PurposeHigher education performance is boosted through cross-border cooperation and increased transnational mobility of students. In addition, exchange students have better employability skills after staying abroad compared to the students' peers. A number of studies have investigated factors that determine whether a student studies abroad. In this study, the authors focused on the role of personality trait openness to experience and cultural intelligence (CI) in explaining Croatian students' experience with and/or intention to travel abroad for studying purposes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyzed results from 482 students (M = 22.61, standard deviation (SD) = 2.24, 66% female), of whom 35% reported that they studied abroad or intended to study abroad. They filled in The Cultural Intelligence Scale and openness facets items from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP-300) questionnaire.FindingsThe authors conducted a hierarchical binary logistic regression analysis and found that students who were younger, had higher adventurousness and higher motivational CI were more likely to study abroad. Results of the mediation analysis showed that the association between openness to experience facet adventurousness and intention to study abroad was partially mediated by the motivational aspect of CI.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the better understanding of complex interrelations between personality traits and CI in the context of higher education internationalization processes. This study offers unique insight into the mediating role CI has in the association between personality and mobility behavior.

Societal Impact Statement Plants are crucial for sustaining life on Earth, and understanding human relationships to plants is key to ensuring that the role of plants is recognized in biology research. This goal cannot be achieved without valid and reliable methods that describe, explain and predict how humans experience plants. Plant awareness is a useful concept that helps researchers understand the individual differences in how people perceive, evaluate and act towards plants. This paper aims to outline the many methodological approaches to researching plant awareness and to critically assess the role plant awareness plays in biology research. Through our suggested guidelines for further methodology development, we hope to strengthen the validity and reliability, and hence the applicability, of scientific work into everyday sustainability and teaching practices. Summary Understanding the relationships between plants and people is crucial because plants sustain life on earth. Plant awareness is one of the key concepts available that help us describe and understand this relationship. Having a strong and clear methodological framework for studying this phenomenon is a necessary condition for building the bridge between the theoretical concept and its application in educational and conservation contexts. Here, we explore and systematize methodologies applied in empirical research concerning the concepts of ‘plant blindness’, ‘plant awareness’ and ‘plant awareness disparity’. We examine 46 unique theoretical and empirical contributions. We discuss the availability and usefulness of existing methodological approaches, applied research designs and measurement tools used as indicators. We present suggestions for their development, and how new research designs could contribute to extant research on plant awareness and related concepts. We found that both qualitative and quantitative research approaches have been successfully applied in the field, and various indicators were used to measure plant awareness. We offer directions for further methodological development, in choice of research design and measurement tools choices.

In this article we consider the use of visual images to assess perceptions of plants. Using data drawn from a Swedish study we review our choices regarding the type of image used, and the responses they provoked. Furthermore, we consider these choices in the light of other studies, propose a tentative model of levels of seeing, and call for further research. In sharing our methodological challenges with the research community, we wish to contribute to current discussions in plant awareness studies. More specifically, to the development of a visual prompt item that is not explicitly connected to knowledge. Thus, the main contribution of this article is to visual research methods in relation to plant awareness studies.

Learning to calculate with natural numbers by structuring seems promising but how this can be taught in a sustainable manner remains an open question. An eight-month-long intervention based on the idea of using a structural approach to addition and subtraction, and particularly bridging through ten, was implemented in four Swedish first-grade classes. One goal was that by the end of first grade, students would be able to solve tasks such as subtracting 8 from 15 by using part-whole number relations. In this paper, we report on learning outcomes from task-based interviews with intervention and control groups before, immediately after, and one year after the intervention, in order to investigate long-term effects and whether students used a structural approach when solving tasks in a higher number range in the second grade. In comparison to controls, students in the intervention group showed higher increases in their learning outcomes. Moreover, the intervention group used a structural approach to a larger extent when solving tasks in higher number ranges, whereas students in the control group more commonly used single-unit counting to solve such tasks. These findings have implications both for teaching and for research on students’ development of arithmetic skills.

The purpose of this research note is to describe an ongoing research project, the demographic characteristics of the mentor teachers who participated in the nationwide survey, and to introduce the articles in progress (i.e., document the processes undertaken in the project to date).

This article provides an account of how six mentor teachers in Sweden reflect on the professional development opportunities they encounter, in the act of mentoring student teachers. The interview data come from the initial phase of a study titled Growing through mentoring: An activity-based inquiry into mentor teacher growth in knowledge and practices (Mentor Growth), which aimed to investigate the knowledge, processes and conditions involved in mentorship practices that lead to professional growth for mentor teachers. The study draws upon the theoretical concepts of social practice theory and situated learning in communities of practice, professional identity development and relational agency. The findings show that despite the challenges such as lack of time and poor support from the school leaders, mentoring benefits professional development by offering opportunities for fruitful collaboration with student teachers and self-reflection.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of a multimodal program, designed for practicing reading, on reading development in struggling readers in two different countries. The research question was whether one specific training method will have a positive effect on pupils' reading development in two different countries with different educational systems and as diverse orthographies as the shallow Croatian and the relatively deep Swedish orthography. It became clear that the Swedish teachers have a tradition of implementing interventions as opposed to in Croatia where there is no tradition of teachers conducting intervention studies in school. Comparing different school systems is difficult which is evident in the results that differ between the two countries. However, the results indicate that the multimodal reading training program used in the intervention had positive effects on pupils' literacy development, including decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension in both countries.

In the twenty years since the first theory of 'plant blindness' was published much discussion has ensued concerning this phenomenon. More recent research, not only demonstrates that humans appear to favour animals over plants but also indicates a preference for mammals with forward-facing eyes. For this paper, we analysed answers to an online survey conducted with 202 student primary teachers in Sweden collected over a period of two years. We focus on two open-ended questions concerning favourite plant and animal choices and motivations for these choices. Our intention in this study was not to contrast animal vs. plant, but rather to further explore differential appreciation of plants and animals. Our findings suggest that there are large variations regarding relationships with plants and that affective connections with plant-life are translated through expressions of beauty, symbolic meaning, emotions (life-long) memories, colour, smell and size, and that similar characteristics seem to attract humans to animals. Our results - in line with arguments presented in recent studies - strongly suggest that in biological education and conservation contexts we should rely more intentionally on cultural and personal factors, utilise pre-existing experience-based human-plant bonds, and in so doing reinforce human recognition and appreciation of plants.

Working memory is one of our core cognitive functions. It allows us to keep information in mind for shorter periods of time, allowing us to process and work with that specific information. In this randomized control trial, the effects of a training program that combine reading training and working memory training among struggling readers aged 8-9 were investigated. 30 pupils were included in the intervention group and 17 were assigned to the control group. The intervention group received a total of 60 training sessions divided into two eight-week training periods with a four-week pause in between. The results show that children in the intervention group improved significantly better than children in the control group on eight tests: Reading comprehension, Word decoding, Nonsense-word reading, Short-term memory, Working memory, Visuospatial short-term memory, Visuospatial working memory and Working memory for words. The effect was not confirmed for Sight word seeing.

In this paper, we report how 5-year-olds’ arithmetic skills developed through participation in an 8-month-long intervention. The intervention program aimed to enhance the children’s ways of experiencing numbers’ part-part-whole relations as a basis for arithmetic skills and was built on principles from the variation theory of learning. The report is based on an analysis of assessments with 103 children (intervention group n = 65 and control group n = 38) before and after the intervention and a follow-up assessment 1 year after the intervention. Our findings show that the learning outcomes of the intervention group were significantly higher compared to those of the control group after the intervention and that differences between the groups remained even 1 year after the intervention. In particular, the results show that children participating in the intervention group learned to recognize and use part-part-whole relations in novel arithmetic tasks.

The purpose of this study was to investigate literacy development beyond the early school years. We investigated mean-level and rank-order changes in two reading (word decoding speed and reading comprehension) and two spelling (word and pseudoword spelling accuracy) tasks during a 4-year period from beginning to the later grades of elementary school, and examined whether rank-order changes in literacy skills could be predicted from verbal working memory, phonological awareness, and morpho-syntactic awareness. The sample consisted of Croatian speaking children, poor (n = 50) and good (n = 61) readers. Croatian is a language with a highly transparent orthography but a rather complex grammar. Word decoding speed and word spelling accuracy improved significantly over the study period, word decoding speed more so among good than among poor readers, supporting the Matthew effect hypothesis. Literacy skills were moderately stable, with the highest stability coefficients obtained for word decoding speed, and the lowest for pseudoword spelling. The predictors of rank-order changes varied across literacy outcomes, but did not differ for poor and good readers. Morpho-syntactic awareness predicted rank-order development of all outcomes except for word spelling. Phonological awareness predicted rank-order development of reading comprehension and word spelling. Verbal working memory predicted rank-order development of word spelling only, and at a low level. The finding that the more language related cognitive variables, i.e., morpho-syntactic and phonological skills, were stronger predictors of literacy development than working memory, for both poor and good readers, suggests remedial focus on these more predictive variables.

An increase in Cesarean section birth rate is evident worldwide, especially in developed and developing countries. Since this trend is rapidly gaining epidemic status with unpredictable consequences regarding the reproductive and overall women's health, there is a need for systematic collection and analysis of Cesarean section occurrence data. At this moment, there is no standardized, internationally accepted classification that would be easy to understand and simple to apply. In 2001, Robson Cesarean section classification in ten groups, which might satisfy good classification criteria, was published. In this paper, we have retrospectively collected and sorted the data on Cesarean section births from the "Dr. Fra Mato Nikolić" Croatian Hospital in Nova Bila, according to Robson classification, for the period from January 1st, 1998 to December 31st, 2007. During this period, 6603 women have given birth. Of these, 1010 opted for Cesarean sec- tion (15.30%). The largest group of women giving birth belongs to group 3 (multiparous, single pregnancy, head down, 37 weeks gestation age or more, spontaneous labor), where 49.74% of all the analyzed births belong. The largest group for those with Cesarean sections is group 5 (previous Cesarean section) with 26.93% of all the Cesarean sections. Our results are similar to the results of studies done elsewhere in the world. Robson classification identifies the risk groups with high Cesarean section percentage and is appropriate for long-term tracking and international comparison of the recognized increase of the Cesarean section trend.

The networking and preventive actions of the institutions involved in upbringing and education of the youth are a necessary perquisite for the development of a healthy and a productive society. The implementation of the preventive programs of Zagreb Police as a standard part of primary school and high school education is a possible step towards attainment of such a goal. Throughout the years, the Zagreb Police is continuously implementing preventive programs intended for students of different age groups. A part of them is a lecture for first-grade high school students, that is carried out as a part of the program "No, because no". This aim of this study was to examine the attitudes of the students towards the Police and the preventive programs, as well as their readiness for engaging in self-protective behaviors and contacting the Police when faced with a situation of endangered personal safety. The sample consisted of 1705 high school students who took part in the research. The results showed that the students had a positive attitude towards the Police, police officers and the preventive programs. However, they also suggest that establishing more frequent and systematic contacts between students and the Police would increase the probability of students approaching the Police while in endangering situations and that these contacts could also reduce the fear of Police, which is somewhat present among youth. The students rated the evaluated lecture with highest grades, wherein it is especially important to note that students positively rate the direct involvement of the Police in the preventive work with the youth.