In this study, the relationship between the empowerment activities applied to employees in education, and entrepreneurship and the mediation role of organizational culture in this relationship are examined. In line with this, the research is a descriptive study in the relational screening model. For this purpose, entrepreneurship and organizational culture are discussed in four dimensions, and employee empowerment in five dimensions. The study was conducted by using a Likert-type questionnaire for 222 educators in 22 schools (192 teachers, 22 principals and 8 assistant principals) in Gaziantep. Employee empowerment, entrepreneurship and organizational culture scales were used to gather data. The correlation and multiple regression analysis were used to analyze the data. As a result of the research, a relationship between the dimensions was found to be significant and positive in the correlation analysis which was conducted to determine the relationship between the sub-dimensions of the scales of employee empowerment, entrepreneurship and organizational culture. According to the results in regression analysis; it was determined that organizational culture level is the sub-predictor in the prediction of entrepreneurship of employee empowerment in education employees, solutions were presented on the subject.

This study was conducted to assess the students’ perception of difficult topics in mathematics in some selected senior secondary schools (SS) in Kano state Nigeria. Two hundred (200) SS final year (III) students were randomly selected from ten (10) selected senior secondary schools within Bichi zone of Kano state Nigeria. A twenty items questionnaire was administered to respondents. Mean, standard deviation, and independent sample t-test statistics were used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that students perceived 13 topics (65%) difficult to comprehend. The study also showed that students’ gender had a significant influence on their perception of difficult topics in mathematics [t (198) =2.34, P =0.020, α = .05] and the nature of students’ schools had no significant influence on their perception of difficulty in mathematics [t (198) = -.444, p = 0.657, α = .05]. It was recommended that students should be encouraged and motivated to learn mathematics, curriculum developers should develop instructions that would improve students’ knowledge by laying more emphasis on the perceived difficulty areas in mathematics and further studies should be conducted to find out the factors responsible for the perceived difficulty and also if there is a relationship between perception and students’ achievement.

The goals of the study were to examine the predictive power of general cognitive ability, working memory, and self-efficacy in first grade for academic functioning of children at risk for learning disabilities in second grade. The study involved 82 children (age 6-7 years) from five local public elementary schools in middle-class neighborhoods in Jerusalem, including 41 children at risk for specific learning disabilities and 41 typically developing peers. In the first stage of the study, (performed at the end of first grade), general cognitive ability and working memory were assessed using subtests from the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (the subtests consisted of:  Vocabulary and Block Design for general cognitive ability; Arithmetic and Digit Span for working memory). Academic self-efficacy was rated using a structural interview. At follow-up, academic functioning was assessed at the end of second grade. A serial-multiple mediation analysis revealed significant mediating roles for levels of performance in the Arithmetic subtest and for academic self-efficacy in predicting the academic functioning in second grade. The significance of the Arithmetic subtest, based on contemporary research on the structure of the intelligence was proposed. Educational implications call for sensitizing teachers to the unique role of academic self-efficacy in shaping trajectories of academic functioning development among children with RLD and in using effective strategies of promoting self-efficacy.

This study examined teachers’ attributions and emotions for their subjectively perceived interpersonal relationships with their students as positive or negative, and whether hope (pathways thinking, agency thinking) influences the perceived positive or negative interpersonal relationships, the subsequent attributions and emotions, and the impact of attributions on emotions. Fifty teachers, of both genders, completed the questionnaire for each of their five students who were randomly selected from their teaching classes. The results revealed that the positive interpersonal relationships were predominately attributed to stable, personally controllable and self-student controllable factors, whereas the negative interpersonal relationships were primarily attributed to external, external controllable, unstable, and self-student controllable factors. Also, teachers reported positive emotions of high intensity (sympathy, cheerfulness, exciting, love, not anger, calmness) for the positive relationships, and negative emotions of moderate intensity (no enthusiasm, shame, anxiety, no excitement) for the negative relationships. Yet, the high hope teachers made adaptive attributional and emotional appraisals for the positive and, mainly, negative interpersonal relationships. Agency thinking, as compared to pathway thinking, was a better and worse formulator of the appraisals in negative and positive interpersonal relationships, respectively. Hope, additionally, had direct effect on the emotions, beyond that afforded by attributions, particularly in negative interpersonal relationships.

Previous research suggests that learning basic neuroscience constructs, especially about the malleability of the brain, impacts middle school and older students’ academic mindset, response to failure and academic persistence.  This research targets teacher beliefs using a similar model.  Teachers were taught introductory neuroscience concepts related to how the brain learns.  Session topics included: basic neurodevelopment, neuroplasticity, sleep and the brain, stress and the brain, exercise and the brain, growth mindset, growth mindset feedback, self- control and grit.   Results of this school level intervention suggest significant impacts on teachers’ mindset, teaching efficacy, teachers’ approach to learning and grit.  In particular, teacher mindset beliefs significantly increased after the teachers were taught the concepts.  Implications for schools and teacher preparation are discussed.

This work has two objectives. The first is to describe a program to strengthen socio-cognitive abilities in initial education children (called PHSC), which is focused on training teachers on its implementation in the classroom. The second objective is to examine the effectiveness of the program when it is applied in schools with different socio-cultural contexts. It involved a total of 257 initial-level students attending two pre-primary schools in the province of Mendoza. One school was in an urban area of a more stable social environment, and the other in a socially-vulnerable area.  The program was administered by teachers who had been trained for it. Pre- and post-assessments were conducted using socio-cognitive tests on the students. The teachers responded to the Executive Functioning Scale for initial education children before and after implementation of the PHSC program, and parents responded to an on-line survey to find out whether they had noticed any improvements or positive changes after the application of the program. The results suggest the possibility that this program, implemented by teachers, could improve the socio-cognitive abilities in children of both of the different social contexts, as well as being a driver to create conditions of equal opportunities and generate learning benefits in all their students.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the first human rights treaty with the ultimate goal of providing conditions conducive to child health and development. The CRC is grounded on four guiding principles: (1) non-discrimination; (2) best interests of the child; (3) the right to life, survival, and development; and (4) respect for the views of the child. These CRC principles are consistent with a social justice approach within the field of school psychology. This article highlights implications for school psychologists and encourages school psychologists to be at the center of the process of measuring, advocating, and actualizing all rights under the CRC, including the right to participation, in schools throughout the world. A summary of the Rights Respecting Schools initiative is offered to provide a concrete example for school psychologists and other school-based professionals.

Teachers often face complex educational judgments and research has shown that teachers are prone to be influenced by unrelated information in their judgments and decisions. To investigate the influence of potential misinformation we employed a list-method directed forgetting paradigm and investigated a simulated judgment scenario, in which participants were asked to recommend a higher or lower school track for a fictitious elementary school child. Previous research using list-method directed forgetting revealed that participants can intentionally forget information but this information might still influence further judgments. In two experiments, data on recall performance, school track recommendation, and the evaluative impression of the target were analyzed to investigate whether participants were able to intentionally forget information and whether the to-be-forgotten information influenced later judgments. To-be-forgotten information was either presented before (Experiment 1) or following (Experiment 2) information instructed to be remembered. Both experiments revealed that participants did not forget information instructed to be forgotten and their judgments were not influenced by this information. Bayes factors spoke in favor of the null hypotheses, indicating that the influence of to-be-forgotten information on simulated school track recommendations is questionable. Our results revealed important boundary conditions of directed forgetting in applied contexts.

During the second decade of the 21st century families and schools world-wide have been affected by several critical events, with economic recession, the refugee crisis, and lately the COVID-19 pandemic being the most prominent. Pertaining to the school community (students, educators, administration, parents, school personnel etc.), evidence-based interventions for improving mental health and supporting psychosocial adjustment are necessary. In this paper the development, implementation, and evaluation of the international WeCARE (We Connect, Accept, Respect, Empower) program, an online multilevel intervention for promoting well-being and resilience in the school community during unsettling times, is presented. The Program has a multicultural perspective and provides the opportunity to students from different countries to cooperate and develop multicultural skills. The intervention is based on a conceptual model for enhancing positive development, resilience, social and emotional skills, and competence. The interventions were implemented on individual and system levels over four consecutive years, including web-based teachers’ training and supervision, seminars for parents, and classroom implementation. Furthermore, collaboration amongst schools and educational settings was highlighted, in the form of networking at national and international level. Based on the evaluation results, the necessity for further development and implementation of programs for the promotion of resilience and well-being during unsettling times is discussed.

The main purpose of this study case is to investigate the contribution of the school community to the improvement of the school. In that context, a two-phase research was conducted. In the first phase, the self-evaluation process was implemented during the first year of the research with the participation of the school community. An overall picture of the school was created, with its strong and weak points reflected in the school's final self-evaluation report. Upon the completion of the school self-evaluation process the school community decided on the implementation of actions in order to reduce a number of dysfunctional behaviors, such as bullying incidents that occurred in the school on the part of some students. The school actions and the relevant results constituted the second phase of the research work. The results showed that some of the dysfunctional behaviors were found to be decreased to a statistically significant level after action was taken by the school community.

The objective of this study was to design an instrument to evaluate parental involvement in the education of their children, and, subsequently, to investigate the content validity of that instrument. The questions on the questionnaire have been written according to the dimensions that shape the construct of parental participation: parenting, learning supervision, communication, parental networks, and relationships with the community. Further, for the study of content validity, expert judgment has been used, and the Aiken V coefficient has been estimated. The results indicate a wide degree of agreement among the judges, showing evidence of content validity regarding the criteria of clarity, relevance, and sufficiency of the questions with Aiken V values that ranged between 0.73 and 1, with confidence intervals of 99 %. It was concluded that the instrument can be used successfully in the evaluation of parental involvement in education.

The emotional lives of teaching at the universities have remained under research.   This study used a qualitative approach to investigate the emotional lives of lecturers teaching at two selected universities. This study sought to identify, understand and interpret the emotional lives of teaching with interpretive phenomenology research design. In purposefully selected two universities, 12 lecturers participated in the study. Semi-structured individual interviews were employed, the data generated were interpreted, the emerged themes were: work condition, resources and accreditation panel, trade union and government disagreement, and experienced emotions and effects on participants. A further interpretation of the emerged themes revealed that the emotional lives of the participants are dependent on teaching resources, academic war and convenient behaviour. The dependence is thereby suggestive that change in the management of teaching resources, academic war and behaviour of lecturers could positively influence the nature of their emotional lives. The paper used two universities, which lays the foundation for subsequent studies because this is the first study to examine the emotional lives of teaching in Nigerian universities. The study made recommendations for further studies and drew implications for policy and practice.

Studies have documented widespread academic disengagement in middle and high school students. This disengagement has been tied to a myriad of negative outcomes, including failure to graduate from high school and transition into college and meaningful vocations. Supporting adolescents in cultivating a sense of beyond-the-self purpose is one factor that may combat student disengagement. MPower is a program designed to cultivate beyond-the-self purpose in an effort to promote student engagement and completion of high school (Klein et al., 2019). In a recent quantitative study, MPower participants compared to controls demonstrated a higher GPA, BTS purpose, self-efficacy, and decreased performance approach and performance avoidance goal orientations. In the current qualitative descriptive study, 11th and 12th grade (N=25) students in the Northeastern region of the United States, described their experiences in the MPower program. Three themes associated with the transformative aspects of MPower emerged from focus group data: 1) practice in strategic goal planning, 2) engagement in mentoring relationships, and 3) increased social support within a community. Because fostering youth purpose engenders many promotive and protective factors, these findings hold important implications for implementing similar programs more widely.

The present study aims at identifying the relationship between social competence and the level of emotional intelligence among teachers of resource rooms for learning disabilities in Amman. The study population consisted of various educational directorates within the capital Amman governorate. They were 212 teachers – 31 males and 181 females. The sample of the study consisted of randomly chosen 60 teachers – 15 males and 45 females. They were tested first with Bar-On Model of Social and Emotional Intelligence, which is a sixty-paragraph self-assessment scale consisting of six aspects: social competence, personal competence, adaptability, stress management, general mood and positive impression. A researcher-designed social competence scale was also employed for teachers of resource rooms with learning disabilities in regular schools, which consisted of six aspects of social skills: expression of emotions, non-verbal communication, conversation, friendship, listening and participation. It has been found that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between the level of emotional intelligence and social competence in the sample of the study. In addition, there is a statistically significant relationship between the level of emotional intelligence and social competence among members of the sample due to the sex variable in favour of females.

In this study, a cluster analysis was performed by creating a data set from students' personality traits and academic procrastination behaviours. Correlation analysis was done to examine the relationship between the variables, and the characteristics of the formed clusters and the association of the clusters with the perceived socioeconomic status were examined. Cluster analysis is a simple and practical method for classifying a set of complex data based on certain variables and making them more meaningful and using the results as an aid to decision-making. Clustering algorithms handle such data effectively, making it more meaningful. Following the analysis, it was revealed that two clusters had formed. The first of the clusters includes 65.2 % of the sample population; the level of procrastination and the mean score of neurotic personality traits were calculated higher than the other cluster. The remaining part of the sample population (34.8 %) constitutes the second cluster. The mean scores of studying systematically habits and extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience personality traits of the students forming this cluster are higher than the other cluster. No association was observed between the clusters and the perceived socioeconomic levels of the students. The distributions of socioeconomic levels within the clusters are similar to each other. When the correlations of these variables are examined; positive relationships were found between the level of procrastination and neurotic personality traits. Procrastination behaviour and neurotic personality traits were also negatively correlated with other variables.

The COVID-19 pandemic required teachers to quickly adapt to changes in teaching likely impacting teachers’ emotional exhaustion and feelings of teaching efficacy. Further, teachers’ experience in the classroom may have shaped how they responded to the crisis and changes. Although teachers faced these unprecedented shifts, it is possible that both internal (i.e., hope) and external (i.e., social support) sources of support may act as promotive factors for teacher outcomes. The present study describes how teachers’ emotional exhaustion, teaching self-efficacy, and supports (hope and colleague) were associated with one another one year into the pandemic. Associations were compared across early-/mid-career and veteran teachers. Results showed higher emotional exhaustion and lower hope for early-/mid-career teachers compared to veteran teachers, and a negative relation between emotional exhaustion and hope for early-/mid-career teachers. Pre-pandemic emotional exhaustion predicted hope during the pandemic for all teachers. Implications include supporting teacher well-being and career longevity considering acute stress.

At the beginning of primary school, young children need to adapt academically, socially, and emotionally to their new school environment. Enjoying going to school and becoming socially integrated are important preconditions for successful learning. However, children from disadvantaged families have fewer resources and receive less support, and such deficits can result in lower attainment, negative emotions, and lower well-being. In recent years, interest in emotions and well-being in school has grown in educational research. However, studies analyzing the affective characteristics of disadvantaged students, especially in primary school, are still scarce. In this study, we analyzed reciprocal relationships between school enjoyment, social integration, and achievement using cross-lagged structural equation modeling (Grades 1 and 2), while controlling for family background and sex. We used data from the National Educational Panel Study in Germany (NEPS; N = 4,986). Results showed positive effects of school enjoyment on achievement and social integration on school enjoyment. Additionally, a better home learning environment had positive effects on school enjoyment and social integration in Grade 1. Effects of socioeconomic and migration background on school enjoyment and social integration were not significant. Our results show no evidence that educationally disadvantaged students are additionally disadvantaged in their school enjoyment or social integration at the beginning of primary school.  

Various investigations have applied meditation protocols in the school context, with beneficial effects. Transcendental meditation, however, received little attention in primary school settings and few controlled studies are available. The present study is aimed: 1) to investigate the implementation of a school protocol (Quiet Time-QT) based on Transcendental Meditation ™ in a primary school setting 2) to test its efficacy in promoting strengths and resilience in children, using a controlled research, with a cross over design. 92 students attending fourth and fifth class of a primary school were assigned to either the QT intervention, or to a waiting list condition. Children assigned to the waiting list received the QT protocol after few months. Before and after the intervention children were evaluated by their teachers using the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA). A Repeated Measures MANOVA was applied to compare the two groups. After the QT intervention children in the experimental condition showed fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties (SDQ) compared to children in the waiting list. An overall positive effect of QT was observed in the total sample in improving children’s strengths and emotional well-being. Participants enjoyed the practice of meditation in the school setting. Conclusions: the results of this controlled investigation showed that the QT school protocol is feasible in the school setting, and it yielded improvements in children’s strengths and well-being. Meditation programs could be easily included in the educational system to sustain children positive development.

One of the life areas under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is university education. As it becomes more prevalent with its various versions, it shapes undergraduates' psychological well-being profoundly. It is necessary to understand how COVID-19-related stress impacts their mental life. The purpose of the study was to examine whether COVID-19 burnout and cognitive emotion regulation had mediating roles in the relationship between COVID-19-related stress and life satisfaction. Three hundred sixty-four Turkish undergraduates participated in the study. Mediational analyses showed that both adaptive and maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation had interplaying roles in the link between COVID-19-related stress and life satisfaction, unlike COVID-19 burnout. Yet, COVID-19-related stress indirectly affected life satisfaction since COVID-19 burnout increased maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies while decreasing adaptive ones concurrently. The findings are crucial for mental health professionals whose aim is to develop necessary psychological interventions for undergraduates to increase their life satisfaction levels during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the work situations that education professionals perceived as stressful during the first wave of COVID-19 infections, and their possible variation according to demographic characteristics and working conditions. Empirical, quantitative, ex-post-facto, cross-sectional study was carried out, in which participated 9,058 teachers (86.9% women; M age = 41.08; SD = 8.82) who completed a semi-structured questionnaire of demographic and labor information and a scale of teacher stressors in the context of a pandemic. It was used Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) with post hoc Bonferroni contrasts to study the variations in the perception of stress according to demographic and work variables. The MANOVAs indicated significant variations in the perception of stress according to the teachers' gender, age, marital status, having dependents (children and parents), the level of education of the teacher, the employment situation (permanent vs. transitory), teaching seniority, the type of educational management, the number of students in charge and the number of weekly working hours (for all cases, Hotelling's F with p <.001).