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Pretend play provides enriched environments for multiple cognitive and social purposes. The quality of children's pretend play depends on the process, including children's back and forth proposals and responses about the play frames. Proposing and responding to play ideas with metacommunication use, leadership-followership interactions are required in which the leaders and followers are interdependent to effectively move play frames forward. The purpose of this study was to examine the use of metacommunication and leadership/followership processes expressed in social pretend play. A conceptual framework was built on works on leadership development and Vygotsky's work of pretend play, describing the dynamic nature of leadership process within social pretend play. Results indicate that children's use of metacommunication varies by which components of pretend play (i.e., imaginary situation, play role, play rule) they are discussing and with whom they are communicating. Results also show how much the factors of interest -- use of metacommunication, child gender, and the role of followership -- may impact children's successful pretend play, represented by sustained pretend play with agreement on the play situation, play roles, and play rules by all players involved.

Teacher turnover in international schools is high, and recruiting new teachers is a costly endeavor. The purpose of this qualitative, exploratory case study was to examine the personal and professional experiences of expatriate international teachers at international schools to develop a deeper, more heuristic understanding of the international teaching experience, particularly how the experiences might affect their decision to remain at a school past their initial contract period. The conceptual framework used in this study was a model of multi-level cultural influences that impinge on an individual teacher in an international school. The purposive sample was 20 international school teachers who have taught in two or more countries outside of their home country. The data collection included a questionnaire answered by the 20 teachers, 10 of whom agreed to be interviewed. The in-depth, semi-structured interviews took place in Google Meet and were recorded and transcribed using Otter.ai software. Transcripts were member checked. Thematic analysis and triangulation were used to identify and support the findings. The findings revealed that international school teachers follow a progression of life goals when deciding which school to teach at. International school recruiters and administrators can use these findings to inform policy and practices to mitigate the challenges associated with high turnover and costly recruitment, like offering longer contracts and encouraging confidential feedback on administrators' performance. More research surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion in international schools is required, as well as understanding how the pandemic affected international school teachers.

Over time, education has become increasingly more legalistic and litigious. The danger of litigation is an imminent threat for agricultural educators due to the potential financial and professional ramifications. In many cases, agricultural educators may be at higher risk for a lawsuit than teachers of other subjects due to the increased liability and safety hazards of the agricultural education classroom. In most public-school districts, the superintendent manages all school-related legal action. These responsibilities regarding the legal undertakings of the school district are coupled with many superintendents having little-to-no teaching experience. In this study, superintendents (N = 1074) rated the importance of 32 educational law issues to agricultural educators. In the first research objective, we used independent samples t-tests to assess how teaching experience affected the perceptions of superintendents regarding the importance of educational law issues to agricultural education. The results found that superintendents with less teaching experience valued agricultural education specific law issues significantly less than superintendents with more teaching experience. Furthermore, in the second research objective, we used a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to extract four components named: 1) General Educational Law Issues, 2) Special Education/Student Interaction Issues, 3) Student Safety/Teacher Contract Rights, and 4) Student Behavior/Curricular Modification Issues. Ultimately, the superintendents chose issues related to mandated reporting, special education accommodations, and safety as the most important educational law issues for agricultural educators. As a result, we recommend integrating educational law coursework into teacher preparation programs for preservice educators and providing practical professional development on educational law for in-service educators. [Note: The page range shown in the citation (75-94) is incorrect. The correct page range is 75-93.]

In this paper, I argue that the dominant assumption that educational research means empirical research narrows the range of possibilities for educational research. More specifically, research methods courses and textbooks exclude philosophy of education as a viable way of going about educational research, which limits what we can know about education by predetermining what counts as a legitimate way of doing educational research. My concern is that the assumption that educational research is limited to qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods research marginalizes other ways of knowing. I begin by exploring the problem of "tacit empiricism," the assumption that educational research means empirical research, which I explore in several educational research methods textbooks and course syllabi. I then critique some underlying epistemological assumptions in empirical research, and lament that the proliferation of qualitative methods has not translated into the inclusion of philosophy as a legitimate way to do educational research. I suggest that the requirement that educational research have a practical "impact," based on a limited notion of what counts as "evidence," is a key reason why philosophy of education is marginalized. This leads to a consideration of the often-overlooked AERA "Standards for Reporting on Humanities-Oriented Research," which can help promote philosophical research when it comes to evaluating submissions to educational journals or conferences. I then argue that it is important to rethink the word "research" itself so that it includes reading, writing and thinking. In conclusion, I suggest a few practical ways in which philosophy of education can be promoted in the face of these challenges.

Higher education plays a vital role in developing lifelong core competencies that empower graduates to thrive amidst technological and economic disruptions. This article proposes that higher cognitive skills, emotional intelligence, and digital literacy are key competencies that promote transferable skills applicable across diverse industries and markets. It provides recommendations for how the higher education community can strategically cultivate these timeless yet critical competencies while also leveraging innovations like artificial intelligence (AI). The University of Louisiana System's core competencies initiative demonstrates a framework outlining essential skills for lifelong success. As jobs rapidly evolve with advancing AI, adaptability becomes key, and core competencies ready graduates for new challenges by developing transportable human strengths. By upholding core competencies while innovating, higher education can fulfill its vital purpose of empowering students to define their own success despite disruption.

Accomplishing a communication task in the real world requires the ability not only to do the task per se but also to manage aspects of the context in which it occurs. For this reason, simulations of target language use contexts have been incorporated into the design of communicative language tests as a way of enhancing the authenticity of assessment task performance. Although some contextual factors may increase extraneous cognitive load and distract learners from focusing on the task at hand (Sweller, 1994), they represent important design considerations in task-based language assessment (TBLA), where the purpose of assessment is to determine what second language (L2) learners can do with the target language in the real world. In that sense, the extraneous cognitive load might well be part of the construct we are interested in assessing. Accordingly, the current study simulated aspects of a real-world task performance context as part of an email writing task assessment. Simulated context was operationalized as (a) additional information about the task scenario, (b) a visual image to simulate the physical context, and (c) an audio to replicate the real-world experience. A total of 276 L2 English learners performed the email task, half with simulated context and the other half without it. Findings revealed that, when presented with simulated context, the tasks were perceived by participants to have induced more time pressure and to be more interesting. In terms of performance effects, the provision of simulated context negatively affected the syntactic complexity of participants' writing but positively affected their syntactic fluency. It also led to greater discrimination among learners at different proficiency levels on various measures of language performance. The paper concludes by highlighting implications for task design and validity evaluation, especially in TBLA.

Autism and sensory-friendly events are an increasingly common feature of community life. One predictable aspect of these events is the presence of sensory havens, which serve as a respite or self-regulation zone for neurodiverse children, family, friends, and, occasionally, their service animals. When research evidence contributes to the design of these spaces, they can positively impact the length of time people attend events and the quality of their experiences. The authors detail autism architecture guidelines and sensory regulation research, and provide practical strategies for designing and operating havens.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a historic event impacting children around the globe. Prior research on the educational experiences of children during the COVID-19 pandemic focused almost exclusively on spring 2020. This article extends this literature past the initial shock of spring 2020, capturing the first full school year (2020-2021) during the COVID-19 pandemic. This registered report study utilized a national sample of 1,666 United States twins in kindergarten through 12th grade from 43 states to provide the current descriptive report of children's educational experiences during this time, as reported by their parents. Specifically, we reported on school format, parents' role in education, parent-teacher interactions, schoolwork struggles, technology access, and school services. About half of children attended in-person schooling, with many children switching from online to in-person throughout the school year. Parents saw the pandemic as a risk to their children's education. During the 2020-2021 school year of the pandemic, parents felt they had a larger role in their children's education and were less satisfied in their interactions with teachers than what they experienced during the prepandemic part of the 2019-2020 school year. Children experienced more schoolwork struggles than they had in previous years, and this was similar across age groups. For most constructs, results were equivalent across age group, but parents of younger children tended to provide more schoolwork help. Overall, this article highlights the disruptions in their educational environments that children continued to experience through the first full school year (2020-2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Are students ready for jobs when it comes time to graduation? This is a common question, and one that is often addressed in the media (e.g., Collie, 2019). Despite psychology being one of the most popular degree plans for undergraduate students (e.g., Higher Education Research Institute, 2008), many students in undergraduate psychology programs fail to see the relevance and value of their degree (Borden and Rajecki, 2000). In this work, we designed, delivered, and assessed a career "conference" for students in psychology. Intentionally different from a career fair where students seek jobs, this event applied a mentorship-based conference model. In this conference model, in addition to professional development training, industry mentors who work in professional fields related to psychology were invited to provide personal insight on their careers in a small-group format. Critical to this model, students were encouraged and able to ask questions that may not be appropriate for a job fair where hiring is happening. Further, this career model involved intentional connections with our Career Services office, allowing for programmatic delivery of career-based content within the domain-specific event. We provide early empirical evidence that this method of career development supports students in learning about career paths that psychology can lead to, identifying skills that will assist them in finding a career, feeling confident in their ability to network effectively, and feeling more connected with professionals in careers related to psychology. We suggest that this model may be beneficial across disciplines.