The authors begin by cataloging a long-standing fracture in motivation science. Behaviorist theories locate motivation in learned stimulus-response contingencies; implicit-need theories in stable personality dispositions; social-cognitive theories in beliefs, goals, and self-regulation; and sociocultural perspectives in participation, interaction, and cultural structures. Each framework foregrounds a different unit of analysis and backgrounds the rest, producing debates about whether motivation is individual or social, stable or malleable, conscious or unconscious. Kaplan and Garner contend these either-or debates are unconstructive, because real motivated action involves all of these dimensions simultaneously, with their relative salience shifting from moment to moment. Adding sociocultural variables to individual-level models, or individual differences to sociocultural accounts, does not resolve the problem; what is required is a paradigm shift.

That paradigm, they argue, is the Complex Dynamic Systems approach, a branch of complexity science that arose as an alternative to reductionist, linear cause-effect explanation. Several of its core assumptions carry direct consequences for motivation theory. First, the elements of a motivational system are interdependent rather than merely interactive: a change in one element, such as self-efficacy, propagates through goals, values, emotions, and perceived action possibilities, and the same perturbation may produce increased motivation, no change, or even diminished motivation depending on the system’s state. Second, motivated action is irreducible to isolated constructs, so studying a single variable or a single construct-behavior link cannot capture the phenomenon. Third, the system is nonlinear: a trivial change in task difficulty can trigger total disengagement, while an intensive intervention may yield almost nothing.

A further cluster of assumptions concerns stability and change. What looks like stability is better understood as dynamic stability—the continuous re-emergence of a system into a similar state, in the way a whirlpool holds its form while its water constantly turns over. This allows the framework to reconcile durability with sudden malleability. Systems are largely self-organizing, arising from the co-action of their elements without a central controller, yet in human systems bottom-up self-organization co-acts with top-down agency and self-regulation. This dissolves the false dichotomy between automatic, unconscious processes and deliberate, agentic ones: both operate together, and motivation is reducible to neither. The authors also borrow the concepts of attractor and repellor states. An attractor is a configuration whose internal feedback loops reinforce themselves, so the system keeps returning to it; a repellor is a configuration whose internal tensions propel the system away. Patterns, in this view, are not established by averaging across people but by mapping each system’s landscape of possible states and the paths between them.

The DSMRI translates these assumptions into a two-level explanation of the foundational motivational question: why does this person act this way in this situation? At the sociocultural level, people generally act according to the role they occupy in a cultural activity system—a framing the authors draw from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory. Roger Barker’s observation that people behave ‘post-office’ when they enter a post office captures the idea: shared cultural understandings of a situation, its roles, purposes, and norms provide a frame for interpretation and action. But this level alone cannot explain a particular individual, because it predicts what students in general do in discussions, not what one particular student does in this discussion. At the individual level, each person occupying the same role constructs an idiosyncratic role identity—one’s meaning of oneself in a sociocultural role within a particular cultural situation—and it is this role identity, itself a complex dynamic system, whose emergent behavior is motivated action. Culture and individual are thus not two additive sets of constructs but two facets of a single emergent phenomenon.

The model’s conception of culture is deliberately rich. The authors integrate four complementary perspectives: Martin Maehr’s account of culture as collective meaning-making that mediates beliefs about situations, selves, and action possibilities; symbolic interactionism’s view of culture as socially generated symbols within leveled social structures that frame role identities; treatments of culture itself as a complex dynamic system, notably Strauss and Quinn’s connectionist account showing how distributed meanings can be simultaneously durable and changeable; and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, which supplies the framing structure of an activity system with six interrelated elements—subject, object, tools, community, rules, and division of labor. They also invoke Robert Serpell’s three metaphors of culture as Womb, Language, and Forum, insisting that cultures are all three at once: stable surroundings, symbolic systems, and sites of ongoing negotiation. The result is a conception of the classroom, the museum, or the workplace as a complex, dynamic, symbolically mediated activity system that frames the emergence of its participants’ role identities even as those participants reshape it.

At the individual level, the role identity system is characterized along three interdependent facets: content, structure, and process. Its content comprises four overlapping categories of elements—ontological and epistemological beliefs about what is true and how knowledge is grounded; purpose and goals, including overarching purpose and achievement goal orientations; self-perceptions and self-definitions, including competencies, values, interests, and social identities; and perceived action possibilities, the behaviors the agent believes are available and appropriate. Established motivational constructs such as self-efficacy, task value, and achievement goals are not discarded; they are relocated as dynamic, situated elements within this system, often straddling categories. The structural facet describes a nested, fractal-like hierarchy of role identities, from momentary ones such as ‘a student responding to a question’ up to ‘a person in the world,’ with relations of accord or tension among elements. When elements align, the agent experiences coherence; when they conflict, the experience is one of identity tension, typically accompanied by negative emotion and experienced as a dilemma about how to act.

The process facet explains how such configurations shift. A role-identity trigger—an event, an action’s consequences, or an internal process—perturbs an element, and because elements are interdependent, change can be nonlinear and disproportionate to the trigger. The system strives toward coherence, gravitating to attractor states and moving away from repellors, though it may pass through uncomfortable periods of fragmentation along the way. The authors illustrate with their hypothetical student, Maya, who falls silent during a discussion of a contested historical event tied to her own racial-ethnic group. A construct-based analysis might ask about her self-efficacy or belonging; a DSMRI analysis instead traces a configuration in which a classmate’s comment activates beliefs about how others view the event, raises the salience of her group membership, shifts her goals from demonstrating knowledge to protecting dignity and relationships, and narrows her perceived action possibilities until silence becomes the viable choice. Her habitual participation is an attractor; the comment perturbs her system into a repellor of tension; and silence emerges as a new, momentary attractor. The model also specifies four control parameters framing this emergence: the agent’s implicit dispositions, plus three features of the activity system—its subject domain, its social context, and its cultural setting and tools.

The framework is not merely theoretical. The authors describe its application to a Smithsonian exhibition on inventiveness, designed to perturb visitors’ habitual passive ‘information recipient’ role identity and scaffold a new attractor built around self-definitions as inventive people, and to a year-long professional development program on teaching the difficult history of school desegregation, where the same program produced sharply different identity trajectories for teachers of different positionalities. The implications are far-reaching: researchers are urged toward two-phase designs that alternate between activity-system analysis and idiographic role-identity analysis, and toward intensive longitudinal methods capable of capturing qualitative shifts between motivational states. Educators are called to treat classrooms as deliberately constructed cultural activity systems, reshaping mediating tools—writing before speaking, rehearsing contested positions in small groups—to perturb maladaptive attractors and scaffold adaptive ones. Policy, the authors suggest, works best when it targets the control parameters shaping activity systems rather than isolated behaviors. In an era increasingly dominated by a-theoretical, data-driven algorithmic models of learning, Kaplan and Garner’s argument lands as both a technical contribution and an ethical one: understanding why a particular person acts in a particular moment requires preserving the full complexity of the person within their culture, not averaging it away.

Subject of Research: A complex dynamic systems model integrating culture, identity, and motivation to explain situated human action

Article Title: A Complexity Perspective on Culture, Identity, and Motivation: The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity

Article References: Kaplan, A., & Garner, J. K. (2026). A Complexity Perspective on Culture, Identity, and Motivation: The Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity. Educational Psychology Review, 38(1), Article 125. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-026-10221-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10648-026-10221-9

Keywords: motivation, role identity, complex dynamic systems, culture, educational psychology, activity theory, attractor states, self-organization, emergence, identity formation, DSMRI, sociocultural theory

The study was conducted by Professor Ge Wei and Professor Haiyan Wang of Capital Normal University in Beijing, who examined a service-learning program at a Chinese normal university. The program emerged in direct response to China’s “double reduction” policy, a national initiative designed to ease the burden of homework and after-school tutoring on schoolchildren. Within the program, pre-service teachers designed and delivered online courses to schoolchildren across the country, working under the guidance of experienced mentors. The setting mattered: rather than a brief, isolated teaching placement, the participants were embedded in an extended, socially consequential service activity with continuous institutional support.

Theoretically, the researchers grounded their analysis in activity theory, a framework that treats human learning as mediated by tools, communities, and social structures rather than as a purely individual mental achievement. They then added a distinctly Chinese philosophical layer. “We invoke the ancient Chinese concept of Yin and Yang (阴阳) as a metaphor for the dialectical relationship between practice and reflection in teacher education,” Wei and Wang explain. “It offered culturally grounded resources for rethinking teacher learning beyond dualism.” In this framing, practice and reflection are not opposing poles to be balanced but complementary aspects of one activity, each containing and generating the other, much as the yin and yang of traditional Chinese thought interpenetrate rather than exclude one another.

One of the study’s central findings is a critique of how the theory–practice divide has historically been understood. The authors found that the problem has typically been framed as an individual, psychological failing — a deficit in the student teacher’s knowledge, skills, or ability to “apply” theory. Their analysis reframes it instead as a collective, socio-cultural problem. On this view, the divide persists because the activity systems surrounding novice teachers — universities, schools, policies, and digital infrastructures — are not designed to let theory and practice transform each other. Fixing it therefore requires redesigning those systems, not simply exhorting student teachers to reflect harder.

The Chinese context proved unusually fertile for such a redesign. According to the study, the “double reduction” policy, combined with university–school collaboration and digital mediation, created what the researchers describe as a fertile ecology for dialectical unity to emerge. The national policy supplied purpose and urgency; the university–school partnership supplied mentors and authentic classroom connections; and the online delivery format supplied a mediating tool through which pre-service teachers could reach real learners at scale. Each element alone would have been insufficient. Together, they formed an activity system in which teaching practice and theoretical reflection could feed continuously into one another.

The most striking result concerns what happened to the pre-service teachers themselves. The study reveals that when novices engage in service learning guided by mentors and peers, their practice and reflection become mutually transformative rather than sequentially separated. Instead of first learning theory and then applying it, the participants reworked their theoretical knowledge in light of real classroom encounters and generated new professional understanding in the process. Reflection was not a post-hoc journaling exercise appended to teaching; it was woven into the act of designing, delivering, and revising instruction for actual children with actual needs. Theory, in turn, was not a fixed script but a living resource that the novices reshaped as they taught.

From these findings, the authors draw three practical implications for initial teacher education programs worldwide. First, programs should stop treating theory as something to be simply applied to practice. Well-designed service learning creates opportunities for the two to transform each other, as novices confront the gap between their assumptions and classroom reality and rebuild their professional understanding accordingly. Second, continuous mentoring and peer collaboration are essential. In the studied program, participants designed, rehearsed, and revised their teaching together rather than working in isolation, making the collective — not the lone student teacher — the basic unit of professional learning. Third, service learning can cultivate a sense of professional responsibility to society: by engaging in a national policy initiative and serving schoolchildren across the country, the pre-service teachers came to see teaching not merely as a job but as a socially meaningful commitment.

Taken together, these principles point to a conclusion that challenges a common policy reflex. Bridging the theory–practice divide, the authors argue, requires more than increasing the number of practicum hours. What matters is the design of authentic, socially consequential activities in which pre-service teachers can practice, reflect, and grow with the support of mentors, peers, and meaningful mediating tools. Hours spent in poorly structured placements, where novices are dropped into classrooms without collective inquiry or genuine purpose, may reproduce the very divide they are meant to close. The quality of the activity system, not the quantity of exposure, is the decisive variable.

The study also stakes out a broader ambition for the field. The authors propose a critical activist role for initial teacher education in transforming societies, a perspective that resonates with growing international calls for more equitable and socially engaged teacher preparation. On this account, teacher education should not merely reproduce the existing schooling system but equip future teachers to question and improve it — and service learning, by tying professional learning to real societal needs, offers one concrete mechanism for doing so. The Chinese program’s alignment with the “double reduction” policy illustrates how national priorities, when paired with university infrastructure, can become a vehicle for socially engaged professional formation rather than a top-down mandate alone.

“The making of high-quality teachers depends on both a sustainable policy ecology and locally grounded spaces in which practitioners can collectively redesign the practices of teacher education,” Wei and Wang conclude. The claim is a pointed one for policymakers and deans alike: high-quality teaching cannot be manufactured by curriculum documents and exam requirements alone. It requires an ecology — stable policies, collaborative institutions, digital tools, and communal spaces — in which the ancient dialectic of doing and thinking can operate as a unity. For a profession long divided between the seminar room and the classroom, the message from Beijing is that the bridge between the two is not built by adding more of either side, but by redesigning the activity that connects them. The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, or publication of the article, which appeared in ECNU Review of Education under the title “Practice and Reflection as a Dialectical Unity: Pre-Service Teachers’ Experience in a Service-Learning Program.”

Subject of Research: Service learning as a means of integrating theory and practice in pre-service teacher education

Article Title: Chinese study reveals how service learning bridges the theory–practice divide in teacher education

Article References: Chinese study reveals how service learning bridges the theory–practice divide in teacher education. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: teacher education, service learning, pre-service teachers, theory-practice divide, activity theory, yin and yang, double reduction policy, Capital Normal University, ECNU Review of Education, mentoring, reflection, China

The motivation for the work stems from a persistent gap in education systems worldwide. Governments and educational administrations increasingly call for the identification and dissemination of good practices with digital technologies in order to improve teaching quality, and international repositories such as the European School Education Platform and the UNESCO ICT in Education Repository collect and share such experiences. Yet defining what actually counts as a good practice has remained surprisingly elusive. Previous literature reviews have highlighted criteria such as effectiveness, transformative effect, sustainability, legitimacy and replicability, while regional agencies in Spain have emphasized features including curriculum integration, institutional support, improved outcomes, interdisciplinarity, inclusion and the involvement of the educational community. Without clear, observable criteria, judgments about quality risk being subjective and inconsistent.

To anchor the instrument in a coherent theoretical framework, the research team, based at the Department of Pedagogy of Universitat Rovira i Virgili, turned to Activity Theory, a cultural-historical framework originally developed by Vygotsky, Leontiev and Engestrom. Activity Theory conceives educational practice as an intentional, object-oriented action involving students and teachers working toward a common goal, mediated by physical and sociocultural tools. The theory models an activity system through its core components, including the subject, tools, community, rules, division of labor and object, and it emphasizes the dynamic, dialectical interactions among these elements. This holistic view aligns closely with the structure of a learning situation and allows observers to detect tensions, contradictions and disruptions within the classroom activity system, which the researchers see as essential to understanding how digital technologies are actually integrated into teaching and learning.

The study adopted a Design-Based Research approach, a methodology structured around iterative cycles of analysis, design, development and evaluation. The first cycle began with a systematic literature review following the PRISMA 2020 model, searching databases including Web of Science, Scopus, ERIC, SciELO and Dialnet for publications from 2013 to 2023 describing educational practices with digital technologies at any educational level. From an initial pool of 718 publications, 27 studies were selected for full content analysis using ATLAS.ti software. This analysis identified 26 variables linked to the seven components of Activity Theory, each operationally defined with its theoretical meaning, the type of evidence required for observation and its intended use within the guideline, forming the initial prototype of the instrument.

Validation proceeded through the Delphi method, a structured technique for aggregating expert judgment over successive rounds. The team formed a coordinating group and recruited a panel of experts across four professional profiles: teachers from early childhood, primary and secondary education; university professors; researchers; and professionals involved in educational management. Thirty-two experts were invited and 26 completed the competence questionnaire, which calculated an Expert Competence Index combining self-assessed knowledge and the quality of argumentation sources. Twenty-three experts scored at or above the 0.8 threshold denoting high competence and continued into the Delphi rounds, a panel size consistent with established guidance that Delphi studies typically require between 15 and 35 participants.

The three Delphi rounds progressively sharpened the instrument. In the first round, 23 experts ranked the variables derived from each Activity Theory component, and the researchers computed a Relative Importance Index to convert the rankings into interpretable percentages, selecting the two highest-priority variables per component to yield 14 variables and 14 indicators. In the second round, 20 experts rated the clarity and relevance of the proposed indicators, with most indicators exceeding 85 percent positive validation and five achieving unanimous acceptance; all indicators met the Content Validity Index threshold of at least 78 percent, the criterion the team used to classify indicators as excellent. In the third round, nine experts assessed their satisfaction with the revised indicators, and mean scores rose while standard deviations fell, with two indicators reaching a perfect average of 4.00 with zero variability, confirming that the iterative refinements had addressed the panel’s concerns.

With the validated prototype in hand, the team moved to pilot testing in authentic educational settings, an essential step for establishing external validity and feasibility. The pilot involved eight educational practices distributed across four stages, early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education, with two practices per stage, all hosted by different public institutions that had previously collaborated with the university. Sessions lasted one hour in the school stages and two hours at university, with class sizes ranging from 28 students in early childhood settings to as many as 80 university students. Researchers observed each practice simultaneously using individual copies of the guideline and then jointly interviewed the observed teachers with a complementary 13-question semi-structured interview guide, allowing triangulation of the observational data.

Reliability analyses during the pilot demonstrated that different observers could apply the instrument consistently. Weighted Cohen’s Kappa values ranged from 0.64 to 1.00 across the 14 indicators, with 10 of the 14 indicators exceeding 0.80, indicating substantial to almost perfect agreement according to commonly accepted interpretive benchmarks. Intraclass Correlation Coefficients, calculated under the two-way random-effects absolute-agreement model, ranged from 0.67 to 1.00 for single measures, while the global ICC reached 0.89 for single measures and 0.94 for average measures. These figures confirm that the guideline is robust, internally coherent and replicable across observers and contexts, a critical property for any instrument intended to support fair evaluation of teaching quality.

The pilot also generated concrete improvements to the instrument’s design and usability. The researchers added a new section capturing contextual information such as the observed teacher’s name, type of session, school type and dimensions, and technological devices used, reoriented the layout from horizontal to vertical for easier field use, reorganized indicators so that all indicators for each component appeared on the same page, expanded the open-observation field from three to seven lines, and moved illustrative examples directly into the guideline itself. One indicator was reworded to replace a conjunction with a disjunctive form, broadening its scope to capture situations in which community resources or external agents are identified but not necessarily used. Post-pilot analysis showed that 58 percent of the modifications involved new sections, 32 percent design adjustments and 10 percent content changes.

Beyond its immediate technical achievement, the instrument carries significant practical potential. The authors note that teacher training has traditionally emphasized technical mastery of digital tools rather than their pedagogical integration, and the observation guideline is well positioned to serve as a formative assessment tool, a self-reflection resource in mentoring programs, or an evidence-based component in departmental evaluations of technology-enhanced teaching. Its flexible design allows adaptation to different disciplines, educational levels and modalities, including hybrid and virtual environments. The authors caution that further research is needed, including criterial and convergent validation, sensitivity testing to detect changes in teaching practice over time, assessment of transferability across educational systems, and development of an English-language version, but the validated guideline already represents a substantial step toward making the evaluation of good digital teaching practices systematic, transparent and grounded in direct evidence from real classrooms.

Subject of Research: Design and validation of an Activity Theory-based observation instrument for identifying good educational practices with digital technologies through direct classroom observation

Article Title: Good educational practices with digital technologies: validation of an instrument for direct classroom observations

Article References: Good educational practices with digital technologies: validation of an instrument for direct classroom observations. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00065-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00065-0

Keywords: digital technologies, educational practices, classroom observation, Activity Theory, Delphi method, instrument validation, teacher digital competence, Design-Based Research, educational research, inter-rater reliability, content validity, teaching and learning