Search Results (150)

Teachers of middle school students (young adolescents) view students positively, build relationships, design curriculum, and create learning environments for them. As a college student transitions to a student teacher (or preservice teacher) in the classroom, the student teacher’s identity is being formed and developed while working with adolescents who are forming and exploring their own identities. Developing a middle level student teacher identity is a complex negotiation between the student teacher’s history and identity as a learner. In addition, they must adhere to university and school district policies and procedures while in middle schools. The transition to student teaching is the catalyst for professional identity development, prompting students to reflect on who they were and who they want to become as middle school teachers and professionals. The term preservice teacher is broadly defined as a university student enrolled in a teacher preparation program, actively seeking certification, and engaged in learning the craft of teaching through field-based learning. Preservice teachers or student teachers are developing the professional knowledge, skills, and abilities needed before officially entering the profession. Preservice teacher development typically progresses through three stages: early candidacy, mid-candidacy, and late candidacy, moving from acquiring foundational theories to advancing pedagogical skills, engaging in authentic classroom practice, and designing standards-based lesson plans. In this manuscript, preservice teacher and student teacher are used interchangeably and refer specifically to the late candidacy stage. This Encyclopedia entry will highlight the complex development of middle level preservice teachers’ identity as they learn to bridge their personal and (pre) professional selves, using the terms student teacher, preservice teacher, or middle level preservice teacher (MLPST), which will be used interchangeably. Full article

Attention problems may compromise child development, learning, behavioral regulation, and school adjustment. The preschool years are an important period for early identification because attentional control develops rapidly and supports the transition to formal schooling. Existing assessment approaches, however, provide limited information about how attentional regulation unfolds during ongoing behavior. This non-systematic narrative review synthesizes evidence from preschool attention assessment, graphomotor development, digital handwriting, and measurement theory using a targeted, concept-driven approach. No systematic literature search or formal study-selection protocol was employed. It proposes pen-based graphomotor attention measurement (PGAM) as a measurement-development framework for examining how children select relevant information, maintain task goals, monitor movement, and correct deviations during graphomotor activity. PGAM links theoretically specified attentional demands and continuous pen-trajectory data to dynamic patterns of engagement, maintenance, disruption, and recovery during goal-directed behavior. Available evidence supports the technical feasibility of digital graphomotor recording and suggests associations between attention-related functioning and graphomotor organization. Future studies should first establish the reliability and developmental calibration of PGAM. Subsequent work should evaluate construct and incremental validity and decision utility to determine whether these process measures can support attention-specific interpretation and potential screening use. Full article

The transition from school to work represents a key developmental challenge during adolescence. Career resources—personal, social, and identity-related factors that support career orientation and preparation—are crucial for navigating this transition. From a resilience perspective, the question arises under which risk and protective conditions such resources develop, are maintained, or are jeopardized. This study examines the relationship between psychosocial difficulties, a career-orientation-focused Positive Peer Culture (PPC) intervention, and the development of career resources. The study used a quasi-experimental pre-post design with an intervention and a control group. The sample consisted of 234 lower secondary school students from regular and special education schools who participated at both measurement points. Career resources were assessed with the Career Resources Questionnaire, and psychosocial difficulties with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Linear regression analyses were conducted while controlling for baseline values and relevant sociodemographic variables. Exploratory subscale analyses and a process evaluation of the PPC group meetings were also conducted. The results showed no significant overall effect of the PPC intervention on career resources. However, psychosocial difficulties at baseline were a significant negative predictor of career resources in ninth grade. At the subscale level, an association with “Importance of Work in Life,” reflecting a motivational and value-related aspect of career development, emerged at the unadjusted level; however, this association did not remain statistically significant after correction for multiple testing and should therefore be considered exploratory. The process evaluation indicated predominantly positive group experiences, particularly collaborative problem-solving and mutual support, but also challenges regarding participation and implementation within the school schedule. The findings highlight the relevance of psychosocial difficulties for career development and suggest that the role of peer-based social support in career preparation warrants further investigation. Full article

Vocational rehabilitation (VR) plays an important role in supporting successful school-to-work transitions for individuals with intellectual disabilities (IDs). However, the organizational conditions that enable effective implementation of VR practices remain insufficiently understood. Because participation outcomes among individuals with ID are influenced by interactions between intellectual functioning, adaptive abilities, and environmental supports, examining organizational implementation capacity provides an important systems-level perspective. This study examined professionals’ perceptions of organizational implementation capacity for VR during secondary transition in Saudi Arabia and explored differences according to institutional and professional characteristics. A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 89 professionals working in government secondary school programs and specialized education centers in Al-Kharj, Saudi Arabia. Participants completed the Vocational Rehabilitation Implementation Capacity Measure (VRICM), a context-specific, theoretically informed measure developed for this study. The VRICM examines four theoretically derived areas: Support and Related Services, Vocational Preparation Services, Collaborative Planning, and Workplace-Based Training. We conducted descriptive statistics and nonparametric group comparisons. Overall perceived organizational implementation capacity was moderate (M = 3.25, SD = 0.95). Support and Related Services and Vocational Preparation Services received higher ratings than Collaborative Planning and Workplace-Based Training. Differences were observed according to institutional sector and professional experience. Findings provide preliminary evidence regarding organizational factors supporting VR implementation within a Saudi Arabian secondary-city context. Further psychometric evaluation of the VRICM, including structural validity assessment, is required before broader application. Full article

Explicit gender stereotypes are shifting toward neutrality, yet how widely a stereotype is endorsed and how consistently it appears across domains within those who endorse it are separable properties of a stereotype climate. The same Romanian adults, parents alongside teachers and school counsellors (N = 121), reported gender-stereotyped beliefs about children’s play and traits in the abstract, together with two applied judgements: gender-differentiated educational expectations and gender suitability of occupations. Stereotyped judgement covaried across all three domains, substantially among parents and moderately among teachers. This cross-domain covariation indexes consistency within respondents rather than a common latent construct, which the confirmatory models did not support. Stereotyping was voiced more strongly as abstract belief than in either applied domain. Explicitly gender-typing occupations was a minority position, yet those who did so held the strongest beliefs, a concentration that direction-cancelling coding rendered undetectable. Because gendered channelling is concentrated rather than diffuse, awareness work is better targeted than universal and better timed before high-stakes transitions such as allocation to high-school tracks. Teachers resembled parents, suggesting professional training does not by itself displace such judgement. Where access is no longer the binding constraint, monitoring that tracks only how prevalent gender bias is will miss what remains coherent in a shrinking minority. Full article

Sustainable development depends on whether emerging economies can convert foreign direct investment (FDI) into durable, knowledge-based capabilities rather than transient, low-skill employment. This paper asks how FDI catalyzes sustainable human-capital formation and whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) can help build the institutions that underpin a knowledge-economy transition. Using a single-equation instrumental-variables (2SLS) model for human-capital formation, with secondary-school enrolment as the dependent variable over 46 annual observations for Morocco (1975–2020), we find a positive and statistically significant FDI effect (β = 0.0029 per million USD of FDI inflow, p = 0.006), robust in sign and significance across OLS, 2SLS, and Dynamic OLS specifications. The result is consistent with a skill-demand channel through which knowledge-intensive MNEs are associated with higher private and social returns to education and with increased targeted public and private training investment. Sectoral evidence from Morocco’s aerospace and automotive clusters shows enrolment in vocationally oriented program growing 312% between 2005 and 2022, concentrated in curricula co-designed with foreign investors. Communications infrastructure carries a positive and significant coefficient across all four estimators but loses significance once urbanization is added as a control, so we do not treat it as a confirmed independent channel, while public education expenditure carries a negative and significant coefficient that is not stable in sign under Fully Modified OLS, indicating that its independent contribution is not well identified with the present instrument set. We interpret these findings through a sustainability lens, linking the mechanism to Sustainable Development Goals 4 (quality education), 8 (decent work and growth) and 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), and we specify three boundary conditions—skill specificity, investor commitment, and state coordination capacity—and argue that the mechanism should be expected to transfer to other developing economies, including in the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa, only where these conditions co-occur, rather than as a general claim. The study advances the literature on MNE-led institutional co-creation and offers policy guidance for designing FDI strategies that support inclusive, sustainable knowledge-economy development across the MENA region and sub-Saharan Africa. Full article

Newcomer youths (i.e., young immigrants, refugees, international students) represent a growing community across Canada, and their transition into school systems is critical to their wellbeing. School integration represents a novel vantage point by which to explore the immigration experiences of newcomer youth who are adjusting to student life. Service providers (e.g., administrative staff, guidance counsellors, settlement workers, etc.) are critical partakers in the school integration of newcomer youth. This qualitative study employed a social constructionist perspective and an integrated social justice lens. The central research questions guiding this inquiry included (1) How do participants understand newcomer youths’ experiences of school integration? And (2) What are the ways in which participants support newcomer students in high schools? In-depth, semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted with six service providers in one designated high school. A thematic analysis led to the development of five salient themes: (1) supporting academic needs, (2) life outside of school, (3) mental health concerns, (4) connections in school, and (5) gaps in the education system. Results of this study highlight the larger systemic issues that continue to impede the experiences of newcomer youth in schools. Implications for service providers working with newcomer youth in schools are presented. Full article

Rapid innovation-driven transitions have, across successive eras, been associated with increased psychological distress, substance use, and suicide when social and economic change outpaces the adaptive capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, and governments. The early artificial intelligence (AI) economy is emerging at an unprecedented pace, reshaping education, employment, and social organization in ways that may intensify these risks, particularly among young people. This perspective argues that school-based mental health nursing, working collaboratively with school psychologists, counsellors, physicians, and other interdisciplinary professionals, represents a practical upstream response to AI-era disruption. Drawing on historical evidence from the Industrial Revolution, population mental health research, and the contemporary mental health nursing literature, the paper examines the mechanisms through which rapid socio-economic change may contribute to psychological distress and substance-use problems. It further distinguishes AI as both a source of socio-economic disruption and a clinical tool that can support—but not replace—relationship-based nursing practice. Strengthening school-based mental health nursing within interdisciplinary systems offers a practical, prevention-oriented strategy to promote resilience, facilitate early intervention, and mitigate downstream mental health and substance-use harms during the AI transition. Full article

Citizenship education in engineering programs has become a topic of growing concern due to the social, environmental, and technological impacts of engineers’ professional practice. However, there is a lack of systematized information about trends and gaps in the academic literature in this area, which hinders the work of researchers, educators, and academic administrators. Therefore, this study examined the academic literature of the last thirty years (1996–2025) in four major scientific databases (WoS Core Collection, Scopus, SciELO, and Dialnet Plus). A systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA method, which allowed the selection of the articles (n = 74). These articles were then examined through qualitative thematic analysis. Additionally, descriptive frequencies of the corpus were identified, allowing for more precise contextualization. The results show a growing, albeit concentrated, field amidst an incipient transition from a dominant individualistic approach to a critical-democratic one. Furthermore, several significant gaps in the literature were identified, pointing to new research directions. Finally, the implications of these results for engineering schools are presented. Full article

Countries face interconnected policy challenges: population aging, fertility change, migration, urbanization, labor transitions, food and water security, climate risk, health-system demand, school planning, housing pressure, consumption planning, and spatial inequality. Yet planning evidence is often fragmented across ministries, statistical offices, surveys, administrative systems, research projects, and dashboards. This paper proposes the Population-Based Systems Model, or PopSyM, as a country-owned analytical infrastructure that places population dynamics at the center of integrated policy planning. PopSyM begins with a demographic spine by age, sex, location, year, and scenario, then links that spine to modules for health, education, food, labor, housing, social protection, environment, and local infrastructure. Its purpose is not projection for its own sake, but the measurement and improvement of population well-being: longer and healthier lives, adequate material conditions, skills, meaningful work, security, dignity, and country-specific dimensions of a good life. Nepal is used as a motivating example, but the proposed architecture is general. The paper argues that the population should be treated not only as a denominator for indicators but also as the organizing framework through which countries understand future demand, vulnerability, consumption needs, policy trade-offs, and feedback between people and systems. Full article

Playground safety for preschool and early elementary school children has become an increasingly important issue for families and local communities. In semi-open playground environments, direct supervision by caregivers is often difficult, while conventional positioning approaches may be costly, infrastructure-dependent, or unreliable due to frequent signal obstructions. This study presents an integrated low-cost monitoring system that combines commercial BLE beacons, a single smart device installed in the playground, a push-notification server, and a caregiver smartphone application to detect children’s entrance and exit events and visualize their playground usage logs. Rather than proposing a new localization algorithm, the main contribution of this work is the practical system integration and field validation of BLE-based entrance/exit detection in semi-open playground settings. The smart device continuously scans beacon RSSI values, applies Kalman-filter-based smoothing and threshold-based state transitions, and transmits detected events to the server, where daily, weekly, and monthly statistics are generated and visualized for caregivers. Field experiments conducted at five real playgrounds showed that the proposed system achieved over 99% entrance/exit detection accuracy with an average response time of less than 7 s. These results demonstrate that reliable playground entry/exit monitoring can be implemented at low cost, with simple infrastructure and practical deployment in residential environments. Full article

The global transition toward net-zero emissions has led to the restructuring of labor markets and an intensification of the demand for sustainability-competent business graduates. However, higher-education curricula lack an operationalized, job-competency-based framework, and this gap in knowledge is especially acute in emerging industrial economies that are facing pressures due to the ongoing decarbonization of the global supply chain. In this context, this study addresses two interrelated gaps in the relevant research: the lack of a structured system of criteria to assess competency in sustainability that is specifically geared toward business education, and the insufficient attention that has been paid to causal interdependencies among such criteria in previously developed frameworks. The authors apply a two-stage, hybrid multiple-criteria decision-making design based on the KSAO framework, which classifies professional competency into knowledge (K), skills (S), abilities (A), and other characteristics (O). A modified Delphi method that involved 12 academic and industry experts serving as surrogate assessors of competency requirements for business and management students was first used to consolidate 142 literature-derived items into 26 initial criteria, which were then refined into 12 core competencies in sustainability, identified through cross-domain expert consensus. Following this, fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) was applied to analyze the structure of causal influence among the retained criteria. The results identified interdisciplinary work as the primary driving competency and integrated problem-solving as the central hub with the highest prominence, with the two factors forming a bidirectional feedback dynamic that anchored the competency system. The retention of four “other” criteria (O-dimension)—ethical values, normative orientation, empathy, and adaptive resilience—confirmed that competency concerning sustainability in business education extends beyond technical knowledge into deeper dispositional attributes. These findings provide business schools in Taiwan with a structurally grounded logic of sequencing for their curricula, as well as a reference framework for curriculum design that is aligned with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Societal Impact standards. While the findings are grounded in Taiwan’s specific ESG regulatory and industrial context, only the methodological approach is offered as a reference for comparable settings; the substantive findings require cross-national verification. Full article

The transformation of the world of work, driven by economic and social change, technological advances, digitalization, and new working environments, has highlighted the importance of soft skills in vocational education and training (VET). In this context, workplace internships constitute a key setting for their development and assessment. This systematic review analyzes the recent literature on transferable skills in VET and their relationship with work-based learning environments. Following PRISMA guidelines, searches were conducted in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. After applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, 26 studies were selected from 1114 records. Findings reveal international consensus regarding the importance of communication, teamwork, problem-solving, and socio-emotional skills for labor market integration. However, a gap persists between workplace demands and training practices. Although active methodologies and integrated learning models show promising results, important limitations remain regarding competency assessment, school-company coordination, and teacher preparation. The review also identifies research gaps, particularly the scarcity of longitudinal studies and validated instruments for assessing transferable skills in authentic VET contexts. Finally, the findings highlight the need for integrated school-company collaboration models that support more consistent assessment and professional development among students. Full article

Introduction: Medical care for transgender minors is understudied, largely because these forms of care are relatively recent. The primary objective of this work was to describe the cohort of transgender adolescents who initiated follow-up at the Strasbourg University Hospital before the age of 18, whether or not they began hormone therapy prior to reaching adulthood. Method: This was an observational, retrospective, single-center, descriptive study conducted among adolescents who had attended at least one consultation in our center before the age of 18 between January 2017 and March 2024. Results: Our population consisted of 115 patients predominantly made up of transmasculine (AFAB) adolescents (68%). Compared with the general population, we observed significantly higher rates of psychiatric co-occurrences, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Only 46.1% initiated gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) in our cohort, and just 34.8% before age 18. A total of 6% of adolescents received puberty blockers as monotherapy. The mean age at GAHT initiation was 16.99 years. Transition pathways appear to differ according to the adolescent’s type of schooling. The rate of retransition/treatment interruption in our sample ranged from 0% to 6.1%, depending on the criteria applied. We did not identify any adolescent who retransitioned to their sex assigned at birth after starting GAHT by the end of the data collection. Discussion: The high prevalence of psychiatric co-occurrences raises important questions regarding how to improve care for these adolescents. The predominance of AFAB adolescents similarly prompts reflection on the barriers that transfeminine adolescents may face when seeking to transition before adulthood. In addition, the substantial number of adolescents presenting with ASD or ADHD underscores the need for particular vigilance regarding their specific needs and overall well-being. Finally, the variability in retransition rates depending on the criteria applied highlights the absence of a consensual definition, which limits the comparability and validity of existing studies. Conclusions: Long-term prospective studies are needed to objectively demonstrate the effectiveness of current transition pathways. Academic research in this field should be strengthened, along with the development of larger prospective datasets, to improve the overall health of this population. Full article

Systemic educational change in Colombia refers to coordinated transformation across policy, teaching, curriculum, assessment, school leadership, teacher professionalization, data use, and community participation, oriented toward improving learning quality, equity, citizenship, and transitions to further study and work. This entry treats systemic change as a continuous, context-sensitive process rather than as a single reform event. Its success depends on the alignment of national direction, territorial implementation, institutional capacity, teacher agency, family and community engagement, and reliable feedback on whether students are developing the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and opportunities needed for social and labor participation. Full article