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The impact of teachers' beliefs on the implementation and effectiveness of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs underscores the essential need for reliable measures of these beliefs. This study aims to explore and validate the psychometric properties of the Teacher Social and Emotional Learning Beliefs Scale (TSELBS) within the Chinese educational context, utilizing the Partial Credit Model of the Rasch family models. Through the analysis of responses from 893 Chinese teachers, our findings confirm the reliability, validity, and robust psychometric properties of the TSELBS, making it a valuable instrument for assessing educators' SEL beliefs. Additionally, our results indicate that the TSELBS demonstrates fairness across gender, educational levels, and areas. These outcomes emphasize the critical role of culturally sensitive methods in evaluating SEL beliefs and lay a foundational step for future cross-cultural research in this domain. This contribution advances the global conversation on SEL, facilitating further studies on similar validations across diverse cultural settings.

Background: Smart classroom environment has drawn worldwide attention, however, there is still a lack of studies that can explore and analyse potential factors, which affect students' satisfaction with smart classrooms in higher education. Objectives: To assess students' satisfaction with smart classrooms in higher education, this study proposed the smart classroom environment satisfaction model based on TAM and ACSI models. Methods: A sample of 1979 Chinese college students who studied in a smart classroom environment completed a survey assessing student satisfaction with the smart classroom environment. And a structural equation modelling analysis was used to further analyse students' preferences for smart classroom environments. Results and conclusions: The results showed that student satisfaction with smart classroom environment is significantly correlated with subjective perception factors after use, such as students' perceived value (PV), user experience and perceived expectations (PE). It indicated that user experience indirectly affected overall satisfaction (OS) through its positive impact on PV, while PE indirectly affected OS through its positive impact on user experience. Second, user experience had the greatest impact on student satisfaction, followed by PV and PE. This study is a theoretical supplement to future research on smart classroom environment in higher education, and can also provide reference for relevant government departments, universities and enterprises to build and manage smart classroom environment.

University study is a period of psychological vulnerability for many individuals. International college students may be particularly vulnerable to experiencing distress and developing a mental illness due to challenges of relocation and acculturation. The aim of this meta-analytic review was to synthesize the literature on the mental health correlates and outcomes of domestic and international tertiary students. A total of 35 studies were identified via search PsycINFO, PubMed, CINAHL, and Scopus databases. Results showed that, among 283,412 participants, very small but non-significant effects were found between domestic and international students on anxiety: r = 0.04; depression: r = -0.01; psychological distress: r = -0.01; and wellbeing: r = -0.01. Most studies were of relatively poor quality. Among high-quality studies, international students reported fewer symptoms of anxiety, depression, and stress than domestic students. On the other hand, domestic students declared higher wellbeing scores on quality-of-life measures. Despite these mixed findings, many students in the included studies reported poor mental health and wellbeing. Further research examining the mental health and wellbeing of domestic and international students is needed, with particular attention to the underlying needs and stressors that affect each subgroup to develop effective supports and countermeasures.

Using validation theory as the guiding framework, this qualitative study explored the advising experiences of 16 Hmong college students. Most participants described instances of advising that were academically and interpersonally validating. Several participants also described instances of invalidating advising experiences. This study highlights how validating and invalidating advising experiences impact their persistence in college and graduation from college. Implications for future research and advising practice are provided.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, cases of discrimination and hate crimes against minority populations including international students have soared in the U.S. This study explores the relationship between international students' perceived discrimination and their self-reported overall health and the role of social support and positive emotions in such relationship. In total, 203 international students studying at two U.S. universities participated in an online survey. The results indicated that: (1) when international students perceive higher levels of discrimination, they experience lower levels of positive emotions and have lower levels of perceived social support; and (2) positive emotions were significantly associated with both psychological distress and physical health. Perceived social support was only significantly associated with physical health not psychological distress. We also provided meaningful implications for higher educational institutions that strive to enhance international students' overall health.

Educational data mining has allowed for large improvements in educational outcomes and understanding of educational processes. However, there remains a constant tension between educational data mining advances and protecting student privacy while using educational datasets. Publicly available datasets have facilitated numerous research projects while striving to preserve student privacy via strict anonymization protocols (e.g., k-anonymity); however, little is known about the relationship between anonymization and utility of educational datasets for downstream educational data mining tasks, nor how anonymization processes might be improved for such tasks. We provide a framework for strictly anonymizing educational datasets with a focus on improving downstream performance in common tasks such as student outcome prediction. We evaluate our anonymization framework on five diverse educational datasets with machine learning-based downstream task examples to demonstrate both the effect of anonymization and our means to improve it. Our method improves downstream machine learning accuracy versus baseline data anonymization by 30.59%, on average, by guiding the anonymization process toward strategies that anonymize the least important information while leaving the most valuable information intact.

Dental anatomy education for dental technology students should be developed in alignment with digital dental laboratory practices. We hypothesized that a virtually assisted sketching-based dental anatomy teaching module could improve students' acquisition of skills essential for digital restoration design. The second-year dental technology curriculum included a novel virtual technology-assisted sketching-based module for dental anatomy education. Pre- and post-course assessments evaluated students' skill sets and knowledge bases. Computer-aided design (CAD) scores were analyzed after one year to assess how the skills students developed through this module impacted their subsequent CAD performance. Participants who undertook the dental sketching-based teaching module demonstrated significantly improved theoretical knowledge of dental anatomy, dental aesthetic perception, and spatial reasoning skills. A partial least squares structural equation model indicated that the positive effects of this module on subsequent CAD performance were indirectly mediated by dental aesthetic perception, spatial reasoning, and practice time. A virtually assisted sketching-based dental anatomy teaching module significantly improved students' acquisition of skills and knowledge and positively mediated dental technology students' CAD performance.