High-school academic track choice is an early and consequential educational decision, yet little is known about how adolescents’ personal values are expressed in the goals that guide these choices. The present study examined how value-based academic goals are organized in adolescence and how they vary across academic tracks. Participants were 791 Israeli students in Grades 9–12. Students reported their personal values and completed the Value-Based Academic Goals Scale, which assesses school-related goals reflecting broad value orientations. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses supported a four-dimensional structure of value-based academic goals: self-enhancement, openness-to-change, conservation, and comfort. This structure partly reflected broad personal value theory, but also showed context-specific reorganization. In particular, self-transcendence did not emerge as a distinct academic-goal dimension, whereas a separate comfort dimension emerged, combining security, enjoyment, and ease in the school context. Associations with general personal values were modest, suggesting that academic goals are related to, but not reducible to, broader value orientations. Across tracks, self-enhancement and comfort were the most prominent goal dimensions, whereas conservation was consistently the least endorsed. Most importantly, students in different academic tracks also showed distinct goal profiles. Realistic and investigative-scientific tracks showed a self-enhancement-centered profile; artistic tracks, and more cautiously investigative-humanistic tracks, showed more comfort-oriented tendencies; social tracks showed high openness-to-change and comfort; and enterprising tracks combined high self-enhancement with high comfort. These findings suggest that academic track choice in adolescence reflects an early form of person-environment fit and may help educators and school counselors better support students’ track decisions.
This study adopts a qualitative descriptive research design supported by descriptive frequency counts to examine pre-service teachers’ conceptual knowledge of executive functions (EFs) and their core components: working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. The participants consisted of 151 pre-service teachers enrolled in the sophomore, junior, and senior years of Primary Teacher Education and Pre-School Teacher Education programmes at a state university in Türkiye. Criterion sampling, a purposive sampling method, was used to select participants. The data were elicited through a structured interview form consisting of eight open-ended questions and evaluated using a graded scoring rubric alongside qualitative descriptive analysis. The findings indicate that most pre-service teachers possess limited and largely superficial conceptual knowledge of executive functions, with the majority scoring at inadequate or medium proficiency levels across all domains. Participants frequently conflated neurocognitive mechanisms with everyday administrative or social concepts (e.g., general management, classroom discipline, and planning) rather than demonstrating an understanding grounded in neuropsychological theory. These results reveal significant conceptual gaps and cross-sectional stagnation in future educators' neurodevelopmental literacy. Consequently, this study demonstrates that relying on implicit coverage within general educational psychology courses is insufficient; instead, it highlights an urgent need for the systematic integration of explicit micro-teaching modules and practical material-design activities focused on child cognition within teacher education curricula.
This study examines the direct, indirect, and socio-economically moderated pathways linking mathematics self-efficacy to mathematics achievement among 15-year-olds in Türkiye, drawing on the PISA 2022 dataset of 6482 students in Grades 9 and 10 nested in 194 schools, with gender entered as a control. A moderated sequential mediation model corresponding to Hayes’s Model 89 examines the association of mathematics self-efficacy with mathematics achievement directly and indirectly through self-efficacy in digital competencies and, subsequently, subject-related ICT use during lessons, with socio-economic status moderating each pathway. The model accounts for 28.0
Second language (L2) willingness to communicate (WTC) has been extensively explored across diverse settings and in relation to various variables, utilizing a range of methods. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to investigating task-specific WTC among Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners through the lens of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST) in natural classroom settings. In response to the research gap, this study seeks to examine the task-specific L2 WTC characteristics of four Chinese EFL learners and the shaping factors by employing the CDST-compatible idiodynamic method to capture momentary fluctuations in task-specific WTC within a task-based language teaching classroom setting. Findings demonstrated that the participants’ task-specific WTC, throughout the performance of a pedagogical task, exhibits the major characteristics of CDST, including non-linearity, interconnectedness, self-organization, and dependence on initial conditions. Furthermore, a series of factors was identified to shape the participants’ task-specific WTC during the pedagogical task performance, encompassing learner-internal factors such as task motivation and emotions, as well as learner beliefs about communicative behaviors, and learner-external factors such as task-related, teacher-related, and interlocutor-related variables. Based on the research findings, pedagogical implications are proposed.
Stereotype threat contributes to gender gaps in academic achievement by interfering with cognitive processes. We tested whether theory of mind (ToM) would make children more susceptible to gender stereotype threat at the beginning of elementary school. To be susceptible to this type of stereotype threat, children must be aware that others may stereotype them based on their gender, an awareness that requires ToM. Such awareness may also enable children to adapt better to academic situations. Participants were 409 children aged 6–7 years who took part in a 2 (gender: boys vs. girls) × 2 (task framing: reading game vs. evaluative situation) between-subjects design. A standard word recognition test was presented either as a game, consistent with the stereotype that positively associates boys and games, or as an evaluative reading task, consistent with the stereotype that positively associates girls and reading. ToM was assessed using first- and second-order false-belief tasks. The study did not reveal the conventional stereotype threat effect: the evaluative situation did not result in an overall reduction in reading performance. However, preliminary signs of stereotype threat emerged in the association between ToM and reading performance. This association was attenuated among children for whom the negative gender stereotype was relevant: boys in the evaluative condition and girls in the reading game condition. These findings suggest that early stereotype threat may not necessarily impair overall performance but may instead disrupt the performance benefit associated with ToM when children encounter a stereotype-relevant context.
