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"Students"

The integration of Failure Analysis (FA) into project-based learning (PBL) frameworks presents a transformative approach to engineering education, preparing students to handle real-world complexities and setbacks. This paper explores methodologies for embedding FA within engineering curricula, aiming to enhance students' critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and resilience. Through structured failure analysis exercises, including root cause analysis, simulation-based testing, and reflective assessments, students develop a deeper understanding of design processes and the factors leading to project failures. A comparative study between traditional PBL and FA-integrated PBL reveals significant improvements in students' ability to analyse and adapt their designs. The findings demonstrate that students engaged in FA not only exhibit increased confidence in addressing project challenges but also show measurable gains in technical skills and innovative thinking. This study underscores the pedagogical value of learning through failure, advocating for a curriculum shift that recognises failure analysis as an essential component of engineering education. © 2025 Akademi Sains Malaysia. All rights reserved.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the institutions and processes shaping work, labour markets and industrial relations policies in Australia. It explores traditional industrial relations issues and examines social change and policy failures in areas such as gender, work and family dynamics, skills and immigration and wage theft. Additionally, it considers how pandemics, climate change, technological advances and new business structures impact policy change. Addressing these universal challenges, the book offers fresh conceptual approaches and rethinks policy problems and solutions. Essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners, this book reshapes our understanding of work and industrial relations policy. © Bristol University Press 2025.

Seeking to understand which pedagogical theories support the initial training of special education teachers in Brazil, we analyze documents, based on historical-dialectical materialism. We examined 53 courses and 1101 subjects, categorized into: fundamentals of education; vocational training; field-specific; “Others”, their relations with the stages and modalities of basic education and with curricular knowledge. We observed that there is an emphasis on the understanding of teaching as an individualized process, which seeks to develop students’ skills and competencies. The absence of a theoretical basis and curricular content distances this formation from a schooling project and brings it closer to non-critical perspectives, such as the new and technical school. © 2025, Centro de Estudos Educacao e Sociedade - CEDES. All rights reserved.

Introduction: When considering personal characteristics in undergraduate medical admission, professional prequalification (i.e., previous work experience in the medical field) and performance on situational judgement tests (SJTs) are prominent criteria. Despite evidence on the ability of professional prequalification and SJT performance to predict general interpersonal skills, their benefit for students’ concrete behavior in everyday situations remains unclear. Methods: With the present study, we examined how undergraduate medical students with prior professional qualification and students with better SJT performance act in actual social situations by using a behavior-focused observer approach. Supervisors rated the students after a mandatory one-week practical training in general medicine on three distinguishable interpersonal dimensions, namely agency (i.e., assured-dominant), communion (i.e., warm-agreeable), and emotional stability (i.e., calm and stable). Prior to admission, participants (N = 210) completed a traditional SJT (i.e., HAM-SJT), a natural science test (i.e., HAM-Nat), and responded to sociodemographic questions. Results: Controlling for cognitive admission criteria, age, and gender, students with prior professional qualifications were rated as more assured-dominant (β = 0.21; 95% CI [0.04; 0.39], p = 0.019), whereas students with better HAM-SJT performance were rated as more warm-agreeable (β = 0.17, 95% CI [0.02; 0.31], p = 0.024). Discussion: The results value both admission criteria as complements to cognitive criteria in undergraduate selection but emphasize their differentiated focus on students’ interpersonal behavior. Medical schools are invited to review their admission criteria based on the present findings and on the question of required and learnable skills. © 2025 The Author(s).

This paper explores the application and efficacy of task-based teaching (TBT) methods within the context of internet-based distance learning for English, with a particular focus on integrating environmental education. Through an empirical study involving two groups of college students, the authors examine how TBT can enhance students' language proficiency, motivation, and engagement compared to traditional lecture-based instruction. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, the findings indicate significant improvements in various aspects of language skills among students exposed to the TBT method. Moreover, the integration of environmental content into digital teaching materials not only enriches the learning experience but also raises awareness about critical global issues. This study highlights the potential of TBT in online environments as a transformative pedagogical tool that fosters deeper cognitive engagement, practical language application, and autonomous learning. © 2025 IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Many schools are creating and expanding their work-based learning (WBL) offerings to provide students access to meaningful adult–youth interactions during high school in response to increased policy focus on career readiness. Strong WBL systems depend on the success of school–industry partnerships, which, historically, have been difficult to create and sustain. This study investigates three telling cases (urban, rural and suburban) that transformed student learning experiences through industry partnerships. The analytic framework of systems dynamics makes visible the complex cross-sector interactions that enable each case. Data were collected through semistructured interviews and publicly available data (e.g., news reports and sociodemographic data). The interviews were coded to (1) identify the elements and connections in each system and (2) distil common design features between the three systems. The systems have four common design features: explicit trust-building, signalling institutional credibility, (striving for) robust systems and aligning instructional systems with industry needs. The findings demonstrate how very different schools enacted principles from the educational change literature to overcome documented barriers to collaboration. Retaining the complexity of educational contexts was essential to better understand the essential elements in each case. Furthermore, the common design principles can be useful to school and community leaders to design and refine local systems. Future research can build on this exploratory work to investigate the complexity of school–industry partnership designs and how they impact student outcomes over time. © 2025 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

This study examined the effect of entrepreneurial personality traits on entrepreneurial mentoring and entrepreneurial potential among vocational students in Malaysia. Vocational colleges offer technical and vocational education, emphasizing the teaching of entrepreneurial competencies through entrepreneurial education and training to prepare modern employees and innovative future entrepreneurs for the nation. The study used a stratified random sampling and collected 270 responses. The findings of the analysis, using structural equation modeling, indicated that entrepreneurial personality traits such as alertness, locus of control, innovativeness, and need for achievements significantly affect entrepreneurial potential. The finding also confirmed that entrepreneurial mentoring significantly affects the entrepreneurial potential of TVET students. Entrepreneurial mentoring proved to be an essential link that mediates the relationship between entrepreneurial personality traits and entrepreneurial potential. The interaction between mentors and students has been proven to be an effective tool in cultivating entrepreneurial potential. This study first provides insights into how teachers’ entrepreneurial mentoring affects students’ interest, especially in entrepreneurship. Vocational students are equipped with solid technical skills, and their strengths in exploring entrepreneurship align with the latest trends in service businesses. The government, vocational colleges, and industries should collaborate to enhance entrepreneurial alertness, innovativeness, and the need for achievements and locus control to facilitate students’ interest in entrepreneurship. Training and coaching should also be provided to teachers to enhance their skills as entrepreneurial mentors. This model offers vocational colleges opportunities to produce more high-quality and skillful entrepreneurs for a sustainable society and economy. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.

This study investigates undergraduate microwave engineering students' conceptions of electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation using a phenomenographic approach. An in-depth semi-structured interview was used to examine a cohort of 15 students’ experience of EM wave propagation in the context of microwave engineering. Result of the study revealed five qualitative distinct categories of students' conceptions. These categories evolved from a basic understanding of EM wave as oscillations of electric and magnetic fields to a comprehensive interpretation of wave propagation as radiation and energy transfer. students' cognitive processes of awareness, discernment, and simultaneity were evident within the descriptive categories. Besides, four dimensions of variation highlighted how students' understanding evolved from basic awareness to discerning complex relationships between concepts. The findings also offer practical implications for designing effective instructional strategies as well as theoretical support for the application of phenomenography in exploring students' learning experiences. Finally, teaching implication for microwave engineering education was presented. © 2025 SEFI.

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is an applied STEM program, first introduced nearly three decades ago, designed to enhance the STEM content of Career Technical Education (CTE). Currently, more than 12,000 US high schools offer the program. Using data from three cohorts of public high school freshmen in Missouri, we investigate the impact of PLTW program offer (ITT), participation impacts on participants (TOT), and the impact of program offer on non-participants on initial post-secondary outcomes. We use a difference-in-difference (DiD) analysis for ITT and a principal score weighted DiD to estimate TOT and the impacts of program offer on non-participants. The parallel trends assumption is tested and not rejected. We find significant positive ITT impacts on STEM major declaration among students with higher STEM preparation levels. ITT impacts on college enrollment are less conclusive. We find no evidence that the program offer affected outcomes for PLTW non-participants. Over a range of estimation strategies, we find substantively meaningful and robust positive TOT effects on STEM major declaration. © 2025 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Authentic assessment is widely recognised as a strategy for preparing university students for future. Although the use of digital technologies in authentic assessment is increasing, there is limited understanding of why and how educators choose to integrate technology in these practices. We conducted an exploratory qualitative study through semi-structured interviews of 21 university educators from diverse disciplines and institutional contexts to explore their approaches. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identified four pedagogical purposes guiding technology use: enhancing disciplinary learning, supporting workplace readiness, fostering personal development, and enabling assessment delivery. The findings show that educators often adapt familiar and accessible technologies to support student learning, rather than prioritising novelty or innovation. Technology serves multiple functions across the assessment process, and its effectiveness depends on alignment with pedagogical intent and student needs. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of technology integration and offers practical implications for supporting purposeful and student-centred assessment design. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.