Search Results (308)

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in education offers novel opportunities to enhance critical thinking while also posing challenges to independent cognitive development. In particular, Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) in education aims to enhance human experience by providing a supportive and collaborative learning environment. Rather than replacing the educator, HCAI serves as a tool that empowers both students and teachers, fostering critical thinking and autonomy in learning. This study investigates the potential for AI to become a collaborative partner that assists learning and enriches academic engagement. The research was conducted during the 2024–2025 winter semester within the Pedagogical and Teaching Sufficiency Program offered by the Audio and Visual Arts Department, Ionian University, Corfu, Greece. The research employs a hybrid ethnographic methodology that blends digital interactions—where students use AI tools to create artistic representations—with physical classroom engagement. Data was collected through student projects, reflective journals, and questionnaires, revealing that structured dialog with AI not only facilitates deeper critical inquiry and analytical reasoning but also induces a state of flow, characterized by intense focus and heightened creativity. The findings highlight a dialectic between individual agency and collaborative co-agency, demonstrating that while automated AI responses may diminish active cognitive engagement, meaningful interactions can transform AI into an intellectual partner that enriches the learning experience. These insights suggest promising directions for future pedagogical strategies that balance digital innovation with traditional teaching methods, ultimately enhancing the overall quality of education. Furthermore, the study underscores the importance of integrating reflective practices and adaptive frameworks to support evolving student needs, ensuring a sustainable model. Full article

Providing inclusive education and engaging all students in reading and writing activities presents an ongoing challenge for teachers, not necessarily resolved by implementing digital technology. This study addresses the need to better understand teacher competencies within the digitally infused classroom, specifically in relation to inclusive education and reading and writing practices. The study investigates the competencies and supportive strategies of middle school teachers who perceive themselves as successful in this area. The study employs the Delphi technique, using iterative surveys through which these teachers describe and rate aspects of their competencies and strategies. The results are analyzed through a modified version of the Technological, Pedagogical, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework, with particular attention to how teachers support students using their content knowledge and digital competency. Findings reveal a range of strategies and competency aspects related to both proactive accessibility and reactive individualization, using a variety of digital tools and text modalities. The teachers describe a dual orientation in their ability to curiously explore digital tools while simultaneously being able to critically appraise their usefulness. The findings contribute insights on what can support teachers when collaboratively developing knowledge of local practices and their agency in relation to available digital tools. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally disrupted assumptions about entrepreneurship, career planning, and professional development. This study explored how the pandemic influenced the entrepreneurial intentions of undergraduate business students in the United States. Using a qualitative methodology based on in-depth interviews with 31 students at a public Midwestern university, the research interpreted student narratives through the lenses of effectuation theory, resilience theory, and the theory of planned behavior. Findings revealed that many participants reframed entrepreneurship as a strategy for navigating economic uncertainty and enhancing personal agency. Students reported valuing adaptability, resourcefulness, and opportunity recognition, often experimenting with side hustles during the pandemic as a means of resilience. Their entrepreneurial thinking shifted from purely economic motivations toward aspirations for flexibility, self-fulfillment, and purposeful work. The study highlights the formative role of crisis contexts in shaping entrepreneurial identity among emerging professionals. It suggests that entrepreneurship education should move beyond traditional models, fostering skills for navigating complexity and building resilience. In doing so, the findings contribute to broader conversations about youth entrepreneurship, post-pandemic career development, and the evolving demands of the labor market in times of disruption. Full article

Oral tradition stories hold a vital place in language education, offering rich repositories of linguistic, cultural, and historical knowledge. In the Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) context, their inclusion provides dynamic opportunities to explore diversity, foster critical and creative thinking, and challenge dominant epistemologies. Despite their pedagogical potential, these narratives remain largely absent from formal curricula, with most SFL textbooks still privileging canonical works, particularly those from the Latin American Boom or European literary texts. This article aims to provide practical guidance for SFL instructors on designing effective, culturally responsive materials for the teaching of vocabulary. Drawing on a methodological framework for material design and a cognitive approach to vocabulary learning, I present original pedagogical material based on a Colombian oral tradition story about the witches of La Jagua (Huila, Colombia) to inspire educators to integrate oral tradition stories into their classrooms. As argued throughout, oral narratives not only support vocabulary acquisition and intercultural competence but also offer students meaningful engagement with the values, worldviews, and linguistic diversity that shape Colombian culture. This approach redefines language teaching through a more descriptive, contextualized, and culturally grounded lens, equipping learners with pragmatic, communicative, and intercultural skills essential for the 21st century. My goal with this article is to advocate for teacher agency in material creation, emphasizing that educators are uniquely positioned to design pedagogical resources that reflect their own cultural realities and local knowledge and to adapt them meaningfully to their students’ needs. Full article

This study proposes an interdisciplinary instructional model tailored for Functional Ecological Carbon (FEC) education, combining Electronic, Mobilize, and Ubiquitous (E/M/U) learning principles with the Practical Transformational Teaching Method (PTtM). The research adopts a mixed-methods framework, utilizing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize teaching objectives and interpret student evaluations, alongside qualitative insights from reflective journals, open-ended surveys, and focus group discussions. The results indicate that hands-on experience, interdisciplinary collaboration, and context-aware applications play a critical role in fostering ecological awareness and responsibility among students. Notably, modules such as biosafety testing and water purification prompted transformative engagement with sustainability issues. The study contributes to sustainability education by integrating a decision-analytic structure with reflective learning and intelligent instructional strategies. The proposed model provides valuable implications for educators and policymakers designing interdisciplinary sustainability curricula in smart learning environments. Full article

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence (AI) in education means that students need to master both AI literacy and personal agency. This study situates a sample of 425 Slovenian secondary technical students within a three-tier framework that maps psychological empowerment onto AI literacy outcomes within a cultural–historical activity system. The agency competence assessments yielded four profiles of student agency, ranging from fully empowered to largely disempowered. The cluster membership explained significant additional variance in AI literacy scores, supporting the additive empowerment model in an AI-rich vocational education and training context. The predictive modeling revealed that while self-efficacy, mastery-oriented motivations, and metacognitive self-regulation contributed uniquely—though small—to improving AI literacy, an unexpectedly negative relationship was identified for internal locus of control and for behavioral self-regulation focused narrowly on routines, with no significant impact observed for grit-like perseverance. These findings underscore the importance of fostering reflective, mastery-based, and self-evaluative learning dispositions over inflexible or solely routine-driven strategies in the development of AI literacy. Addressing these nuanced determinants may also be vital in narrowing AI literacy gaps observed between diverse disciplinary cohorts, as supported by recent multi-dimensional literacy frameworks and disciplinary pathway analyses. Embedding autonomy-supportive, mastery-oriented, student-centered projects and explicit metacognitive training into AI curricula could shift control inward and benefit students with low skills, helping to forge an agency-driven pathway to higher levels of AI literacy among high school students. The most striking and unexpected finding of this study is that students with a strong sense of competence—manifested as high self-efficacy—can achieve foundational AI literacy levels equivalent to those possessing broader, more holistic agentic profiles, suggesting that competence alone may be sufficient for acquiring essential AI knowledge. This challenges prevailing models that emphasize a multidimensional approach to agency and has significant implications for designing targeted interventions and curricula to rapidly build AI literacy in diverse learner populations. Full article

This article presents a structured review of literature published between 2015 and 2025 on the experiences of rural LGBTQIA+ youth. Using targeted search terms—including “LGBT*,” “rural,” “country,” “young people,” “sexual and gender minority (SGM),” “small town,” “youth,” and “students”—a research team identified 26 peer-reviewed articles that met inclusion criteria. Through team-based thematic analysis, six core themes emerged: (1) gaps in intersectional analysis, (2) mental health outcomes, (3) culturally responsive services and resources, (4) community climate and context, (5) experiences of victimization, and (6) policy. Across these themes, the review highlights the resilience, agency, and strength of LGBTQIA+ youth navigating rural environments. The literature consistently demonstrates how experiences of victimization are closely linked to mental health outcomes, while access to social support—particularly from affirming adults in systems (such as schools)—can mitigate harm and foster well-being. Implications for social work research, practice, and policy are discussed, with an emphasis on supporting LGBTQIA+ youth in U.S. Southern rural settings. Full article

Current research predominantly involves human subjects to evaluate AI creativity. In this explorative study, we questioned the validity of this practice and examined how creator–assessor (dis)similarity—namely to what extent the creator and the assessor were alike—along two dimensions of culture (Western and English-speaking vs. Eastern and Chinese-speaking) and agency (human vs. AI) influences the assessment of creativity. We first asked four types of subjects to create stories, including Eastern participants (university students from China), Eastern AI (Kimi from China), Western participants (university students from The Netherlands), and Western AI (ChatGPT 3.5 from the US). Both Eastern participants and AI created stories in Chinese, which were then translated into English, while both Western participants and AI created stories in English, which were then translated into Chinese. A subset of these stories (2 creative and 2 uncreative per creator type, in total 16 stories) was then randomly selected as assessment materials. Adopting a within-subject design, we then asked new subjects from the same four types (n = 120, 30 per type) to assess these stories on creativity, originality, and appropriateness. The results confirmed that similarities in both dimensions of culture and agency influence the assessment of originality and appropriateness. As for the agency dimension, human assessors preferred human-created stories for originality, while AI assessors showed no preference. Conversely, AI assessors rated AI-generated stories higher in appropriateness, whereas human assessors showed no preference. Culturally, both Eastern and Western assessors favored Eastern-created stories in originality. And as for appropriateness, the assessors always preferred stories from the creators with the same cultural backgrounds. The present study is significant in attempting to ask an often-overlooked question and provides the first empirical evidence to underscore the need for more discussion on using humans to judge AI agents’ creativity or the other way around. Full article

Background/Objectives: This study assessed teacher self-efficacy in school-based asthma management in two southern states in the United States. Current literature focuses primarily on supporting school-based asthma management, but few studies have focused on teacher self-efficacy in the asthma management process. Methods: With data collected from a two-state survey of a randomly selected group of teachers in grades kindergarten to grade eight (n = 379), teachers’ demographic variables, general opinions about asthma management practices, and their self-perceptions on the Teacher Asthma Management and Information Seeking Scale, which assesses self-efficacy, were examined. Results: Teachers’ self-efficacy in managing asthma and seeking information was significantly higher among teachers who had completed in-service professional learning sessions and those who had access to community resources or links to community agencies. Additionally, teachers with personal experience of chronic illness, asthma, or allergies and those who had students with chronic illnesses in their classrooms reported higher self-efficacy scores. Conclusions: Findings suggest that providing professional learning about asthma for teachers, offering access to asthma action plans and community resources, and increasing awareness of chronic conditions and training for handling medical emergencies can enhance teachers’ self-efficacy and improve outcomes for students with chronic illnesses. Full article

This systematic literature review examines how artificial intelligence (AI)-integrated tools are being used to scaffold writing instruction for K-12 English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students, with a particular focus on preserving student agency and creativity. Drawing from sociocultural and cognitive theories of writing, this study synthesizes findings from 14 peer-reviewed empirical studies published between 2018 and 2024. Studies were analyzed using a thematic synthesis approach to identify how AI tools function as cognitive supports, creative collaborators, and language enhancement systems. The results reveal that AI tools, when implemented thoughtfully, can reduce cognitive load, foster ideation, and support self-regulated learning without undermining student autonomy. Three major categories of AI scaffolding emerged, i.e., cognitive support tools (e.g., grammar correction, idea organization), creative support systems (e.g., story generation, narrative feedback), and language enhancement tools (e.g., vocabulary expansion, stylistic refinement). Key themes include the importance of balancing AI support with student decision making, aligning tool use with theoretical models, and ensuring equitable access. Limitations in the current literature include short-term study durations, a lack of standardized metrics for creativity and agency, and the predominance of research in EFL contexts. Future research should expand on ESL settings, adopt rigorous methodologies, and explore long-term impacts on writing development. Full article

In health professions education, the hidden curriculum is a set of implicit rules and expectations about how clinicians act and what they value. In fields that are very homogenous, such as rehabilitation professions, these expectations may have outsized impacts on students from minoritized backgrounds. This qualitative study examined the hidden curriculum in rehabilitation graduate programs—speech-language pathology, occupational therapy, and physical therapy—through the perspectives and experiences of 21 students from minoritized backgrounds. Semi-structured interviews explored their experiences with their programs’ hidden curricula. These revealed expectations about ways of being, interacting, and relating. Three overarching themes emerged, each reflecting tensions between conflicting values: (i) blend in but stand out; (ii) success lies in individualism, while de-prioritizing the individual; and (iii) fix the field, using your identities as a tool. When the expectations aligned with students’ expectations for themselves, meeting them was a source of pride. However, when the social expectations clashed with their own culture, dis/ability, gender, or neurotype, these tensions became an additional cognitive burden, and they rarely received mentorship for navigating it. Health professions programs might benefit from fostering students’ critical reflection on their hidden curricula and their fields’ cultural norms to foster greater belonging, agency, and identity retention. Full article

In an era of increasing digital transformation in education, fostering students’ intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning (SDL) is essential, particularly in dynamic fields such as Computer Science Education (CSE). This study explores whether the co-creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) as renewable assessments can enhance intrinsic motivation and support SDL among postgraduate students. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory, social constructivism, and established SDL models, this research adopted a qualitative, phenomenological design. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with BEd Honours students who completed an OER co-creation project as part of their final assessment. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis revealed five core themes: ownership and confidence, personal growth and SDL development, collaboration and connection, motivation and engagement, and challenges and problem solving. The findings suggest that, when students are given autonomy, purpose, and the opportunity to contribute meaningfully, they experience deeper engagement, stronger SDL skills, and a greater sense of academic agency. Informal peer interaction and scaffolded support further enhanced their learning. This study contributes to the growing evidence that open pedagogical practices, particularly renewable assessments, can transform academic culture by positioning students as active participants in knowledge creation and by promoting sustainable, student-centred learning. Full article

In the recent K-12 educational literature, arts-based data visualization has been positioned as a compelling means of rendering data science and statistical learning accessible, motivating, and empowering for youth, as data users and producers. However, the only research to attend carefully to youth’s data-based, artistic storytelling practices has been limited in scope to specific storytelling mechanisms, like youth’s metaphor usage. Engaging in design-based research, we sought to understand the art and design decisions that youth make and the data-based arguments and stories that youth tell through their arts-based data visualizations. We drew upon embodied theory to acknowledge the holistic, synergistic, and situated nature of student learning and making. Corresponding with emerging accounts of youth arts-based data visualization practices, we saw regular evidence of art, storytelling, and personal subjectivities intertwining. Contributing to this literature, we found that these intersections surfaced in a number of domains, including youth’s pictorial symbolism, visual encoding strategies, and data decisions like manifold pictorial symbols arranged to support complex, multilayered, ambiguous narratives; qualitative data melding community and personal lived experience; and singular statements making persuasive appeals. This integration of art, story, agency, and embodiment often manifested in ways that seemed to jostle against traditional notions of and norms surrounding data science. Full article

This conceptual paper presents a framework for supporting multilingual students’ mathematical discourse through teacher professional development grounded in design-based research (DBR). Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the Integrated Language and Mathematics Project (ILMP) was co-developed with elementary educators to promote integrated instruction that simultaneously advances students’ mathematical understanding, language development, and cultural identity. The ILMP framework centers around three instructional pillars: attention to language, attention to mathematical thinking, and cultural responsiveness. Through collaborative inquiry cycles, educators engaged as learners, contributors, and designers of practice, iteratively enacting and reflecting on instructional strategies rooted in students’ linguistic and cultural assets. Teachers implemented discussion-rich mathematical tasks, supported by language scaffolds and culturally relevant contexts, to foster students’ mathematical reasoning and communication. This approach was particularly impactful for multilingual learners, whose language use and problem-solving strategies were both valued and elevated. This paper also discusses the opportunities and challenges of DBR and research–practice partnerships, including flexibility in implementation and navigating district-level priorities. Insights underscore the importance of practitioner agency, asset-based pedagogy, and the co-construction of professional learning. The ILMP framework offers a scalable, equity-oriented model for improving integrated language and mathematics instruction in diverse elementary classrooms and beyond. Full article

This study examines how young children engage with picturebooks, discussion, dramatic inquiry, and writing to negotiate diverse perspectives and develop empathy in an early childhood classroom. Grounded in sociocultural and critical literacy theories, the research explores the role of dialogic pedagogy in fostering young learners’ agency and social awareness. Utilizing a qualitative single-case study design, data were collected over a full academic year in a second-grade classroom through video recordings, field notes, interviews, and student artifacts. Thematic analysis revealed that dialogic engagements supported students in developing a shared language about empathy, resolving classroom conflicts, and exploring actionable ways to support others through collaborative play and inquiry. Findings highlight how sustained, student-driven inquiry fosters critical reflection and social responsibility, offering pedagogical insights into designing literacy experiences that nurture empathy, agency, and collective action. Implications for integrating dialogic literacy practices into early childhood education are discussed. Full article