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The main goal of the one semester long intervention for first-year Bachelor of Social Services students was to enable them to increase their awareness of a variety of cultures and practices encountered in social pedagogical work and to support the development of their ability to interact empathically with clients.

The aim of this article is to describe an educational intervention focused on teaching Qualified Empathic skills to social work students in higher education at Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland. We introduce the concept of Qualified Empathy to describe professional empathic working skills and define it as: Qualified Empathy requires compassion for empathic action and it includes the ability for professional self-reflection, emotional skills and a healthy set of boundaries. Qualified Empathy encompasses the ability to tell the difference between sympathy and empathy, as it includes the capacity to use compassion to act in an empathic way in professional contexts (Raatikainen et al., 2017). The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise?

The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

In this study, as in all studies, some limitations need to be taken into account. One limitation of this study is the size and “nature of data”. Secondly, challenges with the concept of Qualified Empathy need to be addressed and more research is needed to define it more concretely. Even so, as it is a new concept, we need more discussion on the differences in the definition of empathy and Qualified Empathy. However, this study offers one new perspective for discussion which is the need for empathy training, in social work education practices and in the field. An important ethical aspect of research emphasizes that its implementation must not be to the detriment of the people being researched (Juuti and Puusa, 2020, pp. 168).

Our findings demonstrate that educational interventions can improve students' empathy skills to more qualified skills. We emphasized that maintaining the skill demands continuous reflection as a lifelong process. This article provides an overview of an educational intervention to improve students' Qualified Empathy skills and suggests a definition for educators to frame the teaching of professional empathy or empathy in a professional context – especially in the social work context. Furthermore, with this educational intervention in social work, we offer a way to support the students to – not only – have a more professional approach to empathy but also to find a way to establish a more emotionally sustainable environment for professionals in social services. It is essential for social work education to focus on the growth of Qualified Empathy in students through supervision and guidance which supports their professional competence. By doing so, we contribute to the development of more sustainable working environments in the social work context.

Professional empathy is seen as an important factor in building a socially sustainable society from the perspectives of employees, clients and patients. We noticed that it is important to allow time and space for the learners to internalize the concept of Qualified Empathy. When we allow for this, students begin to recognize and assign more value to it and, as we suggest, they become more adept in their interactions and work with clients.

The study was a case study, designed to explore the students' experiences of their one semester long educational intervention (n = 20). Our research question was: How do students construct Qualified Empathy as a dimension of their own professional expertise? The results of the study demonstrate the progress areas of the students' Qualified Empathy skills. The development stages in the three progress areas are: (1) from emotional reaction to emotional response, (2) from understanding to empathic acting and (3) from client perspective to a more systemic approach. Implications of the results for Social Services students are discussed.

This action research study reports on an important unit of study having evidence of success. The paper discusses how students in a social studies classroom setting may be encouraged to develop and display empathy for individuals who are impacted by hurricane disasters. It uses aspects of the documentary “When the Levees Broke” in collaboration with the “Teaching the Levees Module” and several technology based classroom resources. The findings indicate that as students contextualized the impact of Hurricane Katrina and similar natural disasters on human populations they begin to develop and display empathy. The students who were involved in this investigation also were able to apply principles of social justice which facilitated reflective thinking as they used hindsight to analyze and discuss the context of this natural disaster

This study explored the effect of mathematics teaching quality on mathematics achievement among undergraduate students, using the SERVQUAL model.

The sample comprised of 320 first-year undergraduate students of a public university in Ghana. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was run in Amos (v.23) to test the various hypotheses.

The study concluded that the tangible aspect of the SERVQUAL model (service quality), which is very instrument in some service industries such as the airline, had no significant effect on mathematics achievement. Mathematics teaching reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, however, had significant positive effects on mathematics achievement among undergraduate students.

The study assessed the effects of the individual dimensions of SERVQUAL on mathematics achievement, and it was realized that the tangible dimension had no significant effect. Tangibles may however compliment the other dimensions and is therefore imperative to also assess the effect of service quality (as a higher/second order variable) with the five dimensions as its first-order variables.

Human resources (lecturers) were seen as a strategic tool in enhancing students' academic performance and mathematics performance to be specific. Management of universities is therefore expected to invest in building, training and developing their human resources for an enhanced academic performance of students, especially in mathematics.

Although some past studies have applied SERVQUAL to teaching and learning researches, attention was largely focused on the measurement or assessment of teaching quality using SERVQUAL, with little attention on the effect of SERVQUAL on an outcome variable.

Defined as perceiving the past via the lens of former peoples, historical empathy engenders rich cognitive and affective understandings. Drawing on Ricoeur's hermeneutics (1981, 2004), this paper departs from previous work on historical empathy by conceiving empathy as dialogically mediated by sociocultural and narrative perceptions.

This hermeneutic phenomenology explores eight adolescents' engagements with primary sources from the Second World War.

This study reveals the power of empathy to draw the students into the past and to investigate sources. Alternately, the students struggled with fanciful elaborations and overidentifications with historical figures.

Cultivating wise judgments begins with accepting the inherent link between students' historicity and historical empathy and then teaching students to wisely interpret.

This study broadens historical empathy's framework to include Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophies of narrative and history.

This work explores the creation and purposes of an inquiry about Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino revolutionary and sometimes United States ally, as a means to discuss the value of both inquiry and historical empathy in bridging history instruction and civic life. Though history is often identified as a means to foster democratic dispositions, learning can often feel disconnected from students' lived experiences, let alone directly connect to their out-of-classroom circumstances. Teaching with historical empathy allows students to affectively engage with content, resulting in complex reasoning and content acquisition.

The authors explain an original inquiry that uses the Inquiry Design Model (IDM) and historical empathy to help students complicate Emilio Aguinaldo and his legacy. By combining historical empathy and the inquiry model, the authors structured their work for practitioner use but also as a way to draw on rarely emphasized content in US or World history courses.

In using this model, students will be able to apply their learning in a civic engagement task related to modern questions of US geopolitics.

The authors offer and explore the process of an original inquiry as a way to help practitioners and scholars consider how to create other such rigorous opportunities for students to practice global citizenship.

The purpose of this paper is to make the case for bringing compassion to students in educational settings, preschool through graduate school (PK-20).

First, the author defines what is meant by “compassion” and differentiates it from the related constructs. Next, the author discusses the importance of bringing compassion into education, thinking specifically about preschool, K-12 (elementary and middle school/junior high/high school), college students, and graduate students (e.g. law, medical, nurses, counselors and therapists-in-training). The author then reviews the scant empirical literature on compassion in education and makes recommendations for future research. In the final section, the author makes specific and practical recommendations for the classroom (e.g. how to teach and evaluate compassion in PK-20).

While there is a fair amount of research on compassion with college students, and specifically regarding compassion for oneself, as the author reviews in this paper, the field is wide open in terms of empirical research with other students and examining other forms of compassion.

This is not a formal review or meta-analysis.

This paper will be a useful resource for teachers and those interested in PK-20 education.

This paper highlights the problems and opportunities for bringing compassion into education settings.

To date, no review of compassion in PK-20 exists.

The emphasis on primary sources and disciplinary literacy skills in not only the Common Core State Standards, but other national curricula (i.e. College Board exams and the NCSS C3 Framework) requires that teachers continue to find ways to integrate these skills into their elementary and secondary classrooms. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper introduces a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates primary source reading skills and the arts to cultivate student literacy and creativity though the writing of found poems.

Found poetry activities based on social studies primary sources allow students to practice literacy skills, engage more deeply with social studies content, and also may encourage the development of historical empathy toward the experiences and perspectives of distant peoples and events.

After reading and analyzing primary sources, students can create and present their found poems in diverse formats which allows for student expression and creativity in the classroom. Teachers can easily modify found poetry activities to meet the needs of diverse learners.

This paper fulfills the identified need to increase literacy skills and incorporate more student participation in the classroom. Using the strategy of student-inspired found poems, primary sources become more tangible and meaningful to students. Found poems offer yet another way to integrate the arts into social studies education.

Empathy is part of what makes us human and humane, and it has become a core component of the Social Awareness competency of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) (CASEL, 2019). SEL fosters the understanding of others’ emotions, is the basis of Theory of Mind skills and frames the development of empathy. The purpose of this paper is to trace the links between empathy development and social and emotional learning when using real versus virtual environments. Empathy is a uniquely human emotion facilitated by abstract thinking and language. Virtual play is a teaching tool for acquiring prosocial behaviors. And finally, human-mediated (traditional and virtual) play is most favorable for SEL growth. Recognition of emotions such as empathy and other socio-communication skills have been taught to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Therefore, technology can be a venue for acquiring empathy.

This paper uses a qualitative interpretive methodology to advocate for the use of technology with human mediation to teach Social and Emotional Learning skills, based on the premise that cognitive and social-emotional development occurs synergistically and mediated by speech and interaction with the environment.

Technology is best seen as an instrument of assessing and teaching socio-emotional skills, but not as the only means to an end, because what makes us human can only be taught within an ecology of human interaction in real-life situations.

This paper reviews previous research works (both empirical and theoretical) that bring to light the connection between socio-emotional development, specifically empathy development, and virtual environments.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of empathy in the student service experience. Taking a dyadic perspective, both students’ and staff’s perceptions are analyzed to determine if empathy matters to both actors alike; and which differences in perceptions about the role of empathy between these actors exist.

The authors adopt a multi-method approach and used data from 256 usable survey responses from 11 higher education service providers in Singapore. Empathy was operationalized by six cognitive and affective independent variables and multiple multivariate analyses are applied, such as multivariate analysis of variance, discriminant analysis and multiple regression analysis.

Results show that both students and staff alike evaluate empathy as important in the co-created service experience. The provision of individualized attention to students to positively influence student experience in learning was deemed important by both staff and students. Yet, there are also distinct differences. For students, it is essential that staff members have students’ best interests at heart; for staff members, knowledge of students’ needs and show of care and concern are important.

Students and staff perceive empathy in higher education service provision differently. Interestingly, whilst staff think caring for students is important, students feel that too much care and concern from staff has a negative effect on their experience. Hence, too much care and concern might cause potential issues with the students’ perception of “over-servicing” which might manifest as “spoon-feeding.” Instead, students are asking for individualized and professionalized attention to be taken seriously and to be involved in the co-creation of the education service experience.

This study advances the understanding of affective and cognitive aspects of empathy and their influence on students’ service experiences.

Despite an ever-diversifying student population, it is still commonplace for US public schools to present Christmas concerts. These concerts can force minority students to choose between their own religious convictions and school participation. For some students, participation in public-school Christmas concerts can damage their personal identity and assimilate them into ways of being that are not their own. This study aims to test a method for teaching preservice teachers to empathize with minority students.

Using the framework of action research, the study followed a one-group pretest-posttest design. Participants (N = 19), all of whom identified as some kind of Christian, were asked to perform a concert featuring Satanic Worship prayers and a children’s Christmas song. This intervention was meant to induce empathy for religious minority students who feel uncomfortable performing Christmas songs because they are antithetical to their own faiths. Participants’ perceptions of public-school Christmas music performance was measured before and after the intervention.

The intervention effectively increased empathy for minority students. As a result, participants expressed altered teaching philosophies that were inclusive of religious minority perspectives.

This study demonstrates the effectiveness of empathy-fostering interventions as tools for teaching teachers to work with diverse student populations. The intervention tested in this study is of the researcher’s original design.