The study, led by Finn Holler of the UNICEF Latin America and Caribbean Regional Office together with colleagues from UNICEF offices in Panama City, New York, San José, and Nairobi, set out to close that gap. Conducted between August and October 2024 at four migrant transit points in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama, the project had three goals: to identify existing training materials and clinical guidance relevant to migrant maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health; to measure the knowledge of frontline health care workers before and after a pilot training program; and to document the priorities and practical lessons that emerged during implementation. The work was carried out as a UNICEF capacity-building initiative in collaboration with national health authorities, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which had no role in the study design, analysis, or publication.

The first finding was sobering. A desk review of available migrant health training materials, combined with key informant consultations, identified no programs addressing maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition for migrants in short-term transit anywhere in Central America. Existing packages, such as those developed for European reception settings or for longer-term refugee camps, did not fit the realities of transit migration, where families may pass through a facility in hours or days and where clinical guidance tailored to that context simply did not exist. In response, the team developed checklists to support a standardized approach to care at transit points, filling a void that had left individual clinicians to improvise.

The training itself was built as a modular, context-adapted curriculum covering maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health, nutrition, and intercultural competence. The modular design was a deliberate technical choice: it allows the content to be recombined and scaled according to local needs, staff availability, and the shifting profile of the migrant population at each site. Rather than importing a generic curriculum, the developers drew on the gaps and priorities identified during the needs assessment, ensuring that each session addressed situations the workers were actually encountering, from managing malnutrition in children who have walked for weeks to communicating across language and cultural barriers in the middle of a clinical encounter.

To evaluate whether the training worked, the researchers administered questionnaires before and after each session and collected participant feedback through evaluation surveys. The results were consistent across all three countries. In Costa Rica, average knowledge scores rose from 60 percent to 85 percent, a gain of 25 percentage points. In Guatemala, scores improved from 69 percent to 89 percent, a 20-point increase. In Panama, the improvement was from 57 percent to 81 percent, a gain of 24 points. Participant satisfaction was correspondingly high, at 94 percent in Costa Rica, 100 percent in Guatemala, and 93 percent in Panama. For a program delivered under the logistical constraints of active transit points, where staff time is scarce and patient flows are unpredictable, these figures represent a strong signal that short, targeted training can meaningfully raise the knowledge base of frontline teams.

Equally valuable is what the participants told the researchers about what was missing. Health care workers requested more training time and identified clear priorities for future rounds: psychological first aid, gender-based violence, and reproductive health. These requests reflect the epidemiology of the route itself. Women and girls in transit face elevated risks of sexual violence, and mental health burdens accumulate across an arduous journey. The study’s authors note that mental health and psychosocial support, gender-based violence, and reproductive health emerged as the leading priorities for future training, pointing toward the next iteration of the curriculum.

The technical significance of the study lies partly in its honest framing of what the data can and cannot show. The pre- and post-test design demonstrates a short-term gain in knowledge, but the authors are explicit that effects on clinical practice, service quality, and health outcomes remain to be evaluated. Knowledge scores are a proxy, not a guarantee: whether a worker who can answer a questionnaire correctly will manage a dehydrated infant or counsel a traumatized pregnant woman differently in a crowded shelter clinic is a question that requires follow-up research. The study also did not require ethics committee approval under international guidelines, because it was a descriptive report of programmatic capacity-building activities that collected no identifiable personal data, and the questionnaires were anonymous evaluations conducted for internal program purposes.

The context in which this work unfolded deserves attention. The Darién Gap, the roadless stretch of jungle connecting Colombia to Panama, has become one of the world’s most dangerous migration corridors, and the flow through it surged dramatically in recent years. Children, adolescents, and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to the hazardous conditions and to the limited access to care along the route. Transit countries such as Panama, Costa Rica, and Guatemala have had to build health responses for a population that is constantly moving, often without documentation, and frequently speaking indigenous languages or languages other than Spanish. Health systems designed for resident populations are poorly equipped for this task, and the intercultural competence component of the training addressed precisely this mismatch.

The study also situates itself within a broader landscape of migration health training initiatives, referencing packages and frameworks developed by the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization, the International Organization for Migration, and other agencies, including efforts in Europe such as EUR-HUMAN, ORAMMA, and the MEM-TP package. What distinguishes the Central American program is its focus on short-term transit, a phase of migration that most existing materials overlook. Migrants in transit are neither settled refugees nor returning travelers; their contact with health services is brief, their needs are acute, and the window for intervention is narrow. Training that assumes a stable clinical relationship does not transfer well to this setting, which is why the development of transit-specific checklists and modules matters.

Looking ahead, the researchers suggest that the modular training could be adapted and scaled to other transit corridors, and the identified priorities, psychological first aid, gender-based violence, and reproductive health, offer a roadmap for the next version. The program’s funders and implementers, including UNICEF and USAID, now face the harder evaluation question: does better-trained staff translate into better outcomes for mothers and children on the move? For now, the study stands as a documented proof of concept that a gap in global health training, one affecting hundreds of thousands of the world’s most vulnerable travelers, can be identified, measured, and partially closed with a modest, well-targeted intervention. In a year when more than 64,000 children crossed one of the planet’s most perilous jungle routes, that is a finding with consequences far beyond the three countries where it was tested.

Subject of Research: Maternal and child health and nutrition training for frontline health workers serving migrants in transit in Central America

Article Title: Enhancing healthcare capacity at migrant transit points: development and implementation of a maternal and child health and nutrition training program in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama

Article References: Holler, F., Baffoe, P., Fautsch-Macías, Y., Manchikanti, S., López Borbón, D., Arts, M., & McQuen Patterson, J. (2026). Enhancing healthcare capacity at migrant transit points: development and implementation of a maternal and child health and nutrition training program in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama. International Journal for Equity in Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12939-026-03025-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12939-026-03025-4

Keywords: migration health, transit migration, maternal and child health, nutrition, frontline health workers, capacity building, Central America, Darién Gap, UNICEF, psychological first aid, gender-based violence, intercultural competence

The innovation, known as the Cross-Cultural Leadership Story Puzzle Game, is being offered to the marketplace by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York, the private nonprofit corporation that manages research and technology transfer across the SUNY system. The technology is patent pending and currently sits at technology readiness level three, a stage at which the core concept has been demonstrated but is not yet a fully mature commercial product. According to the foundation, the platform is available for licensing, positioning it for adoption by universities, corporate training departments, and professional development providers looking for scalable ways to build intercultural competence.

At its core, the game is built on a deceptively simple design principle borrowed from collaborative puzzle games: distributed information. Each participant in a session is assigned a specific role within a simulated workplace incident, and each role comes with its own set of clues that no other player can see. The consequence is structural rather than incidental. No single participant can solve the scenario alone, because the information required to resolve it is deliberately fragmented across the group. To succeed, players must communicate clearly, listen actively, negotiate meaning across perspectives, and coordinate decisions under pressure, which is precisely the skill set that effective leadership in culturally diverse teams demands.

This role-based architecture transforms what could be a passive learning experience into an active one. In a traditional seminar, a student might discuss cross-cultural communication in the abstract, answering hypothetical questions about how a manager should handle a misunderstanding between colleagues from different backgrounds. In the puzzle game, that same student is placed inside the scenario, holding partial knowledge, facing incomplete information from teammates, and needing to bridge gaps in real time. The learning happens through doing rather than through listening, a shift that educational research has long associated with deeper engagement and better retention of complex interpersonal skills.

The delivery platform is Discord, the communication service best known as a hub for gaming communities but increasingly used for structured online collaboration. The choice is technically pragmatic. Discord provides voice, video, and text channels, robust permission controls, and an automation framework through bots and integrations that the game leverages to manage its own flow. The platform distributes role-specific clues to the right participants, sequences the stages of each scenario, and coordinates interaction among players without requiring a human facilitator to run every session manually. That automation is central to the technology’s scalability claim: multiple groups of users can play simultaneously, and the game can accommodate them without a proportional increase in staffing or instructor workload.

The most distinctive component, however, is the AI-supported assessment system embedded within the gameplay. As participants make decisions, exchange messages, and work through the scenario, the AI continuously evaluates observable behaviors related to cross-cultural leadership. It examines how players communicate, how they approach problems, and how their choices reflect leadership competencies in a culturally diverse context. Rather than waiting until the end of an exercise for a facilitator’s debrief, the system delivers feedback in real time, allowing learners to understand how their actions are being interpreted and to adjust their behavior while the experience is still fresh.

That immediacy matters for skill development. Feedback that arrives days after a training exercise tends to lose its behavioral grip; feedback that arrives during the exercise can shape the very decisions it describes. By making assessment continuous and personalized, the platform turns each session into both a practice environment and a measurement instrument. For instructors and training managers, this also means that leadership development becomes something that can be observed and tracked in a measurable way, rather than inferred from self-reported surveys or one-off classroom performances. The system’s designers describe the combination of narrative engagement, automation, and scalable online delivery as the platform’s defining formula for an immersive learning experience.

The intended applications span a wide institutional landscape. In higher education, the game fits naturally into courses on leadership, communication, and intercultural competence, giving students a structured simulation instead of purely theoretical instruction. In corporate settings, it offers training programs a way to strengthen collaboration in global teams, where misunderstandings rooted in cultural difference carry real operational costs. The developers also point to virtual workshops and seminars on diversity, equity, and inclusion, to research initiatives studying how cross-cultural leadership skills develop, and to international educational collaborations, such as joint programs between universities in different countries, where the game can give participants a shared, structured experience despite geographic distance.

The broader context helps explain why such a tool is attracting attention. SUNY describes itself as the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, serving roughly 1.7 million students across 64 campuses, with research expenditures approaching 1.5 billion dollars in fiscal year 2025. The Research Foundation, which supports SUNY researchers working in areas from artificial intelligence for the public good to quantum technologies and biotech, is actively marketing the game through SUNY TechConnect as part of a portfolio of licensable innovations. For the foundation, the platform represents a strand of its broader effort to translate academic work into economic and educational impact, and for potential licensees it arrives with a clear value proposition: a patent-pending, AI-enhanced training environment that requires no physical classroom and scales through software.

Whether the game fulfills that promise will depend on adoption and evidence, and the technology’s early-stage readiness level signals that validation is still unfolding. But the design logic it embodies points to where soft-skills training is heading. Narrative immersion supplies motivation, distributed-information puzzles force genuine collaboration, platform automation removes the logistical barriers that have kept simulation-based training expensive, and AI assessment closes the loop between action and insight. If leadership across cultures can indeed be practiced rather than merely lectured about, the classroom of the future may look less like a lecture hall and more like a well-designed game, one puzzle, one role, and one conversation at a time.

Subject of Research: An AI-assisted, Discord-based story puzzle game for training and assessing cross-cultural leadership skills

Article Title: Cross-Cultural Leadership Story Puzzle Game

Article References: Cross-Cultural Leadership Story Puzzle Game. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cross-cultural leadership, educational technology, Discord, AI assessment, serious games, role-based learning, intercultural competence, corporate training, higher education, SUNY, technology licensing, soft skills training

The research, published in Discover Education, surveyed 814 undergraduate engineering students at a public Indonesian university spanning six departments, including electronic, electrical, mechanical, automotive, civil, and mining engineering. Led by Muhammad Husin of Universitas Negeri Padang, with collaborators from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Somalia, and Uganda, the team constructed and tested a process-oriented model using structural equation modeling, a statistical technique capable of tracing direct and indirect relationships among many variables simultaneously. The goal was to connect, in a single framework, seven constructs that researchers had previously studied largely in isolation: perceived faculty development support, cultural intelligence, intercultural competence, interculturally informed teaching practices, intercultural student engagement, perceived institutional support, and student learning outcomes.

The logic of the model follows a chain that begins long before a student enters a classroom. When students perceive that their lecturers receive meaningful professional development, including workshops, training programs, mentorship, and intercultural resources, they report higher levels of cultural intelligence, the capacity to function effectively across culturally diverse settings. That cultural intelligence, in turn, was associated with stronger intercultural competence, the ability to interact effectively and appropriately with people from different cultural backgrounds. Students with stronger intercultural competence then perceived more interculturally informed teaching practices in their courses, such as the integration of diverse cultural perspectives, inclusive learning materials, and activities designed for multicultural contexts. Those perceived practices were linked to greater intercultural student engagement, and engagement was ultimately associated with higher self-reported learning outcomes.

The statistical evidence for this chain was striking. Faculty development support showed a very large effect size on cultural intelligence, with an f-squared value of 1.239, far above the conventional threshold of 0.35 for a large effect. Intercultural competence showed an even larger effect on perceived teaching practices, at 1.764, while interculturally informed teaching practices exerted a strong effect of 0.640 on intercultural engagement. All thirteen hypothesized direct and mediated pathways reached statistical significance, with bootstrapped t-values exceeding the critical threshold and p-values well below 0.05. The model also demonstrated adequate predictive relevance across all outcome constructs, with student learning outcomes and teaching practices showing the strongest explanatory and predictive performance.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns sequential mediation. The analysis indicated that students’ perceptions of faculty development support were indirectly associated with learning outcomes through a cascade of four mediators: cultural intelligence, intercultural competence, perceived teaching practices, and intercultural engagement. In other words, investment in lecturers appeared to matter to students not as an abstract administrative expense but as a visible foundation for the intercultural capabilities and classroom experiences that students themselves reported. Institutional support, encompassing policies, resources, infrastructure, and administrative commitment, showed both direct and indirect associations with intercultural competence and learning outcomes, reinforcing the idea that educational innovation depends on organizational structures rather than on heroic individual effort alone.

The authors are careful about what their data can and cannot show. Every variable was measured through students’ self-reports, so faculty development support and institutional support represent student perceptions of their lecturers and university rather than direct assessments of faculty competence or institutional performance. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, and the convenience sampling approach, which distributed an online questionnaire to the entire engineering faculty population, may exclude students with limited internet access and limits generalization beyond the studied institution. The relationships should be read as associations among perceptions and self-reported experiences, not as proven causal mechanisms operating at the faculty or institutional level.

Even with those caveats, the methodological groundwork was thorough. Because no established instrument covered all seven constructs together, the team developed a new questionnaire grounded in the intercultural education literature and piloted it with 51 undergraduate engineering students. Exploratory factor analysis using principal component extraction produced factor loadings between 0.638 and 0.949, all comfortably above the 0.50 threshold for construct validity. Cronbach’s alpha coefficients, a measure of internal consistency, ranged from 0.761 for faculty development support to 0.847 for intercultural competence, indicating satisfactory reliability across all seven constructs. All items used a five-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree, and the main survey data were analyzed with SmartPLS software following standard procedures for assessing measurement and structural models.

Why does this matter beyond one Indonesian campus? Engineering education has historically lagged other fields in attending to intercultural learning, even as professional practice becomes relentlessly global. Graduates increasingly collaborate across national and cultural boundaries, and the ability to do so effectively is now considered an essential professional competency rather than a soft skill. Prior studies had established that faculty workshops can raise intercultural awareness, and that culturally responsive teaching can boost engagement, but the mechanisms linking institutional investment to student outcomes remained poorly charted. By modeling the full sequence, the new study provides a systems-level view: intercultural capability is not simply an individual attribute that students either possess or lack, but something cultivated through an alignment of institutional policy, faculty development, pedagogical design, and classroom participation.

The practical implications are concrete. Universities seeking globally responsive engineering programs, the authors argue, should prioritize faculty development that explicitly incorporates intercultural training, reflective learning activities, and cross-cultural pedagogical strategies. They should support interculturally informed teaching through curriculum development, teaching resources, and institutional incentives, and they should make institutional commitment visible through dedicated funding, mentorship networks, and strategic frameworks that embed intercultural learning objectives. Finally, institutions should treat intercultural student engagement, participation in culturally diverse discussions, collaborative projects, and internationalized curricula, as a core component of the learning experience rather than an optional enrichment, because engagement appears to be the final bridge between inclusive pedagogy and measurable learning gains.

The study also opens a research agenda. The authors call for multi-institutional, longitudinal, and multi-source investigations that could test whether the observed associations hold across different disciplines, countries, and educational levels, and that could incorporate faculty assessments, classroom observations, and institutional records alongside student self-reports. Longitudinal designs would be especially valuable because intercultural competence is a dynamic capability that develops over the course of an academic journey, not a fixed trait captured in a single survey. For now, the message from 814 Indonesian engineering students is clear and quietly radical: when a university visibly invests in its teachers, students notice, and what they notice shows up in how confidently they navigate a culturally complex world. In an era when engineering problems, from climate infrastructure to global supply chains, refuse to respect cultural boundaries, that may be one of the most important lessons a technical degree can teach.

Subject of Research: Intercultural competence development in Indonesian undergraduate engineering education

Article Title: Building intercultural competence in Indonesian engineering education through faculty development, institutional support, and teaching innovation

Article References: Husin, M., Almaaytah, S. A., Ibrahim, A. A., Hashi, A. I., & Laban, O. (2026). Building intercultural competence in Indonesian engineering education through faculty development, institutional support, and teaching innovation. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1067. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02233-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02233-y

Keywords: intercultural competence, cultural intelligence, engineering education, faculty development, institutional support, student engagement, structural equation modeling, Indonesia, higher education, culturally responsive teaching, learning outcomes, PLS-SEM

The research team, led by corresponding author Rakhat Sagyndykova, approached ethics not as a vague aspiration but as an integrative construct with three measurable components. The first is value orientations, meaning the principles a student prioritizes, such as responsibility, tolerance, and fairness. The second is readiness for ethical behavior, the practical willingness to act on those principles in real classroom situations. The third is moral reflection, the capacity to step back and examine one’s own decisions and their consequences. By breaking ethical values into these three dimensions, the team could design a questionnaire that captured something more concrete than general attitudes, allowing for statistical comparison across years of study and between groups of students.

The methodological design mixed quantitative and qualitative evidence in a deliberate sequence. The 300 participating students completed a questionnaire developed by the authors, and the resulting data were processed with descriptive statistics and one-way analysis of variance, a standard technique for testing whether differences between group averages are statistically meaningful. In parallel, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 teachers and analyzed documentary sources, including educational standards and institutional materials from Kyrgyz universities. Qualitative responses were examined through thematic analysis, following the widely used coding procedures established by Braun and Clarke, and the separate strands of evidence were then integrated through methodological triangulation, a technique that tests whether different data sources converge on the same conclusions.

The headline quantitative result is striking in its simplicity: students in later years of study reported consistently higher levels of ethical-value indicators across all three dimensions. First-year students and near-graduates did not look alike. Those closer to graduation scored higher on value orientations, reported greater readiness to behave ethically in professional situations, and demonstrated stronger habits of moral reflection. The authors interpret this pattern cautiously. A cross-sectional design, which compares different cohorts at a single point in time rather than tracking the same individuals over years, cannot prove that university training causes the growth. Maturation, self-selection, and life experience could all contribute. Still, the pattern is consistent with the idea that teacher education programs, as currently structured in Kyrgyzstan, provide supportive conditions for ethical development rather than leaving it to chance.

The interview data add texture to that statistical signal. When the researchers asked experienced teachers how ethical values actually develop in trainee language teachers, the answers converged on five reinforcing factors. Curriculum content matters, because ethics can be woven into language courses rather than confined to a separate lecture. Teacher modeling matters, because students learn professional conduct by watching how their own instructors treat them and each other. Reflective activities, such as structured discussions of difficult teaching situations, give students practice in moral reasoning. Intercultural experiences expose future teachers to different normative frameworks and force them to articulate their own values in dialogue with others. Finally, the broader educational environment, from institutional culture to assessment practices, either amplifies or undermines all the rest.

That fifth factor may be the most consequential for policy. The documentary analysis showed that Kyrgyz professional standards and university programs already formally incorporate ethical principles, professional responsibility, tolerance, and intercultural competence as core components of teacher preparation. On paper, the framework exists. The interview evidence suggests that what determines whether these written commitments translate into actual development is the lived environment of the university: whether instructors model the values they teach, whether reflection is built into coursework, and whether intercultural competence is experienced rather than merely examined. This gap between formal standards and embodied practice is a familiar theme in teacher education research worldwide, but the Kyrgyz data give it regional specificity.

The study is careful to frame its findings within a distinctive Central Asian context. Kyrgyz society carries its own long traditions of moral and ethical education, documented in historical scholarship stretching back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and its higher education system has been reshaped in recent decades by international frameworks, including the Bologna process and European cooperation programs. The authors describe their contribution as an analysis of how global principles of teacher ethics are interpreted and localized within one specific national system. Foreign language teachers occupy a particularly interesting position in this negotiation, because their subject matter is inherently intercultural. A language classroom is, by its nature, a space where students encounter other ways of thinking, which gives language educators an unusually direct role in cultivating tolerance and intercultural understanding.

The findings also connect to a broader international literature on ethics in language teaching. Prior studies from Indonesia, Ukraine, China, and Europe have explored how character education can be integrated into English lessons, how pre-service teachers construct professional identities, and how reflective practices influence classroom behavior. What has been thinner is systematic, triangulated evidence from post-Soviet Central Asia, where teacher education operates under different institutional pressures and cultural expectations. By combining a sizable student survey with teacher interviews and policy documents, the Osh State University team offers a template for how such research can be conducted in contexts where large longitudinal datasets are not yet available. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical principles of educational research outlined by the American Educational Research Association, with voluntary, anonymous participation and informed consent from all participants.

The practical implications reach beyond Kyrgyzstan. If ethical values develop across three dimensions, then teacher education programs that only lecture about ethics may be targeting just one of them. Readiness for ethical behavior, by the study’s logic, requires practice opportunities: simulations, guided teaching practica, and structured reflection on dilemmas that arise during real classroom contact. Moral reflection similarly demands deliberate scaffolding, such as journal writing and supervised discussion, techniques that prior research on pre-service teachers has already shown to be feasible and effective in other regions. The Kyrgyz results give those techniques a new empirical footing, indicating that students who pass through programs rich in such activities report stronger ethical indicators by graduation.

The authors themselves flag the limits of what can be concluded. No datasets were generated or analyzed beyond the study’s own instruments, and the cross-sectional design leaves open the question of causality. The team explicitly calls for longitudinal research that follows individual students across their degrees, and for multi-institutional studies that test whether the patterns observed at one university hold across the Kyrgyz higher education system and beyond. Until those studies arrive, the work stands as a careful proof of concept: that ethical values in future language teachers can be conceptualized, measured, and tracked, and that the university environment appears to matter in shaping them. For a profession whose graduates will spend decades mediating between cultures, treating that environment as a deliberate instrument of moral formation may be one of the most consequential design choices a faculty of languages can make.

Subject of Research: Development of ethical values in prospective foreign language teachers in Kyrgyz higher education

Article Title: Theoretical and practical foundations for the development of ethical values in prospective foreign language teachers at the university

Article References: Theoretical and practical foundations for the development of ethical values in prospective foreign language teachers at the university. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01775-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01775-0

Keywords: teacher education, ethical values, foreign language teaching, moral reflection, intercultural competence, Kyrgyzstan, mixed methods, professional ethics, teacher training, higher education, value orientations, Osh State University

The methodology behind the intervention, known as Collaborative Online International Learning, or COIL, originated at the State University of New York, which established its COIL Center in 2004 to give students opportunities to develop intercultural skills through international online interaction. Unlike a traditional exchange, COIL does not require students to travel. Instead, it embeds a shared academic project into existing courses, so that two classes in different countries jointly produce a common deliverable. Because it operates entirely within the curriculum, it is often described as a form of internationalisation at home, bringing global contact to students who might never afford or attempt physical mobility.

In the Spanish-Costa Rican experience, the seven weeks were tightly structured. In the first week, participants created short introductory videos on Padlet, sharing their personal profiles, interests and motivations. In the second week, mixed teams of up to five students, with a maximum of three from UNED and two from Granada, formed themselves based on the interests revealed in the icebreaker activity. From weeks three to six, the teams collaborated on designing a Primary Education learning situation that used 3D printing as a teaching resource, communicating through a Moodle forum and instant messaging tools such as WhatsApp and Telegram. The final week was devoted to submitting the finished learning situation in PDF and audiovisual formats to a shared Padlet wall and to completing a reflective closing exercise alongside the posttest questionnaire.

Measuring intercultural competence is notoriously difficult because the construct spans cognition, affect and behaviour. The research team therefore triangulated three validated instruments. Intercultural sensitivity was assessed with the 16-item Intercultural Sensitivity Scale, covering respect for cultural differences, interaction attentiveness and interaction confidence. Cultural intelligence was measured with the 20-item Cultural Intelligence Scale, spanning metacognitive, cognitive, motivational and behavioural dimensions. Multicultural personality was evaluated with the abbreviated Multicultural Personality Questionnaire, which captures cultural empathy, social initiative, open-mindedness, emotional stability and flexibility. All three scales have validated Spanish versions, and internal consistency coefficients in this study ranged from 0.737 to 0.912, indicating acceptable to excellent reliability. Data were collected before the intervention on 18 September 2025 and after it on 17 November 2025.

Because the score distributions deviated from normality, the researchers relied on non-parametric statistics. Within-group pre-post changes were tested with the Wilcoxon signed-ranks test, and between-university differences with the Mann-Whitney U test, with effect sizes estimated using Cliff’s delta and the Vargha and Delaney A statistic. Crucially, the team applied the Benjamini-Hochberg False Discovery Rate correction to control the inflated risk of false positives that arises when many comparisons are performed. This methodological rigour mattered: after correction, only a subset of dimensions retained both statistical significance and at least small effect sizes, namely interaction confidence, cognitive cultural intelligence, social initiative and open-mindedness. The remaining statistically visible changes shrank to trivial practical magnitude once multiple comparisons were accounted for.

The gains that survived scrutiny were concentrated in interactional and cognitive-dispositional territory. Interaction confidence rose across the whole sample from a mean of 3.89 to 4.18 on a five-point scale, with a stronger increase at UNED, where scores climbed from 3.87 to 4.24. Cognitive cultural intelligence, which reflects explicit knowledge about cultures, increased from 3.32 to 3.67 overall, and most dramatically at UNED, where the mean jumped from 3.04 to 3.60. Social initiative rose from 3.86 to 4.16 and open-mindedness from 4.04 to 4.24, with both institutions showing parallel gains. These are exactly the components one would expect a short, project-based collaboration to strengthen: students gained concrete knowledge about another culture, grew more willing to initiate contact, and became more confident interacting across cultural boundaries.

The most provocative finding was a decline in respect for cultural differences and enjoyment of interaction, particularly at the University of Granada, where the mean fell from 1.41 to 1.31, while the dimension stayed essentially flat at UNED. Rather than reading this as a failure of the intervention, the authors interpret it through theoretical models of intercultural sensitivity development, which describe non-linear and sometimes regressive phases during initial significant intercultural contact. Ethnorelative frameworks suggest that early exposure to diversity can shatter idealised perceptions and provoke a more demanding, more realistic appraisal of cultural complexity. In other words, students may have become more culturally realistic, recognising that difference is genuinely challenging rather than superficially charming. The researchers caution, however, that alternative explanations cannot be excluded and that longitudinal work is needed to confirm this interpretation.

The comparative analysis between the two institutions added another layer of interest. Before the intervention, Granada students scored significantly higher on metacognitive cultural intelligence, while UNED students started higher on cognitive cultural intelligence. After the seven weeks, the cognitive gap between the universities was reduced to statistical and practical insignificance, a pattern the authors describe as a possible equalising effect of the COIL experience. The metacognitive advantage for Granada persisted, although its magnitude shrank from medium to small. This suggests that international collaborative work can help homogenise certain components of intercultural competence across very different educational contexts, but that deeply rooted metacognitive dispositions, shaped by prior curricular and structural factors, resist short-term correction. A posttest difference in open-mindedness favouring UNED also emerged, with a small effect size.

The study is candid about its limits. The absence of a control group means maturation effects or concurrent learning experiences cannot be ruled out as alternative causes of the observed changes. Participation was voluntary and self-selected, potentially biasing the sample toward students already inclined toward intercultural engagement, which may inflate the apparent impact. The sample, drawn from Primary Education and General Basic Education programmes and comprising 48 men and 159 women aged 18 to 60, was obtained through convenience sampling. The authors also note that they did not formally test measurement invariance of the three instruments across the two institutions, a caveat for cross-institutional comparisons, and they flag the seven-week duration as structurally insufficient for developing stable affective traits such as cultural empathy, emotional stability and flexibility, which showed only trivial changes.

The practical implications are clear. The findings argue for COIL designs of greater duration and structural intentionality, combining collaborative tasks with explicit affective training, structured reflection and pedagogical scaffolding aimed at the dimensions least amenable to short-term change. They also argue for a more honest public conversation about virtual exchange, one that resists celebrating statistical significance alone and instead asks what actually changed, by how much, and for whom. As universities worldwide search for scalable alternatives to physical mobility, this Spanish-Costa Rican experiment offers both encouragement and a warning: online international collaboration can genuinely move the needle on confidence, cultural knowledge and openness, but respect, empathy and emotional stability demand longer, deeper and more deliberately designed encounters.

Subject of Research: Development of intercultural competence in pre-service teachers through a COIL virtual exchange between Spanish and Costa Rican universities.

Article Title: Intercultural competence in teacher training: a COIL virtual exchange between Spain and Costa Rica universities

Article References: Romero-Rodríguez, J.-M., López-Gamboa, J.-E., Aguilera-Jinesta, R., & Victoria-Maldonado, J.-J. (2026). Intercultural competence in teacher training: a COIL virtual exchange between Spain and Costa Rica universities. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00073-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00073-0

Keywords: COIL, virtual exchange, intercultural competence, teacher training, pre-service teachers, cultural intelligence, intercultural sensitivity, multicultural personality, University of Granada, UNED Costa Rica, internationalisation at home, 3D printing in education