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With individual, social, and emotional skills increasingly emerging as integral components of a comprehensive education, this scientific study aims to organize and summarize the range of different approaches found in the literature regarding the role and contribution of to the holistic development of students and adolescents. This study serves as the theoretical background upon which extensive research will be based concerning educational policies and life skills life skills in compulsory education in Europe, through a comparative analysis of three different European educational systems: Greece, Germany, and Finland. [For the complete Volume 22 proceedings, see ED656158.]

Due to recent unrest around the world, the number of refugees has increased dramatically in the last decade. In order to meet the needs of this population, host countries have had to quickly adapt to provide these refugees with basic needs. One such need is to have quality education for refugee children. The aim of this paper is to compare the policies of educational inclusion in Germany and Turkey that have accepted a large influx of refugees. Our findings suggest that both the German city-state of Hamburg and Turkey have made major strides over the past ten years to accommodate and provide for refugee children's educational needs. We list some of the policies that have led to greater inclusion and accessibility for refugee children in mainstream education. Key findings from the comparative document analysis show that although the two countries are distinguished by different levels of income and development, both have similarities in terms of (1) providing compulsory education for all children, (2) the delay in preparing and applying policy-based legislations for refugee education, and (3) the main activities such as additional language support and teacher training for the purpose of social inclusion of refugee students. Furthermore, both countries have had similar challenges such as the necessity of improvements in second language instruction and teacher training, thus highlighting the need for refugee education-oriented global solutions for the host countries. We recommend continued efforts to include multiculturally rich school curriculums to create educational settings that feel inclusive and comfortable for refugee children. [For the complete Volume 20 proceedings, see ED622631.]

Curriculum research is an important tool for understanding complex processes within a degree program. In particular, stochastic graphical models and simulations on related curriculum graphs have been used to make predictions about dropout rates, grades, and degree completion time. There exists, however, little research on changes in the curriculum and the evaluation of their impact. The available evaluation methods of curriculum changes assume pre-existing strict curriculum graphs in the form of directed acyclic graphs. These allow for a straightforward model-oriented probabilistic or graph topological investigation of curricula. But the existence of such graphs cannot generally be assumed. We present a novel generalizing approach in which a curriculum graph is constructed based on data, using measurable student flow. By applying a discrete event simulation, we investigate the impact of policy changes on the curriculum and evaluate our approach on a sample data set from a German university. Our method is able to create a comparably effective and individually verifiable simulation without requiring a curriculum graph. It can thus be extended to prerequisite-free curricula, making it feasible to evaluate changes to flexible curricula. [For the full proceedings, see ED623995.]