Although the role of principals in instructional leadership has been extensively studied, limited research has examined how they experience and enact leadership during curriculum change aimed at improving educational quality. This phenomenological study explores principals’ experiences of facilitating curriculum change in Indonesian madrasahs through semi-structured interviews with five principals. Interview data were analyzed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s (2021) approach, involving data familiarization, coding, theme development, review, and interpretation. The findings reveal that principals acted as curriculum leaders, instructional facilitators, mentors, motivators, evaluators, and stakeholder coordinators. Their effectiveness was shaped by teacher readiness, professional development, collaboration, resources, stakeholder support, and contextual understanding. The study highlights how principals mediate curriculum policy through instructional and distributed leadership while adapting reform to the institutional and cultural contexts of madrasahs.
This study examines a natural experiment in New Zealand higher education, where university entrance criteria were modified in response to Covid-19 disruptions to secondary education. Using comprehensive longitudinal data from seven universities, student retention outcomes were linked to their (un)modified admission marks. While the modified criteria successfully preserved pathways to university during crisis, students admitted under these criteria experienced consistently higher exit rates across all levels of prior academic achievement. However, the higher attrition rates among this cohort highlight the challenges of balancing the increased access to university with academic preparedness. The main limitation of our study is that we do not have a clear picture of what support interventions by universities were targeted towards the modified UE students. In addition, the analyses are primarily descriptive, and differences in institutional responses to the pandemic across universities may have influenced student outcomes independent of admission criteria. University admission criteria must well balance equity upon admission, the cost of failure, and equity in completion. This may be achievable by employing statistical modelling of longitudinal data to advise policy development. This study highlights the importance of adopting a comprehensive equity policy rather than a patchwork that may provide a short-term solution while not addressing negative unintended consequences. The findings suggest significant implications for policy makers and institutions considering similar interventions in response to systemic disruptions to education.
The emotional state of teachers and their well-being in schools and their profession have been a topic of growing interest to policymakers. This paper aims to address teachers’ possible generational differences and overlaps concerning emotional work in teaching. This paper delves into teachers’ emotional engagement throughout their careers in Spain. The research was based on a qualitative paradigm. Focus groups and interviews were conducted with 147 novice, veteran, and retired teachers. The main results show a difference in teachers’ emotional management of tasks, which appears as teachers gain more work experience. On one hand, novice teachers must adapt to their professional environment more than their veteran and retired colleagues. This finding suggests that novice teachers may demonstrate a higher level of emotional management than their more experienced counterparts, but they perceive that their efforts eventually burn out over time. This issue is perceived through the lens of their elders, making both emotional engagement and emotional management in the teaching profession visible.
Numerous factors are related to students’ performance on standardized mathematics tests, including teacher-assigned math grades, gender, socio-economic status (ESCS), origin, geographic location, and school type. Typically, the influence of these factors on students’ outcomes on standardized mathematics tests is analyzed using classical regression analyses, which might not be able to handle complex, high-dimensional datasets and capture non-linear relationships. Boosting regression, a machine learning approach, was employed to overcome these limitations, allowing for more robust estimation of variable importance, detection of interaction effects, and provision of insights that are directly relevant for educational policy and intervention. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the significance of these factors in predicting students’ achievements on the Italian national assessment of mathematical knowledge, INVALSI, through both multiple regression and boosting regression analyses. Results indicate that school type and teacher-assigned grades emerged as the most influential predictors, contributing approximately 42
This study examined the extent to which school-level variation in science teachers' assessment literacy predicts student science achievement in secondary education, after accounting for student-level differences in socioeconomic status and motivation toward science. Drawing on the U.S. Grade 8 sample of the 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a two-level multilevel modeling approach was employed using the WeMix package, which incorporated complex sampling weights directly into model estimation. School-level predictors; teaching experience, formative assessment frequency, and instructional modification were derived by aggregating science teacher responses within each school. Student science achievement was operationalized using five plausible values pooled via Rubin's rules. A null model indicated that 10.4
