The Employability and Career Development of Finance and Trade College Graduates

Employability is a vital aspect for human development in career fields. In order to explore the factors affecting the employability of finance and trade graduates in higher vocational colleges, the researchers focused on human development in educational settings and conducted a piece of quantitative research within nine higher vocational colleges. The study uses descriptive statistical analysis to demonstrate the sample structure, using t-test, rank sum test, and chi-square test to assess the variables. It also adopts exploratory factor analysis to identify the classification of both educational practice and employability. Then, a multivariable linear regression model was adopted to examine the relationships between three main factors as well as the employability and career development of finance and trade graduates. The findings imply that the soft skills and basic skills of finance and trade college graduates have immensely improved through educational practice; graduates with high motivation for learning could enhance their soft skills and more internships or club engagement brings stronger professional skills. Based on these results, higher vocational colleges, enterprises, policymakers, teachers, and finance and trade graduates will benefit from the findings related to the reform of educational practice for strengthening graduate employability and human development. The originality of this paper is the conceptual evolution of finance and trade college graduate employability, as well as the empirical analysis on educational practice, student engagement, and family background affecting their human development.

Teacher's Emotional Display Affects Students' Perceptions of Teacher's Competence, Feelings, and Productivity in Online Small-Group Discussions

Teacher's emotions have been shown to be highly important in the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning. There is a recognized need to examine the essential role of teacher's emotions in students' academic achievement. However, the influence of teacher's displays of emotions on students' outcomes in small-group interaction activities, especially in the online environment, has received little attention in prior research. The aim of the present study was to explore the relationship between teacher's different emotional displays and students' perceptions of the teacher's competence, as well as students' collaborative feelings and productivity in online small-group discussions. Using a three-level between-subjects design, 74 participants were randomly divided into four-member groups comprising a teacher and three other participants. All the groups were asked to discuss an open-ended realistic problem using online software, during which the teacher's display of emotions varied (positive vs. negative vs. neutral). The participants' self-reported questionnaire data (perception of the teacher's competence, students' feeling of pleasure, collaborative satisfaction, and willingness to continue collaborating) and productivity (number of effective ideas expressed within a given time) were measured to compare the participants who were exposed to different emotional displays. As expected, the results showed that the participants who received the teacher's positive emotional display reported that they experienced higher levels of pleasure during the task. However, in contrast to our expectations, those under the negative emotional display condition showed a significantly higher level of productivity in the group task. In addition, compared to emotional display, the participants' perceptions of the teacher's competence were rated significantly higher under the neutral condition, and they reported higher levels of collaborative satisfaction and greater willingness to continue collaborating with their group. The findings have the potential benefit of informing educational practice on whether teachers should display their emotions in a small-group discussion or how they should display emotions following adjustment for the relative aim of the teaching activities.

Construction and practice of a comprehensive nursing skills course with simulation in an RN-BSN program in China: a quasi-experimental study

Background Simulation has been widely used in the teaching of pre-licensed nursing students and has shown positive results. However, there is limited evidence regarding the application of a comprehensive nursing course with simulation for Associated Degree in Nursing (ADN)-prepared nurses with different work experience times. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the satisfaction, self-confidence, and perceptions of scenario simulation among Chinese nurses in a comprehensive nursing skills course in an RN-BSN program. Methods A single-group post-test approach was used in the current study. Participants that completed a comprehensive nursing skills course with simulation in an RN-BSN program were enrolled. Results The mean satisfaction, self-confidence, educational practice, and simulation designs scores were rated highly. Self-confidence (p = 0.002), active learning (p = 0.020), collaboration (p = 0.030), support (p = 0.008), and problem-solving (p = 0.007) were significantly higher among students with more work experience compared to those with less experience. Then, four themes were analyzed: enthusiasm for learning, ability to experience different feelings during role-play, hybrid teaching format, and simulation fidelity. Conclusions Results demonstrated that a comprehensive nursing skills course with simulation might improve Chinese ADN-prepared nurses’ satisfaction and self-confidence in learning. Nurses with work experience gave a high rate to the scenario simulation, demonstrating that simulation can be widely applicable for students with different characteristics. Finally, the teaching strategy in the present study can be applied to more RN-BSN programs.

Playful Education and Innovative Gamified Learning Approaches

In the recent decades, there has been a significant investment in the incorporation of games in the educational practice. This has taken either the form of game-based learning or serious gaming. A literature review on gaming and education results in numerous works tackling different aspects of the approach. Even a simple search on the Web on gaming and learning produces multi-million results. In this work, we try to touch not only the surface of this approach and provide typical game-based learning evaluation results but also to explore its inner workings (offering a modest mixed philosophical and science aspect) and to provide an even more concrete foundation for a playful education.

Methodology to evaluate school buildings. Educational applications

In this work, an innovative methodology to assess the security, habitability and functionality requirements of school buildings have been designed. The objectives are two: to design an evaluative methodology to assess technically the satisfaction of the basic requirements: safety, habitability and functionality that exist in public school buildings, and apply the methodology developed in university teaching so that students of the disciplines related to construction are able to justify, based on the regulations, their project decisions and intervention. The methodology is developed in the subject Applied Construction of the Master in Architecture of the Rey Juan Carlos University. The main result is that, from the detection of a real problem, such as the state of conservation of school buildings, we can developed an educational practice that helps Master students to ensure that their projects comply with current regulations. One of the most relevant conclusions is that the teaching applications of a real research, offer a provided value at academic level and a realistic view of the current constructions. Furthermore, stress the importance of both planning in accordance with the regulations and ensuring the conservation of the buildings

Determination of the content of a construct "volunteer activity" in educational practice: the experience of theoretical comprehension and empirical reconstruction

Introduction. Volunteering is becoming more and more important in the life of civil society and for the formation of human capital, but at the same time there is a lack of comprehensive scientific practice-oriented psychological-pedagogical research on the concept of "volunteer activity". The purpose of this work is to determine the actual effectiveness of an interdisciplinary study of the psychological-pedagogical concept of “volunteer activity” in the educational space. Methods. Empirical data were obtained using the methods of psychosemantics and psycholinguistics (verbal self-descriptions "My volunteer activity" (schoolchildren and students) and "I am an organizer of volunteer activities" (teachers-organizers, leaders of volunteer centers/teams) were used; compilation of an associative dictionary, a "Personal Differential" technique. The data underwent the procedure of content analysis with the extraction of semantic units. To process the results obtained, an iterative method of cluster analysis – k-means clustering – was used; a comparative analysis of fields was implemented. The empirical study involved schoolchildren (N = 44, aged 14-17) and university students (N = 432, aged 18-20) engaged in volunteering and organizers of volunteer activities (N = 37, aged 35-40) from the Altai Territory. The total sample consisted of 910 people. Research results. The scheme of the interdisciplinary study has been tested, which makes it possible to construct the semantic space of a psychological-pedagogical concept of "volunteer activity". For each sample of respondents, two clusters were obtained: schoolchildren and university students (p≤0.01) – the measure of proximity varies from 4.59 to 9.52 for the first cluster and from 4.19 to 7.57 – for the second one; teachers-organizers (p≤0.05) – the measure of proximity varies from 2.67 to 4.89 for the first cluster and from 1.72 to 3.36 – for the second one; volunteer leaders (p≤0.05) – the measure of proximity varies from 2.67 to 4.33 for the first cluster and from 2.35 to 4.73 – for the second one. Significant differences and points of contact of semantic fields were revealed. The average values of the scales according to the "Personal differential" technique are as follows: for schoolchildren – 5, for university students – 16. Conclusion. The prospects for the implementation of this study are outlined, which consist in the empirical generalization of the continuity of implementation of volunteer practices; the structural analysis of psychological-pedagogical technologies and interactive forms of education, the development of a set of tools for assessing the effectiveness of the results of implementation of volunteer programs, the creation of an electronic database of the most effective and adequate practices.

New concepts of media science in the sociocultural system of the information civilization

The object of analysis in this article is the integration process of a number of humanities studying the media sphere of the information age. A new synthetic science of the globalized world is formed through integration – mediology, which studies different directions of human spiritual life in the digital revolution. Since the study is interdisciplinary in nature, the methodological basis for the analysis is a conceptual-systemic approach, which makes it possible to use both general scientific and cultural-historical, social-analytical, and contextual-competence research methods. The study is based on the analysis of different approaches of foreign and Russian scientists (philosophers, cultural experts, sociologists, teachers) to the problems of media science in its historical context and modern status. The main research result is the proof that global transformations of the era in the humanities and, accordingly, in the education system have led to new research objects: the theory and history of media culture, media philosophy and media policy, media pedagogy, and media management. The author comes to the conclusion that over the past quarter-century, a new complex media science has developed in the humanitarian sphere, the theory of which is significantly ahead of educational practice, which still has many problem areas in media pedagogy as a factor of forming a citizen of the globalized world.

Researching Posthumanizing Creativity: Expanding, Shifting, and Disrupting

This article explores the affordances, challenges, and imperfections of researching “post”humanizing creativity, by offering two exemplars, sharing how we walk the talk, so to speak, as well as how we have been rewarded and challenged. This is all within the larger umbrella of exploring how a posthumanizing creative approach can expand pedagogical and methodological possibilities for educators, facilitators, environments, and other actants, and ultimately to see how this can disrupt established cultural and educational practice and research to address the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Project Based Learning: from school to university

Необходимым условием существования инновационной экономики является модернизация системы образования как основы социального развития общества. Чтобы развить личностные качества обучающихся, актуальные для решения перспективных задач реального сектора экономики, нужно использовать в образовательной практике технологии, направленные на формирование навыков XXI века. В последние годы большое внимание уделяется развитию метода проектного обучения. Необходимо проанализировать природу данного метода и его основных компонентов, чтобы определить целесообразные способы их применения для школьной и вузовской практики. Целью исследования является анализ особенностей применения проектного обучения на различных этапах образовательной системы. Актуальность данного исследования связана с ростом трансформационных процессов в образовании, направленных на усиление его практикоориентированности. Гипотеза исследования опирается на положение, что увеличение доли проектных технологий при их целенаправленном педагогическом сопровождении в системе образования будет способствовать развитию профессиональных и личностных качеств будущих специалистов, делая их более конкурентоспособными и востребованными на рынке труда. Основное предназначение метода проектов состоит в предоставлении студентам возможности самостоятельного приобретения знаний и умений в процессе решения разноуровневых профессиональных задач. A necessary condition for the existence of an innovative economy is the modernization of the education system as the basis for the social development of society. In order to develop the personal qualities of students that are relevant for solving promising problems in the real sector of the economy, it is necessary to use technologies in educational practice aimed at developing skills of the 21st century. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the development of the project-based teaching method. It is necessary to analyze the nature of this method and its main components in order to determine the appropriate ways of their application for school and university practice. The aim of the study is to analyze the features of the application of project-based learning at various stages of the educational system. The relevance of this study is associated with the growth of transformational processes in education, aimed at strengthening its practice orientation. The research hypothesis is based on the position that an increase in the share of design technologies with their purposeful pedagogical support in the education system will contribute to the development of professional and personal qualities of future specialists, making them more competitive and in demand in the labor market. The main purpose of the project method is to provide students with the opportunity to independently acquire knowledge and skills in the process of solving professional problems of different levels.