In the context of China’s growing global engagement, college English teaching carries a dual responsibility: developing students’ foreign language proficiency and cultivating their ability to communicate Chinese culture effectively to international audiences. However, many courses still focus predominantly on target-language cultures, resulting in a notable “Chinese culture aphasia” among students--the inability to express native cultural content in English. This paper explores practical strategies to integrate Chinese cultural content into college English instruction, aiming to enhance students’ intercultural communicative competence and their capacity as cultural exchange envoys. Drawing on theories of intercultural communication and cultural confidence, the paper proposes five interconnected strategies:curriculum redesign with systematic Chinese cultural themes; pedagogical innovation through comparative and project-based approaches; teacher development as cultural mediators; leveraging digital resources for cultural production; assessment systems that value cultural output. The paper argues that these strategies, when implemented cohesively, can transform college English from a language skills course into a vital platform for China’s cultural international engagement.
As globalization continues to advance, the new curriculum standard raises the bar for developing students’ intercultural communicative competence during junior high school English instruction. Taking Huainan Dongshan Middle School as an example, this study analyzes in-depth the domestic and international research results in the related fields, and uses literature research, questionnaire surveys and other methods to reveal the existing problems in current teaching. Subsequently, cultivation strategies are put forward. These include enhancing teachers’ intercultural awareness, integrating intercultural content into teaching materials, creating communicative scenes, promoting extracurricular learning, and improving the teaching evaluation mechanism. The goal is to improve students’ intercultural communicative competence and promote junior high school English teaching reform to meet the needs of the times.
This study examines the relationship between digital inclusion and human capital development, proxied by lower secondary school completion rates, across a global panel of up to 173 countries (2000–2023). While information and communication technologies are viewed as catalysts for development, empirical evidence on their association with education is mixed. The study distinguishes between broadband internet use and mobile connectivity. It uses a combination of fixed effects, dynamic System GMM specification, and Method of Moments Quantile Regression to examine persistence and distributional heterogeneity in education outcomes. Mobile subscriptions are positively associated with school completion in the fixed effects (β = 4.34, p < 0.01) and quantile specifications (β = 3.51–4.80, p < 0.01) but not statistically significant in the dynamic System GMM model. Internet usage is not statistically significant in all specifications. In the System GMM specification, the lagged dependent variable is highly significant (β = 0.94), indicating strong persistence in educational attainment. Quantile regression results indicate heterogeneity across the distribution of educational outcomes. Mobile connectivity is more strongly associated with completion rates in lower-performing countries (Q25: β = 4.80, p < 0.01) than in higher-performing countries (Q75: β = 3.5, p < 0.01), while internet usage remains statistically insignificant across quantiles. Overall, the findings suggest that the relationship between digital access and secondary school completion is not uniform across estimation strategies or across the distribution of educational attainment. The study limitations are discussed alongside targeted implications for policy and future scholarship.
This study exploits a unique policy cutoff in Kazakhstan during the COVID-19 pandemic to estimate the effect of online education on student performance. In 2020, small rural schools were permitted to continue offline instruction, while others transitioned to online learning. We estimate the effect of online learning on Unified National Testing (UNT) scores in mathematics and reading for the full population of rural students from 2021 to 2024. To account for potential endogeneity in school’s choice of instructional mode, we employ a control function approach that uses the policy cutoff to isolate exogenous variation in online learning. Results show significant negative effects of online education on reading with the results for math being inconclusive. More importantly, the negative effects are highly persistent: even early exposure to online learning leads to lower test performance in later years. Heterogeneity analysis by internet access at home shows stronger negative effects for students without internet.
This study examines how rapid college expansion in Taiwan has reshaped individuals’ subjective social status (SSS). Using six waves of the 1992–2017 Taiwan Social Change Survey and difference-in-differences models, the analysis identifies heterogeneous effects across three counterfactually defined stakeholder groups: always-takers, compliers, and never-takers. Results show that always-takers and never-takers experienced substantive declines in perceived social standing after the expansion, whereas compliers reported moderate gains through newly opened educational opportunities. These findings are robust across gender and supported by the parallel-trend and placebo tests. The results suggest that higher-education expansion, while promoting access, simultaneously reconfigures hierarchies of perceived social worth. The study advances research on social stratification and subjective social status by revealing educational reform as an upstream institutional mechanism that links economic development to perceptions of inequality, underscoring the paradoxical consequences of mass higher education in stratified societies.
Inclusive education represents a critical challenge in contemporary educational systems, where policy intentions often diverge from classroom realities. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of staff in four private schools in the Emirate of Sharjah in the UAE, this study explored the intricate landscape of inclusive education, revealing a nuanced narrative that challenges conventional understandings of policy enactment. Contrary to typical narratives of the top-down policy-practice relationship, this research uncovered a more complex dynamic: school staff actively implementing federal inclusion policy requirements while simultaneously holding broader, more expansive ideals of inclusion. However, these ideals are reshaped through an intersection between institutional context, cultural expectations (especially when it comes to parental views and cultural understandings), and macro-policy environment which influence school leaders and teachers’ inclusive practices. Our findings demonstrate that while schools successfully adhere to formal policy guidelines, school leaders and teachers envision inclusion as a more comprehensive concept that extends beyond current implementation. Thus, the enactment of inclusive education policy in Sharjah’s multicultural, privatized and largely resource-rich private schools is not a mere adoption but rather a recontextualisation that responds to culture, local logics, and market-driven education. This research illuminates the gap between policy compliance and transformative educational practice, offering insights into the dynamic relationship between policy directives and the ideals of inclusion. The findings taken together point to a greater need for context-sensitive policy frameworks, culturally responsive preparation of school leaders and teachers, and inspection processes that value ethical leadership, relational practices, and adaptive decision-making—not just procedural compliance.
With one of the lowest Latin-American secondary school completion rates, Uruguay aims for continuous and complete educational trajectories. To support this national goal, we set up a sequential multi-stage mixed-methods study to propose and discuss the incorporation of educational trajectories’ indicators in the national public school dashboard. Interviews, focus groups and workshops were conducted to understand principals and teachers’ data needs to support students’ trajectories. Stakeholders’ concerns on the relation between students’ dropout risk, their trajectories and academic performance guide the design of a follow-up quantitative study. Sequence, cluster and regression analyses, together with machine learning techniques, were conducted on a longitudinal database of 2013–2024 trajectories of a national sample of public 9th-grade 2018 large-scale test participants. Results show students’ pre-test trajectories can be classified in four groups, which are correlated with individual reading and math test performance. These pre-test trajectories are also relevant for predicting post-test trajectories and dropout risk. Integration of the study’s quantitative and qualitative strands is achieved by merging stakeholders’ concerns and results from statistical analyses in a joint display. As a result, fifteen indicators are proposed for dashboard incorporation in order to help schools support students flagged by the early-alert-system as in higher risk of dropout. The rationale for choosing a mix methods study design as a way to integrate stakeholders input, foster evidence-based data usability and disseminate study findings is also discussed.
This study examines factors associated with gender differences in mathematics achievement using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018, covering secondary school students across 77 countries. The analysis focuses on disparities in both average performance and high achievement and considers a broad set of student, family, and school characteristics. To capture nonlinear relationships and interactions, the study employs machine-learning methods complemented by regression analyses that provide complementary parametric evidence on the main patterns. The results indicate that differences in students’ career expectations are strongly associated with gender gaps in mathematics achievement across countries. Additional factors—including perceived task difficulty, learning autonomy, parental socioeconomic status, and exposure to bullying—are also systematically related to performance, with associations that vary across the achievement distribution. These findings suggest that gender disparities in mathematics are closely linked to differences in aspirations, learning environments, and social contexts rather than to inherent differences in ability. While the analysis does not establish causal relationships, it provides consistent cross-country evidence on the relative importance of key correlates of gender gaps. The results highlight the potential importance of policies that support students’ aspirations and improve learning environments, particularly in efforts to broaden participation in mathematics-intensive fields.
South Korea increasingly relies on international students to sustain higher education and supplement its shrinking labor force, but stay rates after graduation remain low. Drawing on a survey of 2033 international students, this study examines factors associated with post-graduation intentions to remain in South Korea. Building on the theory of planned behaviour and the three-stage edugration framework (motivations, study experiences, and post-study opportunities) we show that work experience and the recognized value of students’ degree are positively associated with their intentions to stay. Financial autonomy, particularly when supported by scholarships, also increases the likelihood of remaining. In contrast, unmet language-support needs reduce the likelihood of staying after graduation. By linking educational migration with post-graduation settlement, this study contributes to research on student mobility and highlights policy levers for retaining skilled migrants in new destination countries.
Indonesia's multilingual and archipelagic setting places university students within overlapping local, national, and global language environments. This quantitative pilot study examined students' attitudes toward English and whether these attitudes differed according to regional and linguistic background. A cross-sectional questionnaire was completed by 45 undergraduates from two universities in Jakarta. The nine-item language-attitude scale demonstrated good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.834). Students reported highly positive attitudes toward English (M = 4.24, SD = 0.56), particularly regarding academic success, future careers, international communication, personal development, and access to knowledge. However, only 53.3% felt confident using English in class, while 37.8% reported speaking anxiety. The regional-origin difference did not remain significant after Holm adjustment. A first-language difference remained statistically significant, but the local/other language subgroup included only four students and therefore cannot support a stable population inference. Most participants also believed that English could be learned without losing local-language identity. These findings identify a clear gap between valuing English and feeling confident when using it publicly, while emphasizing the need for larger and more linguistically balanced multi-island research.
With the development of artificial intelligence in recent years, many improvements have been made to the services offered by higher education institutions for students. Student loyalty is now an important index of the institutional competitiveness, as the more loyal the students, the stronger their sense of belonging to the school. Based on research, Artificial Intelligence is expected to meet the diverse learning needs and motivation requirements of all students for their studies and life better. Learning Stickiness is a necessary condition for the long-term engagement of students in the school system. The paper also raises problems such as privacy, technological imbalance and human-centered education in this situation to put forward some ideas for the development of universities under responsible AI.
The expansion of vocational bachelor’s education has opened new routes into higher education while also creating uncertainty about skill formation, credential legitimacy, and mobility. Focusing on China, this study examines how students enrolled in vocational bachelor’s programmes retrospectively reconstruct how they chose these programmes within contested status hierarchies, high-stakes admissions, and platform-mediated information environments. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 20 students from three public vocational universities and using two-cycle coding, the study identifies four decision logics: Calculated Pragmatists, Signal-Following Safeguarders, Identity-Seeking Explorers, and Constrained Acceptors. These logics differ in how students assess credibility, stabilise criteria, manage risk, and justify their decisions. The article treats the mechanism as an analytic reconstruction of enrolled students’ retrospective narratives rather than as direct observation of real-time decision-making. It argues that vocational higher education choice is a developmentally consequential process shaped by bounded rationality, unequal access to interpretable information, and stratified agency. By linking information ecology to criteria stabilisation and decision closure, it offers a framework for understanding student choice in newly institutionalised and socially contested higher education pathways.
The objectives of this study were: (1) to describe how the implementation of Semantic Mapping Strategy improves the reading comprehension of eleventh graders at SMA Negeri 1 Malinau, and (2) to determine the extent to which the implementation of Semantic Mapping Strategy improves students’ reading comprehension. This study employed Classroom Action Research (CAR) by adapting the procedures proposed by Kemmis and McTaggart, which include planning, action, observation, and reflection. The participants of this research were eleventh-grade students, with a total of 20 students selected purposively based on preliminary observation indicating that they experienced difficulties in comprehending narrative texts. The research was conducted in two cycles, and the data were collected through reading comprehension tests, observation sheets and interview. The data were analyzed using descriptive quantitative. The findings revealed that the implementation of the Semantic Mapping Strategy was effective in improving students’ reading comprehension of narrative texts. Based on the qualitative data, the strategy created a more interactive, student-centered, and meaningful learning environment, which increased students’ participation, motivation, and confidence during the learning process. Meanwhile, the quantitative data showed a significant improvement in students’ reading comprehension scores, as evidenced by the increase from the pre-test score of 56.75 to the post-test score of 91.5, with all students achieving the minimum mastery criterion (KKTP) in the post-test. In conclusion, the results of this study indicate that the implementation of the Semantic Mapping Strategy is effective in improving students’ reading comprehension of narrative texts at the eleventh grade of the senior high school.
To address the challenges implicit thinking processes, superficial comprehension, and disconnection between linguistic competence and thinking quality cultivation among students in senior high school English reading teaching, thinking visualization provides an effective solution. This method converts abstract information processing, logical connections, and structural analysis in reading comprehension into intuitive graphics via diverse visual tools. Teachers should flexibly apply various visualization tools throughout all stages of reading teaching, guiding students to systematically sort out texts, analyze logical relations, compare viewpoints, and transfer and apply knowledge. Combined with concrete teaching cases, this paper analyzes the feasibility of applying thinking visualization tools to senior high school English reading teaching, aiming to offer a new perspective for reading instruction.
Industrial transformation is pressing higher education to renew curricula, experiential learning, and regional engagement simultaneously. This conceptual policy study examines Guangdong–Taiwan collaboration and its extension to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) through a synthesis of recent research on university–industry cooperation, regional higher education, student mobility, micro-credentials, and digital transformation. Five mutually reinforcing mechanisms emerge: coordinated governance, competency-oriented curricula, cross-regional project learning, joint research translation, and integrated quality and digital support. Shared competency standards and authentic industry assignments can connect teaching with innovation, while professional project management can reduce the costs created by institutional differences. ASEAN extension should be differentiated by national capacity, co-designed with local partners, and advanced in stages so that curricula, credentials, faculty roles, and workplace learning remain locally relevant. The framework links talent development, industrial upgrading, and regional cooperation within one institutional model.
Under the background of connotative development of higher education and the construction of a powerful country in education, university student management is facing a profound transformation from the traditional “discipline-oriented” model to a modern “empowerment-oriented” governance. From the theoretical perspective of humanism, this paper systematically explains the connotation of humanistic management and its applicable logic in university student management. It deeply analyzes the triple dilemmas in current practice: the gap between concept and practice, the imbalance between system and humanism, and the lagging and single management means. Furthermore, it proposes innovative paths from four dimensions: value reconstruction, mechanism optimization, space extension, and technology empowerment, aiming to provide references for the theory and practice of university student management in the new era.
Under the background of intelligent manufacturing industry upgrading and the increasing demand for machine replacement, cultivating high-quality technical and skilled talents with automation production line technical transformation capabilities has become an important task for higher vocational education. Based on the Wenzhou electrical industry and taking the automation production line technical transformation course group as the carrier, this study systematically constructs a school-enterprise dual-mentor collaborative education mechanism featuring multi-angle integration, multi-platform linkage, and full-process coverage. The research establishes a dual-mentor operational framework from four dimensions: selection and appointment, division of responsibilities, collaborative teaching, and assessment incentives. It implements a phased and hierarchical collaborative education path relying on three carriers: training bases, innovation platforms, and production enterprises. Practice shows that this mechanism effectively improves students comprehensive technical application ability and innovative practice ability, providing an operable implementation sample for deep integration of industry and education.
