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This paper investigates the impact of digital creativity educational practices on the improvement of academic performance and creative thinking development of Chinese high school students. The study defined the importance of the concept of STEM learning in the development of modern skills needed to live and work in a digital socio-economic change caused by the development of Industry 4.0. An educational experiment involving 60 9th grade Chinese students evaluated the impact of digital creativity learning practices on the development of students' creative thinking on such indicators as fluency, flexibility, originality, detailing, and metaphoricity. The impact of digital creative learning practices on the performance of students in the control group and the experimental group was assessed. The analysis of the results of practical research on the impact of digital tools and pedagogical models of learning on the acquisition of students' creative thinking skills was conducted, which proved that the digital environment is the optimal place for students' creative manifestations and provides opportunities to improve creative thinking skills by implementing learning practical activities using innovative tools for the manifestation of digital creative skills.

In recent years, the innovative applications of integrated augmented reality (AR) into educational settings had increased rapidly in Taiwan. AR provides the scene of the real world while interacting with the virtual and physical objects and increases students' learning motivation. This paper presents an empirical study that investigated the middle-school students learning health education courses related to human body structure knowledge integrating AR technology with different learning style preferences. A two-way t-test was applied to examine the experimental (AR-based) or control (traditional lecture) group in health education courses for four consecutive weeks, comparing with pre-test and post-test scores. The findings revealed that students in the AR experimental group apparently had a higher learning achievement than the students in the control group. Moreover, students with different learning styles had the significant differences in learning achievement. The research outcomes provided the practical implications for educators in incorporating AR applications for enhancing learning motivation and to study the differences in students' learning style.

FIBER (Flipped Issue-Based Enquiry Ride) is a teacher-facilitated interactive pedagogic framework that the authors propose to integrate flipped learning into social humanities education. This paper reports a quasi-experimental study (with mixed methods) which examined the pedagogic effectiveness of FIBER in the authentic setting of formal curriculum learning and teaching. The study involved totally 611 Secondary-4 students from academically top, middle and bottom schools in Hong Kong. In comparison with the conventional issue-based enquiry learning approach, FIBER had different intensity of positive effects on the high, moderate, and low academic-achieving student participants. This paper provides researchers and educational practitioners with empirical evidence for supporting wider adoption of FIBER in social humanities education, as well as harnessing flipped learning in formal schooling. Apart from discussing the benefits, the authors also underline the challenges of FIBER and suggest future work.

Ontologies have often been recommended for E-learning systems, but few efforts have successfully incorporated student data to represent knowledge conceptualizations. Defining key concepts and their relations between each other establishes the backbone of our E-learning system. The system guides an individual student through his/her course by evaluating their progress and suggesting instructional material to review based upon their answers. Three main tasks are performed within this framework: building ontologies for the course, measuring a student's understanding level for the concepts, and making personal suggestions to create an individualized learning environment. This paper presents: the integration of ontologies, assisted with student data, together with an intelligent Recommendation Module for the development of an E-learning system; the comparison and correction adaption of ontology from students' mind maps; and the assessment of students' actual weaknesses in comparison to what Recommendation Module suggests. The sample of 127 students, five classrooms, was conveniently selected among seventh grade students of a demographically average school in a major city in Turkey. The students' achievement was assessed and the scores for different questions were investigated for associations with concepts made in the students' minds. The results provided significant correlations among scores, and a fit model for the concepts represented by questions. The student suggested model slightly differed from the ontology map from the experts. Based on the data-supported model, the Recommendation Module more accurately determined the students' learning deficiencies and suggested concepts to be reviewed.

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study examining the effectiveness of flipped instruction in a 9th grade biology classroom. This study included four sections of freshmen-level biology taught by the first author at a private secondary school in the Pacific Northwest. Using a block randomized design, two sections were flipped and two remained traditional. The quiz and posttest data were adjusted for pretest differences using ANCOVA. The results suggest that flipped instruction had a positive effect student achievement, with effect sizes ranging from +0.16 to +0.44. In addition, some students reported that they preferred watching video lectures outside of class and appreciated more active approaches to learning.

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Environment) is a teacher-facilitated pedagogical approach to integrating constructivist online game-based learning into formal curriculum teaching in school education. This paper reports a case study on the implementation of VISOLE in secondary Geography education. We compared the pedagogical effectiveness of VISOLE and the traditional classroom teaching approach, in terms of students' knowledge acquisition with respect to a formal curriculum. One hundred and ninety-eight students from top, middle, and bottom academic-banding schools were selected and divided into three experimental groups and three control groups to participate in the research. Results showed that, in comparison with the traditional approach, VISOLE had a positive pedagogical effect on both low and moderate academic-achievement students, but not on high academic-achievement students. The findings shed light on enhancing the existing design of VISOLE, and provide researchers and educators with new insights into harnessing online games in formal school education in practice.

The authors explore the occurrence of different learner profiles in secondary education, as well as their relationship with test performance and student characteristics. Based on a cluster analysis of 1,931 secondary school students' self-reported text-learning strategy use and study traces, the authors identified and validated four distinct learner profiles: integrated strategy users, information organizers, mental learners, and limited strategy users. Integrated strategy users engaged in different text-learning strategies and obtained the highest scores on the performance test. Limited strategy users generally used only a limited number of text-learning strategies and scored the lowest. In addition, a significant difference was established in gender and reading ability distribution across learner profiles, but home language distribution was not found to be significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational privatisation has received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. In much of this work, educational privatisation is viewed as the outcomes of certain government policies or as the result of the influences of education businesses in school systems. This article presents a portrait of an educational entrepreneur in Cambodia to show how privatisation has been enacted by individuals. The empirical data for this article were collected between February and May 2014 using classroom observations and in-depth interviews. The method of portraiture was employed to understand educational privatisation through the perspective of the research subject while embracing the subjective nature of interpreting findings by the researcher. This article develops the literature on educational privatisation by offering a detailed look at the way in which historical memory shapes the behaviour of individuals. This analysis shows how educational privatisation is not only a process of government policy but also a social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]