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This pilot study aims to examine the prevalence of test anxiety and its interplay with attitudes, confidence, efficacy, academic performance and socio-demographic factors within the domain of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) courses.

The authors employed a quantitative, cross-sectional design with 549 sixth-grade students from public lower secondary schools in Prishtina, Kosovo, using the Student Attitudes Toward STEM Survey (S-STEM) for middle/high schools and the test anxiety questionnaire.

Over 70% of Kosovo's sixth-grade students reported moderate to severe test anxiety. The age of students was found to be inversely related to academic performance in STEM. The father's employment was associated with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence, efficacy and academic performance. Having a personal study environment was connected with favorable STEM attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM, whereas access to technology was associated with positive academic performance. Test anxiety, academic performance and personal study space predicted students' attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM and 21st-century learning.

Educational institutions should prioritize student well-being. By addressing test anxiety, these institutions can create supportive learning environments that improve attitudes, confidence and efficacy in STEM fields. These efforts are crucial for STEM career development and student success in the 21st-century workforce.

The current study findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the factors influencing STEM student engagement and performance, highlighting the importance of addressing test anxiety for positive learning outcomes while emphasizing the need to consider socio-economic and contextual factors in education.

This paper presents qualitative data from a gender equity study at a Carnegie I research institution. In this paper we draw on interview data to explore the ways that our sample of senior women and men dealt with family‐work conflicts at different points in their careers. We offer stories of women (and a few men), who struggled with family‐work conflicts, and we provide these in their own voices. After first presenting our findings we demonstrate how they can be used to develop strategies to address family‐work conflicts and evaluate current programs. We first explore how women and men defined the problem of family‐work integration. We then review some of the main coping strategies they used at different points in their careers, and then explore the consequences that women experienced as a result of the university’s lack of support. We conclude by pointing to areas where in stitutionally supported programs and policies may be effective in addressing the balance between family and work.

San Jose State University’s (SJSU’s) Global Leadership Advancement Center (GLAC) was established in 2007 in response to a reported scarcity of global leaders in all sectors. Its mission is to advance, foster, and disseminate knowledge on global leadership and its development. The center created various programs in three focal areas: Knowledge Creation and Dissemination, Development and Training, and the Social Innovation Initiative. We briefly explain the assessment center, the GLLab (Global Leadership Laboratory), used to varying degrees in all development programs and courses. This chapter describes in detail three of GLAC’s innovative global leadership efforts and their theoretical foundations – an undergraduate global leadership course, the GLLab Exchange Program, and the Global Leadership Passport Program. All GLAC programs are based on research and best practices, which are referenced.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which an innovative higher education women’s faculty mentoring community model fosters supportive networking and career-life balance. The secondary goal is to better understand the factors that both promote and limit retention of women faculty at a large, metropolitan university.

The paper examines data from the survey component of an applied research project on understanding and supporting the complex processes of women faculty’s pathways toward self-defined success. Adopting a mixed method research approach, this manuscript focuses on the survey questions related to four key issues related to retention: mentor experiences, gender-based obstacles, a sense of support and community, and goal attainment. In addition to quantitatively examining shifts in perceptions between pre- and post-survey Likert scale questions, the authors performed a qualitative analysis of the supplemental open-ended questions, utilizing a social constructionist lens to further understand perceived influences of the mentoring community on these issues.

The findings revealed qualitatively important shifts in increased awareness surrounding mentoring, gender-based obstacles, interpersonal support, and career-life choices, offering critical insight into the intangible, and thus often difficult to capture, forms of support a mentoring community model can offer women faculty. Findings also reveal how definitions of success can be integrated into community mentoring models to support retention and empowering women faculty.

This study is limited by its exploratory nature with one mentoring community cohort. Ongoing implementations are in place to increase the participant size and further test the mentoring model, while future research is encouraged to implement and expand the research to additional higher education institutions.

This research offers a model that can be implemented across higher education institutions for all faculty, along with offering insight into particular points that can be emphasized to increase perceptions of support, offering concrete mentoring options.

This paper contributes to the advancement of mentoring models, helping to address concerns for better supporting and advancing women faculty, with implications for further supporting marginalized faculty. It offers insight into the ways in which a mentoring model can help to address key issues of retention. Additionally, analyzing quantitative and qualitative findings concurrently allowed for insight into areas that may otherwise be overlooked due to seemingly contradictory or non-significant statistical findings.

Aims to extend internal labour market theory by identifying sub‐markets that influence administrative staffing decisions, and to test a theoretical model regarding the role of sub‐markets in explaining decisions to hire or promote. Hypothesizes that two latent dimensions (hierarchical and functional) of labour markets would explain these decisions. Analyses data from personnel records for position vacancies in a major university for three years 1982‐85 (n = 840), and confirms the fit of the theoretical model. Staffing decisions are directly influenced by characteristics associated with the sub‐markets of the position.

Spatial ability is essential for engineers’ professional performance. Several studies describe it as a skill that can be enhanced using new technologies. Virtual reality (VR) is an emerging technology that is proving very useful for training different skills and improving spatial perception. In this chapter, the authors firstly present some previous works that use VR to train students, mainly in the area of engineering studies, and which demonstrate that VR can improve some aspects of the spatial perception. This study took a group of engineering students who used VR technologies to carry out learning activities designed to improve their spatial perception, which was measured with a widely used spatial ability test. The results obtained confirm that the use of VR technologies can improve students’ spatial perception. This proposal is easily transferable to other educational contexts. On the one hand, it could be implemented to improve spatial ability in other engineering studies, and on the other hand, with simple adaptation, it could be used to enhance other skills.

One of the challenges in educating teachers about inclusion, be it pre-service or in-service, is influencing the student's preconceptions and perspectives so that their newly acquired knowledge will guide their actions in the classroom. A DVD entitled Teachers for All, consisting of 40–50 video sequences recorded in Uganda and Kenya, each followed by discussion questions, has been produced to help meet this challenge. Lecturers at the Department of Special Needs Education at The University of Oslo, in collaboration with our partners in Uganda and Kenya, have been involved in the development of the content of the video recordings. The material has been tested at teacher education institutions in Uganda, Kenya and Norway. The topic of the material is the inclusive classroom, focusing on learners with special needs and on the teaching of reading. Video recordings of a total of 59 students’ reflections and discussions and also information from their reflective notes, were transcribed and analysed. The project results show that the DVD material is promising; it is user-friendly providing students with new outlooks about teaching and learning. Results of the study indicate that video sequences have the potential to be used in training students to observe significant details for implementing inclusive education.

This study uses the most recent national data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), 2011–2012 and Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS), 2012–2013 to investigate attrition trends among Black teachers, and Black female teachers in particular, to inform a qualitative analysis of proposed and adopted teacher retention policy interventions. This study asks: Why do Black teachers report leaving, and what would bring them back to the classroom? What working conditions are associated with Black teacher attrition? What policy interventions can meet the needs of Black teachers in having successful and supported teaching experiences? How have these interventions been successful, and what are the considerations for applying them more broadly? We find that Black teacher turnover rates are significantly higher than those of other teachers and that there are several substantive differences in their preparation, school characteristics, and reasons for leaving. We describe policy interventions that target these conditions, such as teacher residencies, loan forgiveness, mentoring and induction, and principal training programs. We include in that discussion the relative benefits and challenges of each implications for policymaking.

This paper aims to critically review the most cited literature published from 2000 to 2020 in 24 top-ranked marketing journals on the three most studied branding concepts of the 21st century – brand equity, brand loyalty and brand image – to explore how in these papers they have been defined, measured and examined, and propose how they should move forward in an era where brands are expected to be “socially and socio-politically conscious.”

For each concept a systematic literature review is conducted. In doing so, the definitions, antecedents, outcomes and measures for each concept were accessed and synthesized.

The systematic literature reviews provide a “state-of-the-art” snapshot of each concept and collectively demonstrate there is no consensus on the independence and interdependence of these dynamic multidimensional concepts. Based on the recommended process in the measurement literature, an evolved definition of each concept is proposed. In addition to the corresponding research directions presented in the moving forward sections of each systematic literature review, common research avenues emerged.

This paper acknowledges these three branding concepts as dynamic (i.e. evolving over time), systemically reviews and synthesizes the extant literature, and provides a path forward to defining, measuring and exploring brand equity, brand loyalty and brand image in the present era where brands are expected to be socially and socio-politically conscious with responsibilities to the planet, people and profit.