The researchers defined school belonging as students’ perception of being accepted, respected and supported within the school environment, while academic buoyancy refers to the capacity to cope with routine academic setbacks and challenges. Learning engagement was assessed through students’ attention, commitment and motivation toward learning. The analysis was grounded in Self-Determination Theory, which examines the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Students were recruited through cluster sampling of intact classes at a school purposively selected for full-week boarding, a predominantly rural catchment and a student population whose families largely could not provide day-to-day academic support. Of 670 questionnaires completed in June 2026, 13 were excluded because of incomplete responses, patterned answers or failed lie-detection items. The final sample included 266 male and 391 female students, including 179 in Grade 1, 217 in Grade 2 and 261 in Grade 3.

Students completed validated Chinese-language self-report scales for school belonging, academic buoyancy and learning engagement. The school-belonging measure had 18 items and an internal consistency coefficient of 0.890; the four-item buoyancy measure had a coefficient of 0.727; and the 17-item learning-engagement measure had a coefficient of 0.957. The investigators used descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, t-tests and one-way analysis of variance to examine levels and demographic differences.

All three constructs were reported at moderate levels. School belonging had a mean of 3.020, academic buoyancy a mean of 3.252 and learning engagement a mean of 4.274. School belonging correlated with learning engagement at r = 0.436, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.372 to 0.496. Academic buoyancy correlated with engagement at r = 0.380, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.313 to 0.444, while belonging and buoyancy correlated at r = 0.286, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.214 to 0.355.

PROCESS Model 4 assessed whether academic buoyancy statistically mediated the belonging–engagement association while controlling for gender and grade. The indirect effect was 0.211, with a bias-corrected bootstrap 95% confidence interval of 0.140 to 0.291 based on 5,000 resamples, and represented 17.87% of the total statistical effect. A significant direct association between belonging and engagement also remained, with a coefficient of 0.967 and a bootstrap 95% confidence interval of 0.800 to 1.135. The researchers therefore characterized academic buoyancy as a partial statistical mediator.

Demographic differences were selective. Male students reported higher academic buoyancy than female students, with a small-to-moderate effect of Cohen’s d = 0.359 and a 95% confidence interval of 0.202 to 0.516. There were no statistically significant gender differences in school belonging or learning engagement. Academic buoyancy also did not differ significantly by grade. School belonging was higher in Grade 1 than in Grades 2 and 3, while engagement was lower in Grade 1 than in both senior grades. Because all grades were measured at one time, these were comparisons among cohorts rather than measured changes within students.

The authors interpreted the grade pattern cautiously. They proposed that first-year students’ belonging may reflect an initial sense of relatedness and shared identity, while increased academic demands in later years may strain competence and weaken relational security. They also suggested that the college entrance examination may contribute to externally regulated engagement in senior grades, meaning that high engagement should not automatically be equated with highly autonomous motivation. These interpretations were theoretical readings of the cohort differences, not causal findings established by the survey.

The study has several limitations. Its cross-sectional design and single-timepoint self-reports prevent causal inference and leave potential common-method bias. The sample was limited to intact classes at one school in Yunnan Province, so replication is needed across geographic and institutional settings. The three basic psychological needs used in the theoretical framework were not measured directly. The authors also noted that related variables, including academic self-efficacy and academic emotions, were not included in the model, and that future multi-method, multi-wave and intervention studies would be needed to distinguish overlapping mechanisms and test the proposed pathway more rigorously.

Subject of Research: School belonging, academic buoyancy and learning engagement among rural Chinese boarding high school students

Article Title: School belonging and learning engagement among rural Chinese boarding high school students: the mediating role of academic buoyancy

Article References: Zeng, Z., Huang, J., & Nie, Y. (2026). School belonging and learning engagement among rural Chinese boarding high school students: the mediating role of academic buoyancy. Frontiers in Psychology, 17, Article 1958525. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1958525

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1958525

Keywords: school belonging, academic buoyancy, learning engagement, rural boarding students, China, cross-sectional study, mediation analysis, Self-Determination Theory, high school students, student engagement, School, belonging

The program unfolded in two phases at a computer science outreach initiative hosted at a Historically Black College and University in the southeastern United States. During a three-and-a-half-week Summer Academy, students received twelve hours of foundational AI instruction layered onto broader computer science training that included block-based programming in MIT App Inventor. The lessons were built around Ng and colleagues’ four-part AI literacy framework, which moves learners from knowing and understanding AI, through using and applying it, to evaluating and creating AI-supported solutions, all while embedding ethical reasoning. Students distinguished AI from non-AI systems, explored supervised versus unsupervised machine learning, compared outputs from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, practiced prompt refinement, and generated images with Adobe Express while discussing algorithmic bias, hallucinations, deepfakes, and the environmental footprint of large AI systems.

In the fall phase, fifteen students who completed the full experience worked in small groups for four months to design mobile apps addressing problems relevant to their peers or local communities. Each team was required to propose AI-enabled features that extended app functionality, and they were explicitly encouraged to engage with a generative AI tool of their choice as a collaborative partner throughout ideation, research, wireframing, prototyping, and coding. The project culminated in a face-to-face app competition before a panel of judges, in which students had to justify the AI components of their designs and explain how those components would function for real users.

The design artifacts and presentations revealed that participants had internalized emerging AI concepts in practical form. Across the teams, students proposed recommendation systems, chatbots, content generation tools, personalized tutoring systems, and information verification tools aligned with authentic user needs. One team, Trash to Treasure, designed an app promoting the recycling and repurposing of old compact discs, with AI features that generated personalized upcycling ideas and offered chatbot guidance on recycling decisions. Another, EduQuest, built a recommendation system that analyzed survey responses to suggest universities, housing, and employment opportunities to applicants navigating the college process. A team called Artik tackled misinformation in online artistic communities with proposed fact-checking tools, while Inspiring Bright Mind envisioned an educational app providing age-appropriate AI tutoring and custom instructional materials for teachers.

Interview data showed that students treated AI outputs as raw material for judgment rather than finished products. One tenth-grade participant described her team’s process of generating app name candidates with AI and then reshaping them until something original emerged. Another ninth grader explained how she prompted the system to analyze what users loved and hated about Pinterest, then used that synthesized feedback to guide her team’s design decisions. Students also reported using generative AI to create logos, produce visual assets, and obtain programming advice, consistently describing a cycle of evaluation, modification, and improvement rather than simple acceptance of machine output. The researchers interpret this pattern as evidence of collaborative human-AI interaction, in which the AI contributes ideas while students retain responsibility for evaluation and decision-making.

The quantitative picture was more complicated. On a twenty-item knowledge assessment adapted from the validated AI Literacy Concept Inventory, average scores rose only modestly, from 13.14 before the program to 14.10 afterward, a difference that was not statistically significant. Individual trajectories varied widely: roughly 57 percent of students improved, about 20 percent declined, and the rest showed little or no change. Some students articulated striking conceptual growth, with one participant reporting that she had previously thought AI was just Siri and ChatGPT and now understood everything from personalized advertisements to machine vision that identifies weeds in fields. Others, including one student whose scores fell, could not articulate core ideas such as algorithmic bias when surveyed afterward. The discrepancy suggests, the authors argue, that students’ learning showed up more strongly in their applied design practices than in multiple-choice test performance, underscoring the limits of traditional knowledge measures for assessing AI literacy in diverse learners.

Perceptual measures were similarly nuanced. Composite self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and career interest scores shifted only slightly and without statistical significance, although students reported strong perceived gains in professional skills on a follow-up survey, with mean scores above 4.45 on a five-point scale. Collaboration skills drew the highest ratings, including working effectively with others and communicating ideas, consistent with a substantial body of research showing that sustained project-based design work cultivates transferable workplace competencies. The researchers note these are self-reports rather than objective behavioral measures, but the pattern suggests that AI-integrated app design may build both AI-specific competencies and broader professional skills simultaneously.

Perhaps the most revealing findings concerned the instructional challenges that surfaced. Students arrived with widely varying technological readiness; some struggled with basic file management and data uploads, and several admitted they relied almost entirely on smartphones, leaving them inexperienced with the sustained keyboard-based text input that generative AI tools demand. Attitudes toward AI split dramatically. On one end, a team fabricated a needs assessment report with AI instead of collecting genuine data, a misuse they acknowledged and corrected after the fact. On the other end, some students avoided AI entirely for fear of academic punishment. One tenth grader explained that her school monitored iPad use and forbade AI, so she refused to touch it, then reversed course after trying ChatGPT during the program, only to abandon it again when a teammate’s writing was flagged as machine-generated. The study also found that competing software development demands crowded out deeper AI engagement, and that the sheer breadth of AI content compressed into limited instructional hours left some students struggling to consolidate their understanding.

The authors draw three principal implications for educators. First, generative AI should be positioned as a collaborative partner in project-based learning rather than merely a task-completion tool, giving students structured opportunities to ideate, refine, and solve problems alongside AI systems they must learn to evaluate critically. Second, instruction must be differentiated and scaffolded, prioritizing foundational digital skills such as keyboarding alongside tiered AI challenges matched to students’ prior knowledge, a need that is especially acute for students from communities historically excluded from computing education. Third, short bursts of exposure are insufficient; meaningful AI literacy requires sustained, curriculum-embedded time for iterative practice, reflection, and ethical engagement. The study also raises a subtler tension for the field: curiosity about new AI technologies actually declined slightly among participants, possibly because lessons on bias, environmental costs, and hallucinations replaced early enthusiasm with a more critical, realistic view. The researchers caution that their small, single-site sample, participant attrition from 36 initial participants to 15 completers, a middle-school-oriented assessment instrument, and the lead author’s dual role as instructor and researcher all limit generalizability. Future work, they argue, should develop performance-based and design-oriented assessments, explore longer curriculum-integrated programs, and examine how school policies shape whether students learn not just how to use AI, but when and why its use is appropriate.

Subject of Research: AI literacy development among high school students through generative AI-supported project-based mobile app design

Article Title: Cultivating AI literacy among high school students through generative AI as a collaborative partner

Article References: Hur, J. W., Bhuyan, J., Wu, F., Thomas, C., & Koong, K. (2026). Cultivating AI literacy among high school students through generative AI as a collaborative partner. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 805. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02092-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02092-7

Keywords: AI literacy, generative AI, high school students, project-based learning, mobile app design, African American students, underserved communities, human-AI collaboration, instructional scaffolding, AI ethics, Discover Education, K-12 education

The research, published in BMC Public Health by Yasin Sağlam, a public health specialist and District Health Director in Vezirköprü, Samsun, surveyed 782 students in grades 9 through 12 across all public high schools in the district between April and June 2026. Participants completed a sociodemographic questionnaire along with two validated instruments: the Climate Change Worry Scale, or CCWS, which quantifies the intensity of climate-related concern, and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 scale, known as GAD-7, a widely used clinical screening tool for generalized anxiety symptoms. The study was approved by the Samsun University Non-Interventional Clinical Research Ethics Committee and carried out with written informed consent from parents or guardians of participants under 18, in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline numbers are striking. The mean CCWS score among the students was 30.31 with a standard deviation of 9.54, and a median of 30.0 with an interquartile range of 23.0 to 37.0. More alarming from a clinical standpoint, the mean GAD-7 score was 8.78 with a standard deviation of 6.58, and 353 students, or 45.1 percent of the sample, scored at or above the GAD-7 clinical cut-off of 10, the threshold conventionally used to flag probable generalized anxiety disorder. In other words, nearly half of the adolescents surveyed were experiencing anxiety symptoms at a level that would typically warrant clinical evaluation, and their climate worry scores were far from trivial.

The correlation between the two measures was the study’s most consequential statistical finding. Climate change worry and generalized anxiety scores were moderately correlated, with a Spearman coefficient of 0.573 and a p-value below 0.001. This means that students who worried more intensely about climate change also tended to report more generalized anxiety symptoms, and vice versa. The relationship is correlational rather than causal, so the data cannot determine whether climate worry drives anxiety, whether anxious individuals are more prone to ruminate on global threats, or whether both share common underlying drivers. But the strength of the association, in a sample of this size, makes it difficult to dismiss as statistical noise.

Multiple linear regression analysis revealed which factors independently predicted climate change worry. Female sex emerged as the strongest sociodemographic predictor, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.302. The GAD-7 score itself was the single strongest predictor overall at 0.339, followed closely by heavy social media use, defined as more than six hours per day, which carried a beta of 0.275. Reporting an extreme weather event in the local area within the past year contributed a smaller but still significant effect at 0.106, and school type also independently predicted worry levels. Together, these variables explained 43.7 percent of the variance in climate change worry, with an adjusted R-squared of 0.430, a substantial proportion for research on psychological phenomena in real-world populations.

The demographic patterns within the raw data reinforce the regression findings. Median CCWS scores were markedly higher among female students than male students, at 34.0 versus 26.0, a difference with a p-value below 0.001. Students who reported experiencing an extreme weather event in their area during the previous year scored higher on climate worry than those who did not, with medians of 33.0 versus 30.0 and a p-value of 0.005. Most dramatically, climate worry rose steadily across categories of self-reported social media use: students spending less than one hour daily on social platforms had a median CCWS score of 25.0, those using social media between one and six hours scored a median of 30.0, and those exceeding six hours per day reached a median of 36.0, with the overall difference significant at p below 0.001.

The social media gradient deserves particular attention. A dose-response pattern of this kind, where worry increases stepwise with each increment of exposure time, is consistent with the hypothesis that digital information environments amplify climate-related distress among adolescents. Constant exposure to climate news, disaster imagery, and online discourse about environmental collapse may keep the threat psychologically salient in ways that traditional media or school curricula do not. The study cannot prove causation, since it is possible that students who are already more worried about climate change seek out more climate-related content online. But the consistency of the gradient across usage categories, combined with the independent predictive power of heavy use in the regression model, strengthens the case that social media plays a meaningful role in shaping the emotional landscape of climate concern among teenagers.

The finding that local experience of extreme weather independently predicts climate worry adds an important geographic dimension. Rural districts like Vezirköprü are often assumed to be insulated from the psychological effects of climate change because they lack the dense media environments and activist cultures of large cities. Yet direct encounters with floods, droughts, storms, or heatwaves in one’s own community appear to translate abstract global narratives into concrete personal vulnerability. This suggests that as extreme weather events become more frequent under continued warming, the mental health burden on rural adolescents may grow even if their communities remain far from the coastal megacities that dominate climate coverage.

The high prevalence of generalized anxiety symptoms in the sample, with 45.1 percent at or above the clinical cut-off, also warrants independent concern regardless of its relationship to climate worry. Adolescent anxiety is a well-documented public health problem, and rural areas frequently lack adequate mental health services. The study’s findings suggest that school-based interventions addressing climate-related distress could serve a dual purpose: they may reduce a specific source of worry while simultaneously providing an entry point for identifying students with broader anxiety disorders who need clinical support. The author recommends that school-based mental health and climate literacy programs address climate-related distress, with particular attention to female students and heavy social media users, the two groups identified as most vulnerable.

Published as an open-access article in BMC Public Health on 16 October 2026, the study carries the DOI 10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2 and adds to a growing international literature on eco-anxiety, the term increasingly used to describe chronic worry about environmental degradation. What distinguishes this contribution is its rural focus and its use of a validated clinical anxiety measure alongside a dedicated climate worry scale in the same sample. As climate change accelerates and extreme weather becomes more common, understanding how adolescents in less-studied settings process these threats will be essential for designing mental health support that meets them where they are. This study provides a rigorous baseline for that effort in rural Türkiye and a template for similar research elsewhere.

Subject of Research: Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among rural Turkish high school students

Article Title: Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among high school students in a rural district of Türkiye: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Sağlam, Y. (2026). Climate change worry and generalized anxiety among high school students in a rural district of Türkiye: a cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29987-2

Keywords: climate change, eco-anxiety, generalized anxiety, adolescent mental health, social media, extreme weather, Türkiye, high school students, public health, GAD-7, Climate Change Worry Scale, rural health

The study, published in Discover Education, is notable for how it defines its target. Rather than treating cybersecurity awareness as a single quality a person either has or lacks, the researchers grounded their survey in two behavioral models widely used in information security research: Protection Motivation Theory and the Health Belief Model. Protection Motivation Theory holds that people perform two appraisals before acting on a warning: a threat appraisal, weighing how serious and likely a danger is, and a coping appraisal, weighing whether the recommended behavior actually works and whether they can perform it. The Health Belief Model, originally developed to explain preventive health behavior, adds that people act when they believe they are susceptible, that the consequences are serious, that a behavior is beneficial, that barriers can be overcome, and that an external trigger, a cue to action, sets the process in motion. A structured training session, in this framing, is a deliberate cue to action aimed at shifting specific beliefs rather than raising one undifferentiated awareness level.

To measure those beliefs, the team administered a five-point Likert-type survey online to pilot high schools drawn from four school types: an Anatolian High School, a Girls’ Anatolian Imam Hatip High School, a Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School, and a Science High School. The first survey ran between November and December 2024. Instructors from the Department of Management Information Systems at Gebze Technical University, including research assistants and associate professors with expertise in information systems and cybersecurity, then delivered the same one-hour session in each school’s conference hall between February and March 2025. The training assumed no prior knowledge and covered basic cybersecurity concepts and terminology, personal security measures, and practical guidance on identifying fraudulent websites and misleading content, supported by examples, visual demonstrations and selected videos. The same survey was sent again in April 2025.

Of 1029 student responses before the training and 870 after, only students who completed both surveys and could be matched by school and student number were kept, producing a final paired sample of 601. The researchers acknowledge that this attrition was not random: chi-square comparisons between matched and unmatched students showed differences on gender, school and grade, and matching rates ranged from 15.6 percent to 86.7 percent across the four schools. The findings therefore describe the matched participants rather than the full baseline population.

The survey’s structure emerged from a principal component analysis on the pre-training responses, which produced a five-dimensional scale with acceptable overall internal consistency, Cronbach’s alpha of 0.86. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of 0.905 and a significant Bartlett sphericity test confirmed the data were suitable for factor analysis, and the five factors, with initial eigenvalues of 6.24, 2.07, 1.30, 1.15 and 1.08, accounted for 56.42 percent of the total variance. The dimensions were conceptual awareness of cybersecurity, covering knowledge of malware, firewalls and social engineering; action-oriented behaviors, covering device authentication, email checking and password security; awareness of advanced protection mechanisms such as VPNs and two-factor authentication; security in online interactions and transactions, combining cyberbullying and card-security items; and digital risk tendency and privacy management, covering unsecured networks and credential sharing in gaming or streaming. Two-item subscales showed lower internal consistency and were interpreted with caution.

Paired-samples t-tests on the 601 matched students revealed a pattern the authors describe as mixed. Scores on action-oriented protective behaviors rose significantly, which the researchers interpret as a strengthening of coping appraisal in Protection Motivation Theory terms: students increasingly believed that protective measures were useful and within their reach. In contrast, self-reported scores on the conceptual-knowledge dimensions declined significantly, with a similar and more pronounced decrease on the advanced protection mechanisms factor. One plausible reading, the authors suggest, draws on the Dunning-Kruger effect: students who had overestimated their familiarity with cybersecurity terminology may have judged themselves more realistically after the training. Because the study measured only self-assessment and not actual knowledge, the same decline could equally reflect response-shift bias, the instability of a short self-report measure, or a real drop in reported confidence, so the interpretation is offered tentatively rather than as proven fact.

The most concrete evidence came from a practical task embedded at the end of the survey. Participants judged ten website screenshots, eight fraudulent and two genuine, designed from real-world attack cases and deliberately containing cues such as urgent requests, mismatches between displayed URLs and embedded hyperlinks, grammatical errors and abnormal visual design. McNemar tests showed that correct identification improved significantly on four of the fraudulent screens, for example rising from 50.4 percent to 63.9 percent on one item. The improvement was not uniform: no significant change appeared on two fraudulent screens, one of which 87.2 percent of students already identified correctly before the training, and correct identification decreased on two fraudulent screens that already had high pre-training rates. For the two genuine screens, accuracy did not improve and declined significantly on one, from 94.0 percent to 89.7 percent, meaning students became somewhat more likely to label legitimate pages as fraudulent. The authors suggest future training should give more attention to distinguishing fraudulent from genuine pages rather than treating every page as suspicious.

Demographic comparisons revealed differences that shifted in complex ways. Before the training, male students scored significantly higher on the knowledge-oriented dimensions, with the largest gap on conceptual awareness, where male students averaged 3.46 against 2.87 for female students, an effect size of d = 0.68. Female students scored higher on the online interaction and privacy dimensions. After the training, the gap on conceptual awareness disappeared, with female students averaging 2.47 and male students 2.39, while the difference on advanced protection mechanisms reversed in direction, reflecting a larger decline among male students rather than a gain among female students. Across schools, the Girls’ Anatolian Imam Hatip High School scored significantly lower than the other three schools on conceptual awareness before the training, yet after the training the school means converged, ranging from 2.29 to 2.47, and the between-school difference was no longer statistically significant. The authors caution that because the study included no control group and no time-by-school or time-by-gender interaction was tested, these are described as observed differences at each time point rather than as evidence that the training equalized the groups. Grade level, from 9th through 12th, was not a meaningful source of variation on any dimension.

The authors are careful about what the design can and cannot show. Because the same students were measured before and after without a comparison group, the results are interpreted as changes associated with the training rather than definitive proof of cause, and part of the measured change may reflect growing familiarity with the questions. The four pilot schools were purposively selected from a single district, each school type was represented by a single institution, and one all-girls school means the gender findings are partly confounded with school composition. Many statistical tests were conducted without correction for multiple comparisons, so individual significant results, especially the smaller between-group differences and the item-level screen comparisons, are treated as tentative, with more weight placed on the overall pattern.

Within those limits, the study supports integrating standardized cybersecurity training into secondary education. The training appears to have worked mainly as a cue to action in Health Belief Model terms, prompting students to apply protective measures, while strengthening the coping appraisal described by Protection Motivation Theory. The authors suggest that a single program spanning all high school grades may be a practical approach, given that grade-level means were similar before and after the training, and that standardized school-wide training may be more practical than curricula tailored to individual schools. They propose extending the research to pilot schools from different districts to examine the influence of school location, and to middle schools, since children are starting to use the internet at increasingly younger ages and the benefits of introducing cybersecurity education earlier remain to be examined.

Subject of Research: Cybersecurity

Article Title: Evaluation of cybersecurity awareness among high school students in Turkey before and after training

Article References: Cubukcu Cerasi, C., Erat, S., Huseynov, F., Kilic, A., Ozdenizci Kose, B., & Saritoprak, B. (2026). Evaluation of cybersecurity awareness among high school students in Turkey before and after training. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02338-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02338-4

Keywords: cybersecurity awareness, high school students, Turkey, phishing, cybersecurity education, Protection Motivation Theory, Health Belief Model, digital literacy, Evaluation, cybersecurity, awareness, high

The study focused on students in Ardabil, Iran, during the 2024–2025 academic year. From a population of high schoolers who met cutoff criteria for social anxiety, the team recruited 279 participants through cluster random sampling. Each student completed a battery of well-validated questionnaires: the Social Phobia Inventory, or SPIN, to measure social anxiety symptoms; the Ruminative Responses Scale to capture the tendency to brood repetitively over negative feelings; the Internalized Shame Scale to assess the deep, stable sense of being fundamentally flawed or unworthy; and the Anxiety Sensitivity Index, which measures the fear of anxiety-related sensations themselves—the belief that a racing heart or trembling hands signal something dangerous or catastrophic. Because all participants were under eighteen, the researchers obtained written informed consent from parents or legal guardians alongside the students’ own assent, and the protocol was approved by the university’s ethics committee in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The theoretical logic behind the model draws on decades of clinical theory. Rumination, the habit of chewing over past failures and imagined future embarrassments, has long been implicated in social anxiety; a 2024 meta-analysis confirmed that post-event rumination—replaying a social encounter after it ends—strongly maintains social fear. Internalized shame operates on an even deeper level. Unlike situational embarrassment, internalized shame is a global, painful conviction that the self is defective, a state that psychologists such as Paul Gilbert have linked to perceptions of low social rank and submissive standing within a group. Anxiety sensitivity, meanwhile, is the tendency to interpret the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety—palpitations, blushing, mind going blank—as harmful in their own right. The researchers hypothesized that both rumination and shame feed into this fear-of-fear mechanism, which then amplifies social anxiety, while also exerting direct effects of their own.

The statistical machinery behind the study was rigorous. The team employed a descriptive-correlational design analyzed through structural equation modeling, a technique that allows researchers to test an entire network of hypothesized causal pathways simultaneously rather than examining relationships one pair at a time. To verify the mediating role of anxiety sensitivity, they used a bootstrap procedure with 2,000 resamples, a method widely regarded as the gold standard for estimating indirect effects because it does not assume the indirect effect follows a normal distribution. They also computed Pearson correlations among all variables and evaluated the model against a full panel of goodness-of-fit indices, including the comparative fit index, the Tucker-Lewis index, the incremental fit index, the normed fit index, and the root mean square error of approximation.

The results were striking in their consistency. Rumination predicted anxiety sensitivity with a standardized coefficient of 0.46, and internalized shame predicted it with a coefficient of 0.44, both statistically significant at the p < 0.001 level. All three variables also directly predicted social anxiety: rumination at 0.45, internalized shame at 0.42, and—most powerfully—anxiety sensitivity at 0.52. In other words, the fear of anxiety symptoms themselves emerged as the single strongest direct predictor of social anxiety in this sample of adolescents. The bootstrap analysis then confirmed the central hypothesis: anxiety sensitivity partially mediated the link between rumination and social anxiety, with a standardized indirect effect of 0.238 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.140 to 0.340, and likewise mediated the link between internalized shame and social anxiety, with an indirect effect of 0.226 and a confidence interval of 0.130 to 0.330. Because these confidence intervals exclude zero, the indirect pathways are statistically reliable.

Just as important as the significant pathways was the quality of the model itself. Every fit index landed in the range that methodologists consider excellent: the ratio of chi-square to degrees of freedom was 1.244, well below the conventional threshold of 3; the comparative fit index reached 0.988 and the incremental fit index 0.989, both far above the 0.95 benchmark; the Tucker-Lewis index stood at 0.983, the normed fit index at 0.944, and the parsimony-adjusted RMSEA was just 0.030 with a PCLOSE value of 0.908, indicating no meaningful discrepancy between the model and the observed data. In structural equation modeling, where complex models frequently strain against fit criteria, results this clean are uncommon, and they suggest the proposed architecture—shame and rumination feeding anxiety sensitivity, which in turn feeds social anxiety, with direct paths running alongside—captures something real about how these processes interlock in adolescence.

The word partial in partial mediation matters. Anxiety sensitivity did not fully explain the relationship between rumination, shame, and social anxiety; substantial direct pathways remained. This means that brooding thoughts and internalized shame also fuel social anxiety through other channels—perhaps by shaping negative self-imagery, anticipatory processing, or avoidance behavior—while simultaneously being funneled through the fear-of-fear mechanism. For clinicians, this dual finding is arguably the study’s most actionable insight. Interventions that target only one node in the network may leave other pathways intact. Conversely, a treatment strategy that reduces anxiety sensitivity while also addressing ruminative habits and shame-based self-evaluation could, in principle, attack the problem from multiple angles at once, weakening both the direct routes and the mediated route to social fear.

The findings arrive at a moment of growing concern about adolescent mental health. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis estimated substantial global prevalence of social anxiety disorder among children, adolescents, and young adults, and longitudinal research from Norway has linked adolescent social anxiety to reduced school completion and lower progression to higher education. Social anxiety in the teenage years is not a benign phase that everyone simply outgrows; it can derail education, friendships, and the developmental task of building a stable social identity. Prior work has also shown that rumination functions as a transdiagnostic process—one that cuts across depression, anxiety, and related conditions—and that co-rumination with peers can elevate anxiety sensitivity in adolescents. The new study ties these threads together into a single, testable structure applicable to a school-age population.

Several caveats frame the conclusions. The design is correlational, so the model describes patterns of association consistent with a causal story rather than proving causation; longitudinal and experimental work would be needed to establish directionality definitively. The sample comprised Iranian high school students who already met social anxiety cutoff criteria, and cultural context may shape how shame and rumination are experienced and expressed, so replication in other populations is warranted. The data were self-reported, which introduces the usual possibility of response bias. The authors also note that the underlying data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request, and the research received no specific external funding. Still, the study’s practical implications are clear: screening adolescents for anxiety sensitivity could help identify those most at risk, and interventions—whether cognitive-behavioral, compassion-focused, or aimed at interrupting ruminative loops—may gain leverage by explicitly teaching teenagers that a pounding heart before a class presentation is uncomfortable but not dangerous. In the architecture of adolescent social fear, the fear of fear itself may be the keystone worth pulling first.

Subject of Research: A structural equation modeling study of rumination, internalized shame, and anxiety sensitivity as predictors of social anxiety in high school students

Article Title: Developing a model of social anxiety based on rumination and internalized shame with the mediating role of anxiety sensitivity among high school students

Article References: Abdoli, A., Damirchi, E. S., & Homayoon, M. N. (2026). Developing a model of social anxiety based on rumination and internalized shame with the mediating role of anxiety sensitivity among high school students. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1610. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10179-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10179-5

Keywords: social anxiety, rumination, internalized shame, anxiety sensitivity, adolescents, high school students, structural equation modeling, mediation analysis, Current Psychology, school psychology, cognitive vulnerability, bootstrap mediation

The research, led by Muhammad Noor Kholid of Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta together with colleagues from Indonesia, Vietnam, and Singapore, focused on reflective thinking, a concept with a long intellectual pedigree stretching back to John Dewey. Reflective thinking, in the framework used by the team, is a mental activity that begins with a state of perplexity, whether doubt, difficulty, or error, and is resolved by drawing on prior knowledge and experience through repeated evaluation until the confusion is overcome. In mathematics, this means students do not simply apply procedures; they monitor their reasoning, adjust strategies mid-course, and integrate conceptual understanding as they work toward a solution.

To capture this process as it unfolded, the researchers adopted a descriptive qualitative design involving 35 high school students. Participants were selected precisely because they were reflective thinkers: students who experienced doubt or difficulty when solving mathematical problems but persisted until they reached a correct solution. Each student tackled non-routine problems on arithmetic series, a topic chosen because it sits at a critical juncture in secondary mathematics, underpinning later work on linear equations, statistics, and mathematical modeling. Crucially, the problems could not be solved by plugging numbers into a formula; they demanded interpretation of the problem’s structure and the invention of an appropriate strategy.

The methodological centerpiece was the think-aloud protocol. Students verbalized their reasoning while solving the problems, and the sessions were recorded using audiovisual methods. Answer sheets, observation sheets, and recordings were then analyzed through the constant comparison method, an inductive procedure in which data incidents are compared with one another and with emerging categories until stable classifications emerge. The instruments themselves were rigorously vetted: three experts in mathematics education, assessment, and evaluation rated the tasks, yielding an Aiken’s V index of 1, above the minimum criterion of 0.95, and 100 percent inter-rater agreement on reliability.

The analysis, anchored in the reflective thinking framework of Zehavi and Mann, which identifies four components, techniques, monitoring, insight, and conceptualisation, revealed three clearly distinguishable problem-solving patterns. The first, labeled Employ Variable, describes students who translate the problem’s key quantities into algebraic symbols. The second, Visual Representation, captures students who sketch the situation to build understanding. The third, Direct, characterizes students who plunge straight into manual calculation without constructing any symbolic or visual model of the problem.

In the Employ Variable pattern, exemplified by a student coded PS1, the reflective journey began with a systematic inventory of what was known and what was asked. The student assigned variables, n for the number of rows, b for the difference in seats between rows, and a for the seats in the first row, precisely because the initial reading of the problem produced confusion. In an interview, the student explained that equating critical information with variables made the problem easier to understand and easier to solve. This symbolic scaffolding then allowed the student to apply the arithmetic series sum formula, re-examine each step, and, when confusion resurfaced over how many additional rows of seats were needed, reread the problem repeatedly until the correct first step re-emerged. Every component of reflective thinking was activated: techniques in selecting the strategy, monitoring in re-checking the work, insight in breaking through the impasse, and conceptualisation in linking the variables to the underlying structure.

The Visual Representation pattern told a different but equally complete story. A student coded PS2 responded to the same problem by sketching the seating arrangement of a performance hall, row by row, writing in the seat counts from 10 in the first row to 22 in the last. The sketch was not decoration; it was a core cognitive tool. As the student put it during the interview, drawing the rows allowed him to imagine what the situation actually looked like. From the sketch he computed total seats, multiplied by the ticket price, discovered the revenue fell short of the target, and then extended his tally row by row until the target was met, concluding that six additional rows were required. Here, too, all four reflective components were engaged, with visualization serving to stabilize understanding, reduce confusion, and guide monitoring of each calculation.

The Direct pattern was strikingly different. A student coded PS3 simply wrote down the seat counts and added them up manually, with no formula, no variables, and no sketch. Perplexity did appear, but only later, at the stage of interpreting intermediate results, when the student paused over whether the first revenue figure represented the full answer. Reflection in this pattern was contextual and partial: the student re-checked calculations, adjusted steps when results mismatched the target, and verified the final answer, but never restructured the problem symbolically or visually. The analysis found that Direct-pattern students missed several key reflective indicators, including articulating what was being asked, restructuring information, revisiting the problem when confused, and integrating conceptual understanding. Notably, the researchers caution that this does not signal low ability; rather, it reflects a situational, minimal level of reflection confined largely to monitoring.

The broader significance of the findings lies in what they mean for classrooms. Prior research cited by the team shows that teachers often struggle to recognize the specific strategies students use, tending to identify only general difficulties with comprehension or procedure. By classifying problem-solving patterns through the lens of reflective thinking, the study offers teachers a diagnostic vocabulary: a student stuck in the Direct pattern may need experiences that encourage representation and conceptual reconstruction, while students already employing variables or sketches may benefit from challenges that deepen their monitoring and evaluation. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the modest sample size and the single topic of arithmetic series, and call for future work with open-ended and ill-structured problems, as well as instructional models designed to infuse reflective learning. For now, the study delivers a vivid message: the path a student chooses through a hard problem, whether symbolic, visual, or direct, shapes not just the answer they reach, but the quality of the thinking they do along the way.

Subject of Research: Reflective thinking patterns in students' problem-solving of non-routine arithmetic series tasks

Article Title: Students’ problem-solving patterns in arithmetic series tasks viewed through reflective thinking

Article References: Kholid, M. N., Febriyanti, R., Santosa, Y. T., Faiziyah, N., Hidayati, Y. M., Budi, A. B. S., Sukmawati, T., Suharna, H., Tong, D. H., & Lam, T. T. (2026). Students’ problem-solving patterns in arithmetic series tasks viewed through reflective thinking. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 991. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02176-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02176-4

Keywords: reflective thinking, arithmetic series, problem-solving, mathematics education, non-routine problems, think-aloud protocol, qualitative research, metacognition, visualization, algebraic variables, high school students, pedagogy

The motivation for the HCIA stems from a well-documented gap in existing career-interest measurement. The dominant framework in vocational psychology, John Holland’s RIASEC model, sorts interests into six broad themes—Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, and Conventional—usually arranged in a hexagon where adjacent types are assumed to be more similar than opposite ones. That parsimony is useful for summarizing general orientation, but it can mask enormous within-domain heterogeneity. The broad Artistic domain, for example, lumps together visual arts, music, performing arts, creative writing, and design, which are distinct majors with distinct course demands. Research on so-called basic interests has shown that narrower, content-homogeneous scales provide incremental information beyond broad RIASEC themes, and one study found that interest congruence measured at the basic-interest level predicted college-major satisfaction better than congruence measured at the broad level. For students choosing among academic programs that look similar at a distance but differ substantially in learning content, that specificity matters.

To build the HCIA’s category structure, the researchers conducted an iterative content-mapping process that integrated several large classification systems. On the educational side, they drew on Taiwanese academic-field classifications—including the fifth revised Standard Classification of Academic Fields, which organizes fields into 11 broad fields, 27 narrow fields, 93 categories, and 174 detailed categories—and cross-checked coverage against UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of Education Fields of Education and Training, known as ISCED-F, which spans 11 broad fields, 29 narrow fields, and roughly 80 detailed fields. On the occupational side, they used the 2018 U.S. Standard Occupational Classification, with its 867 detailed occupations nested in 459 broad occupations, 98 minor groups, and 23 major groups, along with the O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy. Crucially, the authors emphasize that these taxonomies served as content-mapping frameworks for coverage and naming, not as psychological theory; the interpretation of the final categories is grounded in vocational-interest theory, basic-interest research, and hierarchical models of interests, including Gati’s hierarchical model and the more recent Comprehensive Assessment of Basic Interests, or CABIN, which organizes 41 basic-interest scales under eight broad dimensions.

The resulting HCIA framework comprises nine broad categories—Arts, Services, Law and Politics, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, Human Sciences, Business, Engineering, and Physical Fitness—each containing four subcategories. Item development began with a pool of 245 items written to describe the essential features of learning contents and work activities rather than relying on the names of courses or occupations, a choice intended to reduce the influence of students’ differential familiarity with specific labels. An item representing politics, for instance, reads “Exploring how national government works,” while one representing tour-guide work describes “Leading tours and explaining scenic spots, dealing with problems in traveling.” A panel of three experts in educational psychology and psychometrics reviewed the pool for relevance, clarity, developmental appropriateness, representativeness, and conceptual overlap, retaining 228 items for pilot testing. After psychometric screening, the final version retained exactly four items per subcategory—two course-related learning-activity items and two occupational-activity items—yielding the 144-item instrument with balanced content representation.

Perhaps the most distinctive technical feature of the HCIA is its response format. Rather than asking students to rate items on a traditional Likert scale, the assessment employs the Visual Analogue Scale for Rating, Ranking, and Paired-Comparison, or VAS-RRP, a computerized format in which students drag item icons onto a continuous response line. The 144 items are assembled into 24 testlets of six items each, displayed on a single screen so that all six can be compared simultaneously. Because the system prevents two icons from occupying exactly the same position, students must make relative preference judgments rather than assigning identical ratings to everything—a built-in forcing function against indiscriminate responding. The 36 subcategories were treated as treatments in an incomplete-block design, with the allocation of items to testlets generated by an algorithmic procedure based on a D-optimality criterion, ensuring that each subcategory appeared exactly four times across the assessment. Scoring converts each icon’s horizontal position into a proportional 0-to-100 coordinate relative to the scale’s endpoints, a normalization that removes the influence of screen resolution and display size on the measurement metric.

The psychometric evaluation proceeded in stages. A pilot study with 1,550 Grade 11 students from northern Taiwan, aged 16 or 17, was conducted between mid-December 2018 and late January 2019. Item analysis flagged ten items with item-total correlations below the prespecified 0.40 discrimination threshold for removal or revision, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the nine broad categories all exceeded 0.88 in the pilot data. The formal validation study, run from early May to late June 2020, initially collected 3,308 response records from Grade 11 students across Taiwan; after screening out 52 incomplete records and 116 records completed in under seven minutes—far shorter than the typical 25-minute completion time and indicative of careless responding—3,140 valid records remained. A separate subsample of 238 students retook the assessment approximately one month later to establish temporal stability, and a third cohort of 555 students provided scores on both the HCIA and an earlier Holland-based instrument, the Situation-Based Career Interest Assessment, for convergent comparison.

The results were largely favorable. In the formal validation sample, Cronbach’s alpha ranged from 0.75 to 0.94 for the 36 subcategories and from 0.86 to 0.96 for the nine broad categories, while composite reliability coefficients derived from confirmatory factor analysis ranged from 0.76 to 0.95 and 0.84 to 0.98, respectively. Test-retest coefficients over the one-month interval ranged from 0.73 to 0.91 for subcategories and 0.85 to 0.91 for categories. Average variance extracted, a measure of convergent validity, ranged from 0.64 to 0.96 across levels, comfortably exceeding the conventional 0.50 threshold. The researchers compared four confirmatory factor analysis models: a nine-factor direct model, a testlet-adjusted version of it, a correlated 36-factor subcategory model, and the hypothesized testlet-adjusted second-order model in which items load on 36 subcategory factors that in turn load on nine broad categories. The correlated 36-factor model fit best empirically, but the hypothesized second-order model also showed acceptable fit—CFI of 0.969, RMSEA of 0.061—supporting the intended hierarchical organization, with item loadings ranging from 0.49 to 0.91 and second-order loadings from 0.45 to 0.98.

External validity evidence came from correlations between HCIA broad-category scores and the RIASEC scores of the Holland-based SCIA. The pattern was theoretically coherent: Arts correlated most strongly with Artistic interests (r = 0.62), Natural Sciences with Investigative (r = 0.62), Engineering with both Investigative and Realistic (r = 0.54 and 0.52), Law and Politics and Business with Enterprising and Conventional, and Social Sciences with Social (r = 0.52). Some categories showed more differentiated, cross-domain patterns—Services correlated with both Artistic and Social interests, likely reflecting its inclusion of fashion, hospitality, and tourism—suggesting the HCIA captures structure that a six-type inventory would blur. Supplementary score-level analyses of differential item functioning across gender, school ownership, and geographic region found that metric-like effects were generally negligible, while scalar-like effects were more frequent for gender, appearing to reflect genuine mean-level differences in interest profiles rather than measurement bias, though the authors caution these were preliminary score-level checks rather than full item-level invariance tests.

The authors are careful to frame what the study does and does not establish. The confirmatory findings support the HCIA’s proposed measurement structure, not the superiority of hierarchical models over circumplex ones, nor a direct validation of Gati’s original hard-science versus soft-science partition. Limitations include the focus on Taiwanese students, the absence of predictive validity evidence—future longitudinal work should test whether HCIA scores forecast track choices, major satisfaction, and persistence—and the lack of discriminant validity analysis. The study also notes that the original administration did not undergo prospective IRB review, and that device-related variability in the drag-and-drop format, though mitigated by proportional scoring, warrants further study. Still, the practical promise is clear: by letting students and counselors zoom from broad academic directions down to specific subcategory profiles, the HCIA extends hierarchical interest assessment to an earlier educational stage, potentially giving teenagers facing high-stakes streaming decisions a far more detailed map of where their interests might take them.

Subject of Research: Development and psychometric validation of a hierarchical career-interests assessment for senior high school educational tracking

Article Title: Constructing the hierarchical career-interests assessment (HCIA) for educational tracking

Article References: Sung, Y.-T., & Hsiao, M.-T. (2026). Constructing the hierarchical career-interests assessment (HCIA) for educational tracking. Current Psychology, 45(17), Article 1495. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09871-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09871-3

Keywords: career-interest assessment, vocational interests, psychometrics, educational tracking, HCIA, RIASEC model, confirmatory factor analysis, high school students, Taiwan, ISCED-F, test reliability, academic major selection

The research, published in Discover Education, was conducted by Leila Sadat Hamidian Divkolaei of the Technical and Vocational University in Tehran. It asked a deceptively simple question: do high school students respond differently, in emotional and aesthetic terms, to facades whose windows differ only in their geometric proportions? To find out, the study recruited 327 third-grade female high school students in Babol, drawn from three study tracks, mathematics, experimental sciences, and humanities, and from both public and private schools. Participants were selected according to strict criteria, including normal or corrected-to-normal vision and voluntary, informed participation, with written consent obtained from their legal guardians.

The experimental design was carefully controlled. Five facade alternatives were generated from the same base school design, taken from a project under construction by Iran’s School Renovation Organization. Across all five images, the overall building massing, viewpoint, scale, and facade composition were held constant; only the geometry and proportion of the openings varied. The five alternatives comprised a rectangle with proportions of approximately 1.6 to 1, embodying the conventional golden ratio; a golden triangle, an equilateral triangle with an apex angle of 36 degrees; a hexagon, from which the so-called Iranian golden ratio of 1.73 is derived; and two strongly elongated rectangles with 3-to-1 proportions, one horizontal and one vertical. This isolation of a single variable allowed the researchers to attribute differences in emotional response to geometry alone, rather than to materials, color, or form.

Students evaluated the images using a semantic differential questionnaire, a technique that presents bipolar adjective pairs and asks respondents to rate a stimulus between them on a seven-point Likert scale. The 21 attributes spanned several domains: architectural qualities such as beautiful-ugly, traditional-modern, dynamic-static, and light-heavy; educational qualities such as encouraging-discouraging and curious-gloomy; and psychological qualities such as joyful-sad and happy-depressed. The images were projected onto a three-meter screen at a fixed height, and every participant viewed them from a standardized distance of four meters under consistent classroom lighting, with each image displayed for roughly 30 seconds before ratings were completed.

The theoretical scaffolding for the study draws on two complementary strands of environmental aesthetics. The first is processing-fluency theory, which holds that forms the visual system can parse easily, typically coherent and symmetric configurations, tend to be judged more positively. The second encompasses classic environmental-preference models, including the Kaplan and Kaplan preference matrix and Berlyne’s collative-properties framework, which argue that human preference requires a balance between coherence and complexity to avoid monotony. A hexagon, the author argues, occupies an intriguing middle ground: its geometric regularity ensures high perceptual fluency, while its non-orthogonal character introduces a distinctive complexity that pure rectangles lack. In an Iranian cultural context, moreover, repeated historical exposure to hexagon-derived proportions in traditional patterns and spatial modules may lower the cognitive effort needed to process these forms, deepening aesthetic pleasure and emotional comfort.

Because every participant rated all five alternatives, the data were analyzed as repeated measures. Shapiro-Wilk tests revealed that all opening-by-attribute distributions departed significantly from normality, so the researcher employed Friedman tests rather than parametric alternatives, followed by Wilcoxon signed-rank pairwise comparisons with Holm adjustment to control the family-wise error rate. Kendall’s W was reported as the omnibus effect size, and matched-pairs rank-biserial correlations quantified pairwise effects. This nonparametric pipeline reflects a methodological rigor that has often been absent from earlier studies of architectural proportion, many of which relied on small samples and uncorrected comparisons.

The results were striking. On the overall 21-attribute score, the opening geometries differed significantly, with a chi-squared statistic of 104.29 across four degrees of freedom and N equal to 327, Holm-adjusted p below .001, and a Kendall’s W of 0.080. The hexagonal opening achieved the highest overall mean rating of 4.421, followed by the vertical 3:1 rectangle at 3.902, the horizontal 3:1 rectangle at 3.735, the golden triangle at 3.684, and the conventional golden-ratio rectangle at 3.680. In Holm-adjusted pairwise comparisons, the hexagon was rated significantly higher than each of the other four openings, with rank-biserial correlations ranging from .437 to .571. Perhaps most tellingly, the hexagonal opening took the highest mean on 18 of the 21 individual attributes, including beautiful, classy, light, distinctive, harmonic, modern, creative, encouraging, curious, ideal, joyful, peaceful, and memorable. The conventional golden-ratio rectangle led only on three attributes: identified, purity, and safe, where it posted its single strongest mean of 4.575.

Secondary, exploratory analyses added texture to the picture. Comparing public and private school students on the hexagonal opening using Mann-Whitney U tests with Holm correction, five attributes differed significantly, classy, beautiful, harmonic, identified, and safe, with public-school students rating the hexagon higher on all five. Across the three study tracks, only 8 of 105 opening-by-attribute tests remained significant after correction, and no attribute differed by track for the golden-ratio rectangle. Comparisons by height category found no significant differences, while weight categories produced only isolated effects. The author is careful to flag all subgroup findings as exploratory, cautioning that the data do not support prescribing particular geometries for specific school types or student subgroups. Attribute-level effect sizes were mostly small, with Kendall’s W ranging from 0.018 to 0.137, indicating consistent but modest relative differences rather than dramatic swings in sentiment.

Why might the hexagon triumph over the golden ratio rectangle, a proportion long mythologized as the pinnacle of beauty since Gustav Theodor Fechner’s pioneering psychophysical experiments in the nineteenth century? The study situates the answer in both perception and culture. Iranian proportional tradition, exemplified by monuments such as the Taq-i Kisra at Ctesiphon and the Sassanid Palace of Sarvestan, is built on rectangles with ratios of the square root of 2, the square root of 3, and the rarer 1.118, alongside the Peymoun, a measurement system derived from human body proportions. The hexagon, composed of three rectangles each with the 1.73 ratio of the Iranian golden proportion, has historically shaped courtyards, ponds, and the celebrated five-door rooms of traditional Iranian architecture. Prior work cited in the study lends convergent support: research on consumer behavior found hexagonal forms received the highest preference in packaging design, and a Kansei-method study of bank facades found triangular openings received comparatively unfavorable emotional ratings, echoing the golden triangle’s middling performance here.

The author is candid about the study’s limits. The sample came from a single city, a single grade, and female students only, restricting generalizability, and some adjective sets showed low internal consistency, particularly within the ethical-identity and two-item spiritual categories. Crucially, the study measures self-reported aesthetic and emotional responses to static facade images, not learning outcomes, behavior, motivation, or well-being, and the author explicitly warns against inferring such outcomes from these results. Still, the design implications are clear. Within this sample, the hexagonal opening emerges as the strongest candidate for user-centered facade development, though any final choice must weigh daylighting, privacy, energy performance, constructability, cost, and cultural context. Future directions include extending the approach to other facade parameters and interior spaces, replicating with broader and more diverse samples, complementing self-report with physiological measures such as eye-tracking or EEG, and testing longitudinally whether aesthetic preference translates into tangible benefits. For now, the message for architects and school planners is quietly provocative: the shapes we cut into a wall may speak to students more powerfully than we assumed, and the oldest proportional wisdom of Persian architecture may deserve a seat at the drafting table alongside the golden ratio.

Subject of Research: Emotional and aesthetic responses of high school students to school facade opening geometries based on the golden ratio and Iranian proportional systems

Article Title: Emotional responses to school façade opening geometries associated with the golden ratio among high school girls in Babol, Iran

Article References: Divkolaei, L. S. H. (2026). Emotional responses to school façade opening geometries associated with the golden ratio among high school girls in Babol, Iran. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1140. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02143-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02143-z

Keywords: golden ratio, hexagonal openings, school facade design, environmental psychology, processing fluency, semantic differential, Iranian architecture, aesthetic preference, emotional response, architectural geometry, user-centered design, high school students

The study focused on a region of Vietnam that has been largely absent from the international mathematics education literature. Between September and December 2025, researchers administered an in-person questionnaire to students in twelve classrooms across nine schools in An Giang Province and Can Tho City. The instrument was built around a well-known framework from argumentation theory: Toulmin’s Argumentation Model, which dissects any argument into six interlocking parts, namely data, claim, warrant, backing, qualifier, and rebuttal. In geometry, this structure maps naturally onto proof. The data are the givens, the claim is the statement to be proven, and the warrant is the theorem or property that connects the two. Crucially, the researchers used Toulmin’s model as a conceptual lens rather than a rigid measurement template, acknowledging that the model has known limitations when applied to the dynamic, social process of classroom discussion.

The questionnaire began with fifteen items rated on a five-point Likert scale, grouped provisionally into perceptions and attitudes, use of argumentation components, and difficulties in geometric reasoning. Statistical screening quickly reshaped that structure. Four items fell away, and an exploratory factor analysis on the remaining eleven items revealed something the researchers had not anticipated: instead of three tidy domains, the data organized themselves into four distinct factors. The first, Participation in Mathematical Argumentation, captured students’ enjoyment of reasoning tasks, their confidence in presenting arguments, their willingness to engage in discussion, and their critical evaluation of claims. The second, Use of Reasoning Components, measured how often students identified given information, deployed prior knowledge as a warrant, and explained why each step of a proof was valid. The third factor reflected the Perceived Importance of Mathematical Reasoning, and the fourth captured Difficulties in Geometric Reasoning, such as trouble recalling or correctly applying theorems.

Together these four factors explained 61.3 percent of the total variance, with reliability coefficients ranging from acceptable to good. The factor structure itself carried a theoretical punch. Items that the researchers had expected to split across affective, skill-based, and participatory domains instead converged into a single participation factor, suggesting that students experience argumentation holistically, as one integrated social practice rather than a bundle of separable skills. This finding aligns with a sociocultural view of mathematics learning, in which knowing how to argue and actually arguing in front of peers are inseparable from the classroom environment a teacher creates. It also echoes prior research showing that classroom argumentation is nonlinear and messy, requiring students to coordinate warrants, rebuttals, and qualifiers in real time while responding to one another’s reasoning.

The descriptive statistics delivered the study’s headline result. Students rated the importance of mathematical reasoning at a mean of 4.18 on the five-point scale, one of the highest endorsements the instrument recorded. Yet their reported participation in argumentation averaged just 2.88, well below the midpoint of active engagement. In other words, students believe argumentation is central to mathematics but say they rarely get to do it. The researchers are careful to note that because these two factors come from different item sets, the gap should be read as an exploratory observation rather than a proven attitude-behavior discrepancy. Still, the pattern is consistent with a well-documented distinction in mathematics education between possessing component knowledge and deploying it in performance. Students reported moderate use of reasoning components, at a mean of 3.68, suggesting they have cognitive tools they do not consistently bring into classroom discourse. The authors point to motivational and affective barriers, including limited confidence and limited enjoyment of reasoning tasks, as plausible culprits, alongside classroom discussion norms that may simply not invite justification.

Group comparisons added further texture. Male students reported significantly higher participation than female students, with a small-to-moderate effect size, and also reported slightly more difficulty in geometric reasoning. No significant differences emerged between rural and urban students on any factor, a result the authors attribute in part to Vietnam’s standardized national curriculum, which imposes shared goals and content across regions. Grade level made no difference either: tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders held broadly comparable perceptions. That null result is quietly one of the most consequential findings in the paper, because it implies that argumentation-related perceptions do not mature automatically as students advance. Higher-order competencies, the study argues, require deliberate and sustained pedagogical support rather than time alone.

Participation in mathematics enrichment courses, by contrast, mattered considerably. Students who had taken supplementary enrichment modules reported higher perceived importance of reasoning, higher participation, and, intriguingly, more reported difficulty. The participation difference was the largest in the study, with a medium effect size of 0.644. The authors caution that enrichment participation is likely confounded with prior motivation, achievement, and family resources through self-selection, so the enrichment experience itself cannot be isolated as the cause. Nevertheless, the pattern is consistent with the idea that structured exposure to argumentation activities builds both the habit of participating and the metacognitive awareness of where one’s reasoning breaks down.

The most counterintuitive result concerned achievement level. Across all four factors, students’ self-reports differed significantly by mathematics achievement, and the direction of the difficulty finding defied expectations: students rated Excellent reported more difficulty in geometric reasoning, at a mean of 2.966, than students rated Satisfactory, at 2.330. Higher achievers also reported significantly higher participation and perceived importance. The researchers offer three speculative interpretations, all flagged for future investigation. Higher-achieving students may be more metacognitively aware and more willing to acknowledge gaps in their understanding, a phenomenon consistent with research on active learners. They may also be tackling more demanding tasks that expose genuinely harder reasoning challenges. Or the difficulty items, which probe trouble recalling and misapplying theorems, may be tapping into productive struggle, the productive confusion that characterizes engaged learners pushing at the edge of their competence rather than incompetence. Any of these explanations, if confirmed, would complicate how teachers interpret students who say geometry is hard.

Correlation analyses reinforced the interlocking nature of the four dimensions. Perceived importance correlated moderately with use of reasoning components, and component use correlated moderately with participation, a chain suggesting that valuing argumentation, wielding its tools, and engaging in it tend to travel together. Notably, the correlation between valuing argumentation and actually participating in it was weak, at 0.282, confirming that attitude alone does not drive classroom behavior. Perhaps most suggestive was the modest positive correlation between participation and reported difficulty: students who argue more also report more struggles, hinting that engagement surfaces cognitive challenges rather than dissolving them.

The study’s limitations are candidly enumerated, and they matter for how far the findings travel. All data are self-reported and subject to social desirability bias. The sample was geographically concentrated, with 82 percent of participants from An Giang Province, and drawn through convenience sampling of intact classrooms. Two of the four factors rest on only two items each, and no confirmatory factor analysis or external content validation was performed. School-level clustering was non-negligible for the participation and difficulty factors, effectively shrinking the usable sample for those comparisons. The authors call for confirmatory validation, geographically diverse replication, additional items, and qualitative methods such as classroom observation and think-aloud protocols to unpack the counterintuitive difficulty finding. Even with those caveats, the practical message is clear. If students prize argumentation but rarely practice it, interventions should target the motivational barriers, the participatory structures, and the component reasoning skills that stand between conviction and classroom voice. Geometry, with its built-in demand for hypotheses, conclusions, and deductive bridges, remains the ideal arena for that work, provided teachers design discussions in which every student is expected to justify, and to be justified.

Subject of Research: High school students' self-reported perceptions of mathematical argumentation in geometry learning

Article Title: Exploring high school students’ perspectives on mathematical argumentation in geometry learning

Article References: Duc, N. H. T., Triet, L. V. M., Loc, N. P., & Kiet, B. A. (2026). Exploring high school students’ perspectives on mathematical argumentation in geometry learning. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1044. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02227-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02227-w

Keywords: mathematical argumentation, geometry education, Toulmin argumentation model, exploratory factor analysis, high school students, student perceptions, geometric reasoning, mathematics education, Vietnam, survey research, classroom participation, reasoning difficulties

The study was carried out between January 1 and January 30, 2026, using a school-based design that randomly selected 422 students across grades 9 through 12 in the Awi Zone. Researchers used a pretested, self-administered questionnaire, a method chosen deliberately to reduce social desirability bias in a setting where sexual topics are rarely voiced openly. Students completed the questionnaires independently, without parents present, and no identifying information was collected. Of the 422 students approached, 412 responded, yielding an exceptionally high response rate of 97.6 percent and lending considerable statistical weight to the findings.

The operational definition at the heart of the study was straightforward but consequential: parent-adolescent communication was counted only when a student had discussed at least two distinct sexual and reproductive health topics with either parent. By that standard, just 101 of the 412 respondents qualified, producing a prevalence of 24.5 percent with a 95 percent confidence interval of 20.5 to 29.9 percent. In practical terms, fewer than one in four adolescents in the study population could rely on their parents as a source of structured information about their own bodies, reproduction, or sexual health. The remaining three-quarters were left to navigate puberty, menstruation, and emerging sexual questions through other, often less reliable channels.

The topic-level breakdown reveals a striking hierarchy of what families are willing to discuss. The most commonly addressed subjects were sexually transmitted infections including HIV and AIDS, raised by 78.6 percent of communicating students, followed by puberty at 75.0 percent and menstrual health at 60.7 percent. At the bottom of the list sat the very topics most directly tied to pregnancy prevention: contraceptive methods, discussed by only 41.3 percent, and sexual intercourse itself, discussed by 42.2 percent. This pattern suggests that even within families that do communicate, the conversation tends to stop short of the practical, decision-relevant information adolescents need most, skirting the mechanics of sex and contraception while dwelling on disease and biological development.

To identify which adolescents were most likely to communicate with their parents, the researchers employed multivariable logistic regression using SPSS, adjusting for potential confounders and checking for multicollinearity with variance inflation factors, with statistical significance set at a p-value below 0.05. The results pointed to a clear educational gradient. Students in grade 11 had more than four times the odds of discussing sexual and reproductive health with their parents compared with younger peers, with an adjusted odds ratio of 4.3 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.7 to 10.7. Grade 12 students showed a nearly identical association, with an adjusted odds ratio of 4.2 and a confidence interval of 1.6 to 11.2. The interpretation is intuitive: as adolescents approach the end of secondary school and adulthood looms closer, parents appear more willing to break the silence, perhaps recognizing that the window for protective guidance is closing.

Age and family structure also shaped the odds of communication, though in unexpected directions. Students aged 20 to 24 were substantially less likely to communicate with their parents than younger adolescents, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.2 and a confidence interval of 0.1 to 0.6. The authors suggest this inverse relationship may reflect the growing autonomy of older students, who increasingly seek information from peers, partners, or media rather than from home. Meanwhile, adolescents living with single parents had roughly two and a half times the odds of communication, with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.4 and a confidence interval of 1.7 to 4.8, a finding that may reflect the intensified bonds and concentrated caregiving responsibilities that often characterize single-parent households. Maternal literacy emerged as another powerful facilitator: adolescents whose mothers could read and write had 2.3 times the odds of parent-adolescent communication, with a confidence interval of 1.3 to 4.1, underscoring the pivotal role of mothers as health educators and the cascading effect of female education across generations.

The quantitative survey was only half of the study. To understand why so many families remain silent, the researchers conducted four focus group discussions with parents, and the qualitative findings paint a vivid picture of the social architecture of taboo. Shame emerged as the dominant barrier, with parents describing deep embarrassment at the prospect of discussing sexual matters with their own children. Cultural unacceptability compounded this discomfort: in many communities across the Awi Zone, sexual topics are considered inherently private or even improper for parent-child conversation, and parents fear that raising them will be interpreted as encouraging early sexual activity. A third barrier was more prosaic but perhaps more tractable: many parents simply lack the knowledge themselves, having never received formal sexual education, and feel unqualified to answer questions they cannot confidently answer for themselves.

The public health stakes of this silence are considerable. Decades of research have established that open parent-adolescent communication about sexual and reproductive health is associated with delayed sexual debut, reduced risky sexual behavior, lower rates of teenage pregnancy, and better uptake of health services. In Ethiopia, where teenage pregnancy carries significant risks of obstetric complications, school dropout, and intergenerational poverty, and where HIV and other sexually transmitted infections remain persistent concerns among young people, the family represents a uniquely trusted and continuously accessible channel of prevention. When that channel is blocked, adolescents do not stop needing information; they simply obtain it from sources that may be inaccurate, stigmatizing, or absent altogether.

The authors of the study argue that their findings point toward concrete intervention strategies. Because higher grade level and maternal literacy both facilitate communication, programs that keep girls in school and expand adult literacy, particularly for mothers, are likely to yield secondary benefits for adolescent sexual health. Because shame and cultural unacceptability are the leading barriers, interventions must be culturally sensitive rather than confrontational, working through trusted community structures, religious institutions, and parent associations to normalize gradual, age-appropriate conversation. And because many parents lack basic knowledge themselves, parent-focused education sessions, rather than adolescent-only programs, may be essential to equip families to serve as reliable first sources of information. The researchers conclude that such culturally tailored interventions addressing shame and building parental knowledge are urgently needed in the Awi Zone and in comparable settings across Ethiopia.

Published as an open-access article in BMC Public Health, the study received no external funding, obtained ethical approval from the Institutional Review Board of Injibara University’s College of Medicine and Health Sciences, and followed the Helsinki Declaration throughout, including written informed consent from adult participants and parental consent plus adolescent assent for minors. Its unusually high response rate, dual quantitative and qualitative design, and pretested instruments strengthen confidence in the central finding: in this corner of Northwest Ethiopia, the conversation that could protect adolescents is happening in fewer than a quarter of homes. Closing that gap, the evidence suggests, will require not just information campaigns but a patient reshaping of what families believe they are permitted to say to one another.

Subject of Research: Parent-adolescent communication about sexual and reproductive health among high school students in Awi Zone, Northwest Ethiopia

Article Title: Parent-adolescent communication on sexual and reproductive health issues and associated factors among high school students in Awi Zone, Northwest Ethiopia: a mixed-methods study

Article References: Laikemariam, M., yazew, A., Wondie, Y., Egziabherfenta Tadele, A., Molla, A., & Fentie, E. (2026). Parent-adolescent communication on sexual and reproductive health issues and associated factors among high school students in Awi Zone, Northwest Ethiopia: a mixed-methods study. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29435-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29435-1

Keywords: parent-adolescent communication, sexual and reproductive health, adolescent health, Ethiopia, Awi Zone, high school students, teenage pregnancy, HIV prevention, maternal literacy, health communication, public health, mixed-methods study