Sustainability awareness is generally treated as a single level to be raised, yet its components can vary independently of one another. This exploratory study identified subgroups of undergraduate students whose awareness follows distinct patterns and examined how those subgroups relate to demographic characteristics. Data were collected through an online survey from 597 undergraduate students across five faculties, on five dimensions covering personal knowledge and efficacy, educational experience, individual practices and engagement, institutional perception, and global concerns and ethics. The five-dimension structure was supported by exploratory structural equation modeling, with a scaled Chi-square of 268.02 on 185 degrees of freedom, CFI = .991 and RMSEA = .027, and scalar measurement invariance held across gender, age group, faculty, academic year and level of first exposure for the specifications tested. Latent profile analysis, estimated from multiple starting values after the default initialization was found to return to a local optimum, identified four profiles: moderate awareness (37.7%), high comprehensive awareness (36.7%), low practices and engagement (13.2%), and low personal knowledge (12.4%). Profile membership showed no association of practical size with any demographic variable, and effects of medium size were excluded by equivalence testing. Sustainability awareness is therefore distributed in qualitatively distinct patterns that do not follow conventional demographic lines. Because items were administered in a fixed order within visually separated blocks, construct and presentation format are confounded, and both the instrument and the profile structure require independent replication with randomized item order before they can be regarded as established.
This study examines how four intersen phase (grade 4-grade 7) mathematics teachers at one South African school interpret and use prescribed textbooks and teacher guides in planning, enacting, and reflecting on reform-oriented mathematics lessons. Drawing on Leshota’s (2015) framework of curriculum mediation and Remillard’s (2005) and Brown’s (2009) conceptualization of curriculum use and pedagogical design capacity (PDC), the study employed a qualitative case study design. Data were generated through pre-and post-lesson interviews and lesson observations with four teachers and analyzed inductively using the constant comparative method. Findings indicate that teachers’ reliance on curriculum resources was shaped primarily by their mathematical content knowledge and was consistent across both textbooks and guides for a given teacher, suggesting that PDC functions as a knowledge-driven disposition rather than a resource-specific response. Teachers frequently struggled to articulate how their practice supported 21st century competencies, while adaptations to curriculum materials, although sometimes enhancing instruction, occasionally introduced content errors when undertaken without sufficient subject knowledge. The study contributes a fine-grained, resource-differentiated account of curriculum mediation, clarifying the knowledge-dependent conditions under which reform-oriented mathematics teaching is enabled or constrained in a highly prescriptive curriculum context.
Teacher beliefs play a central role in how professional development (PD) shapes classroom practice. The open lesson (OL), a long-standing mandatory PD practice in Kazakhstan and other post-Soviet contexts, involves teachers conducting observed classes before colleagues and administrators. Using a three-stage sequential design, this study investigated the structure, characteristics, and demographic correlates of OL beliefs among 218 secondary school teachers in Kazakhstan. Exploratory factor analysis identified three correlated belief dimensions – professional growth, professional collaboration, and perceived student benefit – accounting for 65% of total variance. Cluster analysis revealed three teacher profiles: skeptical (9.6%), moderately positive (38.6%), and highly enthusiastic (51.8%) teachers. Gender, age, and teaching experience did not significantly differentiate beliefs. A significant difference in perceived student benefit was found between teachers of natural sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology combined) and teachers of other subjects (p = .015). The near-absence of demographic moderation suggests that OL’s cultural embeddedness produces convergent belief patterns regardless of professional background.
In primary school, the teaching of mathematics and natural sciences should promote meaningful, context-based learning that enables students to apply knowledge in real-life situations. Interdisciplinary approaches such as STEAM foster 21st century competences through active and collaborative methodologies, while educational robotics (ER) supports the development of computational thinking and social skills. This study analyses the influence of a STEAM practice, incorporating ER on the development of statistical literacy and learning about ocean plastic pollution among 4th grade students. The research adopted a mixed-methods, interpretative action research design. Data were collected by the trainee teacher as participant researcher through performance tasks, field notes, photographs and audio recordings, later used to construct multimodal narratives. Findings reveal statistically significant improvements in global level of knowledge and global performance. The study concludes that steam practices incorporating ER and grounded in real-world problem-solving constitute an effective strategy for fostering statistical literacy.
Early geometric reasoning predicts later mathematical achievement, yet children’s errors in this domain persist across instruction and are conventionally labelled “misconceptions.” Dual-process theory offers an alternative reading, that many such errors are cognitive biases, in which a fast intuitive response overrides slower analytical reasoning, but this framework has been applied mainly to numerical tasks and to adolescents or adults, leaving elementary geometry largely unexamined. It therefore remains unclear whether children’s geometric errors reflect genuine intuitive interference or a simple lack of knowledge. This study profiles cognitive biases in the plane-geometry reasoning of elementary school students, focusing on prototype-based shape recognition and area-perimeter comparison, and uses a congruent-incongruent task design to separate intuitive interference from missing knowledge. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, fourth- and fifth-graders at a high-performing school in South Sulawesi completed task-based clinical interviews combining congruent and incongruent items with think-aloud and probing; episodes (one student × one item) were analyzed thematically for bias forms, sign patterns, and inhibition markers. Prototype bias appeared in 13 of 15 students—most often as orientation-based rejection—and area-perimeter bias in 12, most often as the “larger perimeter, larger area” rule. Crucially, the dominant pattern was accuracy on congruent but not incongruent items, and most such errors were accompanied by self-correction, indicating failed inhibition of available knowledge rather than absent knowledge. The study extends the dual-process framework to spatial-geometric reasoning in early childhood and reframes many geometric “misconceptions” as inhibitable cognitive biases, implying that diagnosis should precede remediation.
