered. Further, I aim to show the deleterious effect an impoverished civic education has on liberal education, drawing, principally, on lessons from Socrates’s understanding of education as we find it in the writing of Plato. Full article

Serious concerns have been raised over the consistent academic underperformance of Yemeni students at almost all levels of university studies. This paper investigates the impact of various socioeconomic factors on the academic performance of engineering students in Taiz State, Yemen, an impoverished and unstable society. Our quantitative methodology employed a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire and targeted 596 female/male students from three engineering colleges in Taiz State. Data were analyzed using SPSS software and simple and multiple regression models to examine the impact of socioeconomic variables on academic achievement while moderating financial condition and gender. This study measured academic achievement through GPAs, student attendance, and English level. Many socioeconomic influences have been examined against academic performance, such as gender, family income, family stability, family openness, marital status, co-education, part-time jobs, and stimulant use. The results accurately specified that students’ gender considerably impacts the studied variables; moreover, low-income features of families negatively affect students’ academic performance. The outcome of this study indicated that socioeconomic variables matched well with GPA, attendance rate, and English level, but with higher matching to the attendance rate. This study highlights that university students in impoverished and unstable societies, like Yemen, are significantly affected by socioeconomic factors. It recommends coordinated efforts among government authorities, educational institutions, and community leaders to mitigate the negative impact on academic achievement and implement appropriate technologies to enhance performance. Additionally, conducting similar studies in other disciplines and communities within the country is recommended for a deeper understanding of this issue. Full article

We explored the mediating effect of social support and loneliness in the relationships between perceived discrimination and suicidal ideation among impoverished Chinese college students. Using the convenience cluster sampling method, we chose a total of 964 impoverished college students from a central province of China. Students completed the cross-sectional survey using the Perceived Discrimination Questionnaire, the Social Support Rating Scale, the University of California at Los Angeles Loneliness Scale, and the Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation. Correlation analysis and structural equation modeling analysis were conducted to clarify the relationships between study variables. Correlation analysis showed that perceived discrimination, loneliness, and suicidal ideation were positively correlated with each other; social support was negatively correlated with perceived discrimination, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. In addition, structural equation modeling analysis indicated that perceived discrimination had a direct positive effect on suicidal ideation; social support and loneliness partially mediated the relationship between perceived discrimination and suicidal ideation. Specifically, perceived discrimination was positively associated with suicidal ideation via social support and loneliness separately, and had a serial association through both social support and loneliness. Thus, perceived discrimination may have influenced suicidal ideation through both social support and loneliness. Full article

In recent years, live webcast classes have been increasingly used in China as an approach to alleviating educational poverty through equal access to high-quality education. Many schools in impoverished areas have managed to increase their proportions of students entering college by introducing the new model. While celebrating improved learning outcomes of a small percentage of students, educators should also be concerned about the overall academic wellbeing and sustainable development of less successful students. In the present study, academic wellbeing was conceptualized as a multidimensional construct covering seven dimensions, namely Empathy, Support, Responsiveness, Reliability, Tangibility, Self-efficacy and Buoyancy. Data were collected from 136 twelfth-grade students who had studied in live webcast classes. The results show that the overall academic wellbeing in live webcast classes was consistent among students of different academic performance levels, but the specific dimensions of academic wellbeing that they think mostly need improvement varied among different student groups. The findings of this study suggest that learner wellbeing and sustainability can be enhanced by closer collaboration between live webcast instructors and local teachers in instructional materials design, exercise and test questions’ compilation, as well as students’ self-study facilitation. The degree to which a local teacher should be involved in classroom teaching depends on the students’ academic level and learning needs. Full article