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The purpose of this paper is to provide for Western educators of international Chinese and Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) students the first integrated review of kiasu, the “fear of missing out”, and its consequences for learning, teaching, and future research.

A review of the economic importance of international Chinese students is provided, followed by consideration of the pedagogical consequences of restricted participation in educational activities by the so-called “silent Chinese student”. Examination of research on international Chinese students and their source cultures established significant gaps and misunderstandings in the generally accepted understandings of CHCs, especially with respect to the actual practices used in Western and Chinese teaching. More importantly, the participation-related implications of kiasu within the context of broader cultural characteristics are described and implications drawn for teaching practices and research.

While many Western university teachers are aware of the “silent Chinese student” phenomenon, few understand its underlying reasons, especially the kiasu mindset and its relationship to other cultural elements. Kiasu actively impedes the interaction of international Chinese students with their teachers and restricts collaboration with peers, thereby limiting educational achievement. Specific tactics for amelioration are reviewed and recommendations are provided, while an agenda for future research is outlined.

Western teachers need to normalise and encourage Chinese student participation in class activities using tactics that have been demonstrated to improve outcomes for Chinese students, but that also assist students generally. These include both within-class and electronic interaction tools.

More culturally sensitive understanding of the impact of cultural differences on teaching effectiveness. While some effective responses to these already exist, further research is needed to expand the skill-set of Western teachers who work with international Chinese students.

This paper provides the first systematic integration of the kiasu phenomenon with educational practice and research.

Employability is a major educational goal, but employability programmes emphasise skill development, while employers value performance. Education acts as a model for employment, so educational performance assessment should be aligned with employment models. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between educational and workplace performance, especially the role of Citizenship Performance within educational settings.

Students in an introductory university course rated their own personality, and weeks later assessed one another's Citizenship Performance. The relationship of these ratings to academic Task Performance was analysed with structural equation modelling.

Citizenship Performance was correlated with academic Task Performance, at a similar level to that found in workplace studies. Further, Citizenship Performance mediated the prediction of Task Performance by the personality dimension Conscientiousness, a major predictor of academic performance.

Use of separate raters for the various ratings and the study's longitudinal design provides assurance that results are not inflated due to measurement arteficiality, instead probably underestimating correlation strength.

Rather than treating employability skills as an additional educational component, university teachers should actively foster student Citizenship Performance within their courses. This will better prepare students for employment and in the short term will aid their studies. Attending to Citizenship Performance also provides benefits to students who are higher on Conscientiousness without restricting access to education based on personality.

This is the first study to demonstrate the relevance of Citizenship Performance within educational settings, or to explain how Conscientiousness affects academic performance.

Neuroscience research on human motivation in the workplace is still in its infancy. There is a large industrial and organizational (IO) psychology literature containing numerous theories of motivation, relating to prosocial and productive, and, less so, “darker” antisocial and counter-productive, behaviors. However, the development of a viable over-arching theoretical framework has proved elusive. In this chapter, we argue that basic neuropsychological systems related to approach, avoidance, and their conflict, may provide such a framework, one which we discuss in terms of the Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST) of personality. We argue that workplace behaviors may be understood by reference to the motivational types that are formed from the combination of basic approach, avoidance, and conflict-related personalities. We offer suggestions for future research to explore workplace behaviors in terms of the wider literature on the neuroscience of motivation.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the combined influence that soft skills and Graduate Point Average (GPA) achievements have on the employability of higher education (HE) graduates, and the possible mitigating effects that score attainments have on some ex ante issues, like the gender asymmetries existing in labour market, or the great difference between some knowledge fields, regarding their unemployment rates.

The methodology used is a probit model, performed on a sample of 1,054 HE graduates, coming from a middle-sized European university.

The results show: a clear positive influence of the GPA on job finding odds; that some generic competencies improve this probabilities but another ones act as penalties; and that GPA and systemic competencies enhancement initiatives (at an individual level or at HE policy institutions level) could act as attenuators for the gender inequality or for the low recruitment perspectives existing on some knowledge fields like humanities or social sciences.

A wide scientific literature can be currently found on generic competencies and their influence on the employability odds, but the results regarding GPA attainments are still too heterogeneous and scarcely explored. On the other hand, there’s a non-solved controversy in the literature about the influence of the GPA results on the odds that a HE graduate has to obtain a job: do GPA signal correctly the best candidates? Do current employers prefer competencies scores over GPA attainments? This paper will contribute to clarify these questions.