Search Results for
"education"

This paper discusses the transformative potential that liberal vocationalism, aligned with contemporary visions of lifelong and lifewide learning, presents for outdoor learning across institutional and industry settings. Utilising Bernstein’s sociological theory, the paper explores this transformation through an illustrative case study of the relations, knowledges and identities of post-Year10 Outdoor education in Western Australia (WA). The case study highlights how Outdoor education in WA has been organised through distinct classificatory relations that exist between government, regulatory bodies and individual industry providers that serve to distinguish Outdoor education from outdoor learning that is ongoing and able to be pursued by people of any age in many and varied learning contexts. These classificatory relations are shown to be reflected in established qualification and training structures, privileged knowledges and particular subject and learner identities. It is argued that consequently, current post-Year10 Outdoor education provision has a generated a vision of outdoor learning and vocationalism that constrains learners’ access to and engagement with lifelong and lifewide experiences that can enhance their own and others’ lives. In response, three foci are presented that constitute a heuristic framework via which transformative possibilities can be progressed. The first focus calls for progressive relations between institutional education, industry and community stakeholders in the creative re-design of qualification structures and educational experiences. The second underlies the need for qualification and training structures to enable all learners equitable access to knowledges for lifelong and lifewide learning. The third argues for the construction of new therapeutic identities in Outdoor education that enables learners to orientate towards an experience of outdoor learning that is autonomous and flexible in both theory and practice. The paper concludes by considering research and teaching directions that can facilitate the realisation of these possibilities. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

To promote gender equity in physics education, it is essential to understand the factors that influence how even pre-service teachers perceive, interpret and make decisions when gender inequities arise in the classroom. This means that we need to pay particular attention to teachers’ professional vision of gender-sensitive physics teaching. The following study examines pre-service teachers’ interest in gender-sensitive teaching and learning, as well as their learning opportunities and teaching experiences as potential predictors of their professional vision. A questionnaire and a vignette test were used for a cross-sectional survey of 586 pre-service teachers in Switzerland. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyse the predictors. The results contribute to the current research on gender-sensitive physics education, highlighting the importance of interest as the strongest predictor, followed by teaching experience and number of learning opportunities. The results are discussed in terms of their relevance for teacher training programs in gender-sensitive science education. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The goal of the Guitars, Robotics, and Rocketry Advanced Technological education (GRRATE) project was to increase the number of rural STEM technicians in the form of self-efficacy building experiences with awareness of STEM technician career options available to them. The project team anticipated that an experience in STEM projects would create a sense of ownership, motivation and enhance self-esteem in students performing interdisciplinary tasks. We addressed this by offering Guitar Building, Rocketry and Robotics at three educational centers in the form of a 15-week project-based course. The centers are located in rural areas between 25 and 40 miles from the main campus at Santa Fe College. An S-STEM survey was administered to measure STEM attitudes, changes in attitudes, and efficacy in program participants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted regarding changes in attitudes/perceptions of STEM skills and interest in STEM-related careers. A parallel converged mixed-method provided evidence that students participating in the course experienced an increase in attitudes toward STEM competencies and STEM-related careers. © 2024 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Associations among self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and instructional methodologies fundamentally determine the success of skill acquisition within educational frameworks. This study assessed the impact of inquiry-based and computational thinking pedagogies on the outcomes among 132 students from two universities in Enugu State. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design using five instruments to assess students’ experiences. Hierarchical Multiple Regression and 5000 re-samples BC bootstrapping via the PROCESS macro were employed to test hypotheses and examine the relationship between student engagement and achievement. The study found that inquiry-based and computational thinking pedagogies improved achievement and retention, with ability, belief and intrinsic motivation as mediators. This study contributed to extant literature by integrating the mediators into computational thinking and inquiry-based learning, presenting a groundbreaking framework that enhances critical skills acquisition in Nigerian universities. The study recommended integrating these methods into Nigerian university frameworks to enhance students’ academic achievement, retention, and critical skills acquisition. © 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Higher education has implemented various pedagogical interventions to increase connectivity with the workplace and ease students’ education-to-work transition. However, the effectiveness and underlying mechanisms of these interventions in supporting students with this transition remains largely unexplained. The present review article analyzed 49 articles bringing together two theoretical frameworks on this transition: connectivity and boundary crossing. Results show that connectivity can be increased by collaborating with the workplace in several ways. However, our results also show that higher education seldom learns from this collaboration, resulting in a lack of effective boundary practices to support students in their education-to-work transition. On top of that, our research demonstrates the importance of assessing the effectiveness of any of these interventions from both a student and a labor economics perspective. © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Purpose – This study aimed to investigate the impact of ChatGPT on students’ self-efficacy, anxiety and motivation within blended learning environments. Design/methodology/approach – A correlational quantitative method was employed using the data collected through an online questionnaire distributed randomly to 293 science and engineering students from 2 state universities in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Measurement analysis was conducted to assess instrument validity, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the relationships between the constructs. Findings – The results indicate that self-efficacy and motivation significantly enhance student performance in blended learning, with the positive effect of self-efficacy moderated by ChatGPT. Although anxiety had a positive, though not significant, effect, the interaction between anxiety, motivation and ChatGPT still demonstrated a positive effect on learning performance. Research limitations/implications – This study highlights the moderating effect of ChatGPT on motivation, anxiety and performance, emphasizing the need to understand educational contexts and individual differences. The study was limited to a specific student population and a short duration of ChatGPT usage, potentially restricting generalizability. Future research should explore diverse educational settings, disciplines, long-term effects and qualitative methods to gain deeper insights. Originality/value – This study provides valuable new insights into the use of AI technology in education from the psychological perspective of students and offers practical implications for improving future learning strategies. © 2025 Emerald Publishing Limited

Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Australia have responded to their environment – driven by government and industry - and cultivated a skills focus when it comes to employability of its graduates. However, this has led to criticisms of a ‘job factory’ with minimal thought given to longer-term lifelong learning orientations and at the core, the students themselves and their values. With a quasi-field experiment design, using both phenomenology and surveys, 15 undergraduate and postgraduate students were exposed to a range of experiences exploring the role of values in career choice and career development. Findings reveal that students appreciate the focus on values as a currency of the employability equation. Five core themes arose out of the research: amplified career awareness; entrepreneurial thinking; anxiety; educational purpose; and understanding personal values. These findings pose questions for HEIs: whether to incorporate a discussion on values as part of employability; how to achieve this in a manner which reaches all students; and when is best to do so. Participants unanimously felt that the penultimate year of study is the ideal time to have a conversation with students not based on skills transferability into the workplace, but values transferability. © (c) 2026 Jeffrey Naqvi. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a transformative force across industries, with education and employment services increasingly adopting intelligent solutions to enhance efficiency and quality. In higher vocational education, the growing need for accurate internship placement and effective employment support underscores the value of integrating AI into institutional practices. Vocational colleges offer a valuable context to examine how data-driven systems can optimize the transition from education to the workplace. This paper investigates the application of AI within the National Smart Platform for Internship and Employment at Shanghai Vocational College of Science and Technology. Methodologically, it employs RealMLP with strong meta-tuned default parameters, a modern machine learning framework tailored for structured tabular data, to analyze survey responses from graduates using the platform. RealMLP balances efficiency and accuracy, while the meta-tuned defaults reduce the need for extensive hyperparameter tuning, making it practical for large-scale educational datasets. Results show that this approach effectively identifies the key factors influencing graduates' satisfaction, employment outcomes, and platform perceptions. More broadly, the analysis highlights which dimensions of the intelligent employment system most significantly affect students' overall experiences. By uncovering these patterns, the study provides evidence-based insights for understanding the impact of AI-driven analytics on vocational college internship and employment services. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

The primary objective of this study is to develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for the action-oriented teaching perspective, grounded in the German approach, widely adopted in German-speaking countries. The article proposes a process that teachers can use to design and implement action-oriented teaching to enhance students’ application of academic content in realistic professional situations and social contexts. This study follows a qualitative approach, employing systematic literature review, grounded theory, and thematic analysis methods. The findings reveal that action-oriented teaching has a strong psychological foundation. When analyzed in relation to cognitive and skills taxonomies, and empirical data from Germany and Vietnam, this concept demonstrates its capacity to foster learners’ complex competencies—particularly their ability to apply theoretical knowledge in professional and social contexts. Action-oriented teaching can be implemented through various methods, such as project-based learning, experimentation, design tasks, fabrication tasks, debates, role-plays, and case studies. A key aspect of this concept is that learners actively engage in comprehensive actions to create material (tangible) or verbal learning products, which result from situation-oriented learning tasks. This framework helps address key educational challenges, including student engagement, competency development, and the integration of theory and practice. Its interdisciplinary and cross-cultural relevance makes it valuable for educators, policymakers, and researchers across vocational, general, and higher education contexts. © (2026), (University of Windsor), All Rights Reserved.

The demand for creative and innovative problem-solvers in industry has encouraged educators to integrate STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) with practical technological tools such as Computer Numerical Control (CNC) into the learning environment. This article presents a learning-centered CNC-based STEM course designed to enhance students' creative and innovative skills through project-based learning and student-centered pedagogies. The method employed in this study uses a mixed-method approach to comprehensively understand the impact of CNC-integrated STEM learning on students' creativity and innovation. The article provides a nuanced view of how CNC-STEM learning influences student outcomes. The project-based (PBL), student-centered learning model empowers students to design, build, and critically evaluate original CNC projects. Improving creativity and innovative skills with STEM-based CNC education includes: using PBL in CNC education gives students the opportunity to work on real-world projects, which stimulates their critical and creative thinking. Students gain creative thinking and imaginative problem-solving skills by creating and producing their own items. Collaborative learning using STEM-based CNC instruction promotes student cooperation. When students work in groups, they exchange ideas, solve issues together, and gain knowledge from one another, which develops their innovative and creative thinking, and using STEM to support teaching factory. © 2026 by the authors; licensee Asian Online Journal Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License