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Globally, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning in schools has become an increasingly popular and growing area of interest for educational reform. This prompts discussions about Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM), which is shifting educational paradigms toward art integration in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. Authentic tasks (i.e. real-world problems) address complex or multistep questions and offer opportunities to integrate disciplines across science and arts, such as in STEAM. The main purpose of this study is to better understand the STEAM instructional programs and student learning offered by nonprofit organizations and by publicly funded schools in Ontario, Canada.

This study addresses the following research question: what interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary skills do students learn through different models of STEAM education in nonprofit and in-school contexts? We carried out a qualitative case study in which we conducted interviews, observations and data analysis of curriculum documents. A total of 103 participants (19 adults – director and instructors/teachers – and 84 students) participated in the study. The four STEAM programs comparatively taught both discipline specific and beyond discipline character-building skills. The skills taught included: critical thinking and problem solving; collaboration and communication; and creativity and innovation.

The main findings on student learning focused on students developing perseverance and adaptability, and them learning transferable skills.

In contrast to other research on STEAM, this study identifies both the enablers and the tensions. Also, we stress ongoing engagement with stakeholders (focus group), which has the potential to impact change in teaching and teacher development, as well as in related policies.

This chapter outlines potential steps to take in designing active learning experiences based on several theories underlying the learning process. The chapter examines theories of learning and instruction including information processing, schema acquisition, and cognitive load theory. Next follows an explanation of how these theories support problem-centered learning as well as a rationale for the need to help learners develop domain-general, flexible problem-solving skills that will transfer to future needs and contexts. The second half of the chapter focuses on designing active learning experiences based on the selection of real-world problems as the foundation for learning, activating prior knowledge, demonstration of the process or concept, multiple opportunities for practice with relevant scaffolding, and the chance to integrate that knowledge into the learners’ own context based on M. D. Merrill’s (2002) First Principles of Instruction. Examples of assessments, strategies, and activities to foster active, problem-centered learning drawn from the literature are also provided.

This paper explores the idea of the prudent entrepreneurial self, through re-conceptualizing prudence into the domain of entrepreneurial education, to unite the two processes of becoming enterprising and entrepreneurial. It is argued that developing a capacity for prudence among graduates involves past, present and conjecture forms of knowledge that the authors find in the interplay between individuation and social awareness.

Building on Palmer's idea of wholeness, the authors discuss six poles of paradoxes in entrepreneurial education and in conjunction establish a philosophical argument for the idea of stimulating the development of prudence as fundamentally important to contemporary notions of entrepreneurial education.

The paper presents a model to develop a schema that moves students towards becoming prudent entrepreneurial selves. The model rests on two interrelated developmental processes – individuation and social awareness – conditional for developing the three forms of knowledge (past, present and conjecture) that makes up prudence where developing prudence is a means to handle or cope with the unknown.

This paper argues that for enterprise and entrepreneurship education to realize their potential contributions, both the relationships between each field and the overarching purpose that ties the fields together need to be rethought, and the poles of paradoxes need to be connected to further develop both fields and creating wholeness for the emerging scholarly discipline.

To educate towards the prudent entrepreneurial self means educating towards an unknown end where student development aims to meet both the objectives of individual development and the growth in social awareness required to handle the changing nature of contemporary society.

This study philosophically conceives a united enterprise and entrepreneurship education landscape in which deeper student learning makes possible the notion of the prudent entrepreneurial self.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a measure of soft skills suitable for use in a large survey of Australian adolescents.

A survey was conducted with N = 4,704 Australians aged 15–19 over 2 years. Principal components analysis was performed on 14 self-report items, followed by generalised linear mixed modelling predicting education- and employment-related outcomes.

Self-reported problem solving, creativity, teamwork and verbal communication were alternately associated with later high school performance, hourly wage and employment status. These effects persisted when controlling for demographics and prior academic achievement.

Existing measures have been limited by their length or focus on specific skills or industries. The presented measures are short, domain-general, measure multiple skills simultaneously, and are suitable for a wide range of research contexts.

Universities are considered as learning institutions and their output is knowledge. Their main objectives are to promote knowledge and to integrate three main roles: (1) teaching and learning toward an award; (2) research and publication; and (3) activities centred toward work-based learning. Researchers generally categorize knowledge in three dimensions, cognitive, functional and social competence which are clearly consistent with the French paradigm- savoir, savoir faire, and savoir être. Delamare Le Deist and Winterton (2007) acknowledged that knowledge, that is, understanding is captured by cognitive competence, skills are captured by functional competence and behavioral and attitudinal competencies are captured by social competencies. This chapter describes some basic concepts of social competence in the tertiary education and examines the relationship that exists among knowledge, knowledge management, and social competence. Achieving personal goals and at the same time maintaining positive relationship over time and across situations is one of the main definition of social competence, as brought forward by Rubin and Rose-krasner (1992). Social competence also embraces all the social, emotional and cognitive knowledge and skills individuals require to achieve their goals and to be effective in their relations with others (Kostlenik et al., 2014).

Some employers contend that the college graduates they hire should have stronger communication and critical thinking skills upon arrival from their various college/university programs in which they majored. As higher education continues its efforts to meet the demands for employers, the authors contend that the benefits of participation in debate exercises can be incorporated into various courses as a teaching tool to increase facility with these soft skills. A practical application of debate in a specific organizational leadership course is presented, along with highlights of the student participants’ reflections upon the experience, and the initial signs of positive impact on these skills. Suggestions of future application of debate into curricula are also shared.

The present study proposes action-breakdown-repair (ABR) as a pedagogical model and 3D virtual worlds as technology, to bridge the gap between curricular goals and students out of school technology experiences, referred to as the educational gap.

A qualitative study combining design-based research (DBR) and a case study was used with video observation as a data collection method. ABR is demonstrated by an empirical analysis of learning activities with ©Minecraft (hereafter MC) and ©Second Life^TM (hereafter SL) used in two teacher education programs.

Teachers and students could use the technology with some initial training. Experience in gameplay, collaboration and problem solving eased the transitioning into curricular activities. The teachers integrated domain knowledge by giving students tasks that involved the creation of domain-specific artifacts and role-play scenarios. In total, two dilemmas of educational gap closing were found and discussed: learning domain knowledge vs learning technology and breakdown in action vs breakdown in understanding.

Automated feedback (critiquing) adapted to students' individual needs while building and role-playing in MC or SL to off-load some of the teachers’ work in scaffolding design activities in the classroom is a direction for further work.

The model can provide guidance for teachers and other stakeholders who are in the process of integrating creative technologies like visual programming, design environments and collaboration tools in K-12 education.

A novelty of the present research is treating ABR as a pedagogical model and closing the educational gap.

This chapter describes how conversational computer agents have been used in collaborative problem-solving environments. These agent-based systems are designed to (a) assess the students’ knowledge, skills, actions, and various other psychological states on the basis of the students’ actions and the conversational interactions, (b) generate discourse moves that are sensitive to the psychological states and the problem states, and (c) advance a solution to the problem. We describe how this was accomplished in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) in 2015. In the PISA CPS 2015 assessment, a single human test taker (15-year-old student) interacts with one, two, or three agents that stage a series of assessment episodes. This chapter proposes that this PISA framework could be extended to accommodate more open-ended natural language interaction for those languages that have developed technologies for automated computational linguistics and discourse. Two examples support this suggestion, with associated relevant empirical support. First, there is AutoTutor, an agent that collaboratively helps the student answer difficult questions and solve problems. Second, there is CPS in the context of a multi-party simulation called Land Science in which the system tracks progress and knowledge states of small groups of 3–4 students. Human mentors or computer agents prompt them to perform actions and exchange open-ended chat in a collaborative learning and problem-solving environment.

To help workers make the right decision, over the years, technological solutions and workplace learning analytics systems have been designed to aid this process (Ruiz-Calleja et al., 2019). Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to further revolutionise the integration of human and artificial learning and will impact human and machine collaboration during team work (Seeber et al., 2020).

Complex problem-solving has been identified as one of the key skills for the future workforce (Hager and Beckett, 2019). Problems faced by today's workforce emerge in situ and everyday workplace learning is seen as an effective way to develop the skills and experience workers need to embrace these problems (Campbell, 2005; Jonassen et al., 2006).

In this commentary the authors argue that the increased digitization of work and social interaction, combined with recent research on workplace learning analytics and AI opens up the possibility for designing automated real-time feedback systems capable of just-in-time, just-in-place support during complex problem-solving at work. As such, these systems can support augmented learning and professional development in situ.

The commentary reflects on the benefits of automated real-time feedback systems and argues for the need of shared research agenda to cohere research in the direction of AI-enabled workplace analytics and real-time feedback to support learning and development in the workplace.