The review, conducted by Steve Springer Laryea of the GNAT Institute for Research and Industrial Relations Studies and Kumasi Technical University in Ghana, began with a Scopus search carried out on 1 April 2026 using predefined terms covering first-generation status, support, and higher education. That search returned 534 records. After applying limits to English-language journal articles published between 2000 and 2026, 400 records were retained. Title and abstract screening narrowed the pool to a focused, support-oriented core corpus, from which 76 studies were retrieved in full text. Ultimately, 56 empirical studies met the criteria for thematic synthesis. The methodological scaffolding followed established systematic review conventions, including the PRISMA 2020 reporting guideline and its PRISMA-S extension for literature searches, alongside the thematic synthesis approach developed by Thomas and Harden for aggregating qualitative findings.

Bibliometric profiling of the corpus revealed a field in rapid acceleration. Research output on first-generation student support has grown sharply since 2020, but it is also heavily concentrated in one national context: the United States dominates the evidence base to a striking degree. Studies from the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Chile, Ghana and other African contexts appear in the literature, but they remain comparatively rare. That geographic skew matters, the review argues, because the challenges facing a first-generation student at a selective American research university may differ in kind—not merely degree—from those facing a student who is the first in her family to attend university in rural Ghana, China, or Chile.

From the 56 studies, the thematic synthesis identified seven recurrent themes that together describe the support landscape: family and kin support; institutional programmes, mentoring and advising; psychosocial support, belonging and identity; social and cultural capital, information, and help-seeking; financial and structural supports or barriers; access and transition supports; and resilience and agency. These themes are not isolated silos. The review’s central conceptual claim is that effective support for first-generation students should be understood as a layered ecology, one that spans the family household, the secondary school, institutional agents within the university, financial structures, and the student’s own psychosocial validation. Pull any one layer out, and the whole structure weakens.

The family layer emerged as one of the most consistently documented in the corpus. Studies of Appalachian first-generation students in the United States, for example, traced how family involvement shaped postsecondary success, while research on Latino first-generation families examined the intragenerational bargains struck between siblings, in which one sibling’s college journey becomes a resource for the next. Other work has explored how parents’ memorable messages at graduation encode years of quiet sacrifice, and how the familial habitus—the accumulated dispositions of a household that has never navigated higher education—shapes aspirations long before an application form is ever filled in. Family support, the evidence suggests, is rarely a simple one-way transfer of encouragement; it is negotiated, sometimes strained, and often redefined as students become conduits of new knowledge back into their households.

Inside the university, the review found a rich literature on institutional programmes, mentoring and advising. Studies have documented how first-generation faculty and staff mentor first-generation students, how institutional agents at public urban universities promote success, and how mentoring relationships correlate with college enrollment through the social capital they transmit. Credit momentum policies such as the 15 to Finish initiative have been evaluated for their effects on low-income, first-generation students’ academic progression, while longitudinal work on technical college students has examined how financial aid interacts with first-generation status to shape academic performance. Accelerated learning combined with financial aid has been associated with reduced first-year outcome gaps between Hispanic first-generation students and their peers, pointing to the value of bundling interventions rather than deploying them piecemeal.

A third cluster of research concerns the psychosocial dimension: belonging, identity, and self-efficacy. Studies of first-generation students in honors talent programs have examined identity compatibility and its effects on belonging and confidence, while work on community college students of colour has shown that belongingness moderates the influence of student mindsets on outcomes. Research conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic documented the communicative resilience first-generation students deployed to stay enrolled under conditions of acute disruption. Help-seeking itself has come under scrutiny: qualitative analyses of first-generation students’ help-seeking attitudes, decisions, and behaviours reveal how deeply the decision to ask for help is entangled with questions of identity, pride, and the fear of confirming that one does not belong.

The social and cultural capital theme connects many of the others. First-generation students often arrive at university without the tacit knowledge—the unwritten rules of office hours, research opportunities, internships, and faculty relationships—that their continuing-generation peers absorb at home. Studies have examined how students develop social capital for the rigours of college-level research, how rural students navigate academic help-seeking, and how social networks shape career planning among first-generation and non-first-generation students in Germany. The review notes that across these themes, support was overwhelmingly relational in character: it flowed through people—parents, siblings, mentors, advisers, teachers—rather than through impersonal systems. Yet that relational support was frequently individualised, asking students to find, cultivate, and leverage relationships on their own, rather than being structurally transformative in ways that would redistribute advantage across the institution as a whole.

Financial and structural supports formed another critical layer, and the review is candid about the asymmetry in the evidence base. The corpus was weighted heavily towards post-entry persistence—what happens after students arrive on campus—with comparatively little attention to pre-entry support and the school-to-university transition, especially in the Global South. This is a significant gap. Studies of high school teachers’ awareness and preparedness in supporting first-generation students, of the high school–college disconnect in literacy preparation, and of college talk in rural economies all suggest that the decisive groundwork for first-generation success is laid years before matriculation. Research from Africa, including studies of what drives first-generation students’ resilience and what support systems exist in Ghanaian higher education, demonstrates both the feasibility and the urgency of extending the research agenda beyond the United States.

The review concludes with implications for policy, practice, and future research that follow directly from its layered-ecology framework. If support is relational but individualised, institutions should design structures that make supportive relationships systematic rather than accidental—embedding mentoring, advising, and belonging interventions into the architecture of the student experience rather than leaving them to chance encounters. If the evidence base is skewed towards post-entry persistence in one country, funders and researchers should prioritise intervention studies and geographic diversity, particularly pre-entry and transition research in the Global South where first-generation enrolment is expanding fastest. And if resilience and agency are repeatedly documented as student strengths, policy should build on those assets rather than framing first-generation students solely as deficits to be remediated. What emerges from 56 studies and a quarter-century of research is a picture of a field that has matured rapidly in volume but still needs to mature in reach—moving from cataloguing how remarkable individuals overcome the odds, to changing the odds themselves.

Subject of Research: Systematic review of support for first-generation students' access, transition, and success in higher education

Article Title: Supporting first-generation students’ access, transition, and success in higher education: a systematic review

Article References: Laryea, S. S. (2026). Supporting first-generation students’ access, transition, and success in higher education: a systematic review. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01800-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01800-4

Keywords: first-generation students, higher education, systematic review, thematic analysis, social capital, student persistence, mentoring, belonging, educational equity, transition support, Global South, education policy

The protocol, published in PLOS One by Gerardo Urra-Barra, Graciela Acevedo, Erich Leighton-Vallejos, Víctor Ruiz-González, and Camila Díaz-Ibáñez, does not yet report findings. Instead, it lays out a rigorous blueprint for a systematic synthesis of existing literature, registered in advance on the Open Science Framework to ensure transparency and traceability. The registered protocol, under registration number 10.17605/OSF.IO/UTR6V, specifies the methodology, inclusion criteria, search strategy, and analysis plan that the final review will follow, offering the research community a chance to scrutinize the approach before any results emerge.

At the heart of the review is a concept known as practice-based teacher education, or PBTE. Rather than treating teaching as a body of theory to be absorbed in lecture halls before any real contact with students, PBTE argues that professional learning should be constructed through authentic, situated teaching experiences that integrate pedagogical theory, disciplinary knowledge, and classroom action. The approach implies a substantial transformation in how initial teacher education programs are designed, particularly in relation to mentoring practices and the articulation between universities and schools. Instead of primarily theoretical or didactic preparation, PBTE promotes the active participation of pre-service teachers in simulated teaching, analysis of real classroom practices, guided mentorship from experienced educators, and systematic processes of critical reflection.

The Chilean context gives this protocol particular urgency. Alternative teaching certification programs have expanded rapidly within the Chilean tertiary education system, defined by the country’s National Accreditation Commission as formalized pathways offering study continuity to individuals who already hold a prior professional or technical degree, recognizing work experience and knowledge acquired within the school system. These programs connect prior learning with the completion of a bachelor’s degree in education and a specific disciplinary teaching certification. Yet their growth raises challenges for quality assurance, especially under current regulations in which accreditation is required to enroll new students. Chilean regulators currently lack an evidence base on how practice-based components should be designed and implemented in these programs, a gap the review is explicitly intended to fill.

Methodologically, the review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodology for scoping reviews, as outlined in the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis, and will be reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, the international standard for transparent reporting of scoping reviews. Data extraction and synthesis will be structured around the JBI Participants, Concept, and Context analytical framework, commonly abbreviated as PCC. This framework allows reviewers to organize evidence around who is being studied, what concept is being examined, and in what context the phenomenon occurs, providing a coherent analytical spine for a body of literature that is otherwise scattered across disciplines and countries.

The search strategy is deliberately precise. Systematic database searches will be conducted in Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus, two databases selected because they offer the broadest interdisciplinary coverage of peer-reviewed literature in education and the social sciences, support advanced Boolean search logic, and together index the large majority of high-impact journals in teacher education research. The search strings are structured in three thematic blocks covering PBTE terminology, initial teacher education, and alternative certification programs, crossed using the AND operator. Studies published between 2009 and 2025 will be included, a window chosen because it corresponds to the emergence and consolidation of practice-based approaches in teacher education, particularly the development of models such as core practices and high-leverage practices. Publications must be written in English, Spanish, or Portuguese, reflecting the linguistic competencies of the research team, although the language of program implementation itself is not restricted.

Inclusion criteria are equally carefully specified. On the participants side, studies must involve teacher candidates and teacher educators in programs explicitly defined by their authors as alternative teaching certification programs, directed at people who already hold a prior academic or professional qualification. Studies reporting only on traditional initial teacher education, involving candidates without such prior qualifications, will be excluded. On the concept side, a program will be considered PBTE-aligned if it explicitly incorporates at least one of three processes described by Grossman and colleagues: representation of practice, decomposition of practice, or approximation of practice, implemented in a structured and recurring manner within the program design. No restrictions apply to program length, disciplinary area, or intended education level.

The review will also cast a wide net over study types. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs, analytical observational studies including cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional designs, descriptive observational studies, and qualitative approaches such as phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, qualitative description, and action research will all be considered. Notably, opinion pieces and reflective articles will also be included, a decision the authors justify by pointing out that PBTE within alternative certification is an emerging area in which much of the available knowledge is still expressed through expert commentary and practitioner reflection rather than empirical studies. During data charting, these sources will be flagged by type and synthesized separately from empirical studies in the narrative synthesis, a safeguard against mixing evidence of very different strength.

Screening and extraction will follow established best practices for evidence synthesis. All citations will be imported into Rayyan, a systematic screening tool, with duplicates removed automatically. Before full-scale screening, a pilot test with four purposively selected articles will confirm inter-rater agreement on the eligibility criteria; an agreement rate below 75 percent will trigger joint discussion between reviewers and, if necessary, revision of the criteria. The authors candidly acknowledge that four articles constitute a limited pilot sample given the conceptual complexity of PBTE, and they commit to treating recurring disagreements during early full screening as an informal extension of the pilot phase. Titles and abstracts will then be assessed independently by at least two reviewers, with full-text assessment conducted independently by two reviewers and discrepancies resolved by consensus or a third reviewer. Data will be extracted independently by two or more reviewers using a purpose-built tool aligned with the PCC framework, piloted and refined before full extraction, with all modifications documented and justified in the final review.

The significance of this protocol extends well beyond Chile. Alternative certification routes are expanding as a workforce strategy across multiple countries facing comparable teacher shortage pressures, and the review aims to synthesize, for the first time, evidence on how practice-based approaches have been conceptualized and implemented specifically within this type of program. The final review will examine program duration, mentoring structures, practicum design, institutional type, teaching strategies, and reported outcomes, presenting results through descriptive tables, graphical representations, thematic maps, and a narrative synthesis organized around the PCC framework. The authors also acknowledge the limitations inherent in their design, including the restriction to two databases, the modest pilot sample, the heterogeneity introduced by including opinion pieces, and the absence of formal quality appraisal, which is standard for scoping reviews. By mapping the breadth of available evidence rather than judging its robustness, the review is positioned as the essential first synthesis step in a field still under development, one that could shape how the next generation of career-changing teachers is trained worldwide.

Subject of Research: Education Research

Article Title: Practice-based initial teacher education in alternative teaching certification programs: A scoping review protocol

Article References: Urra-Barra, G., Acevedo, G., Leighton-Vallejos, E., Ruiz-González, V., & Díaz-Ibáñez, C. (2026). Practice-based initial teacher education in alternative teaching certification programs: A scoping review protocol. PLOS One, 21(10), e0360047. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360047

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360047

Keywords: teacher education, alternative certification, practice-based teacher education, scoping review, teacher shortage, PLOS One, Chile, mentoring, practicum, evidence synthesis, career changers, research protocol

The study, titled ‘Design and Implementation of Personalized Teacher Professional Development: A Case of an NGO-Based School System in Pakistan’, examines a professional development model implemented across 25 NGO-based schools in two regions of the country. Rather than delivering identical training packages to all teachers regardless of their experience, subject area, or classroom context, the programme began by identifying what individual teachers actually needed to learn. On the basis of those identified needs, targeted audio-visual modules were developed, covering areas such as formative assessment, classroom questioning techniques, and differentiated instruction. Teachers then accessed these modules through audio-visual studios established within the schools themselves, a design choice that placed professional learning resources physically close to the point of practice.

The technical architecture of the model is worth examining because it departs from the mobile-first or fully online formats that dominate discussions of digital education. Instead of relying on personal devices and internet streaming, the programme created shared, school-based AV studios where teachers could watch and work with audio-visual learning resources. This design acknowledged the infrastructure realities of resource-constrained settings: connectivity can be intermittent, electricity supply can be unreliable, and not every teacher owns a suitable device. By concentrating the technology in a dedicated school space, the model gave teachers a reliable venue for self-paced learning while also creating a natural site for peer collaboration. Teachers could revisit materials as often as they needed, a flexibility that conventional workshops, by their very nature, cannot offer.

Crucially, the digital resources were never intended to stand alone. The programme combined self-paced engagement with audio-visual content against a backdrop of practice, reflection, peer feedback, and mentoring. School-level facilitators, including school leaders and programme implementation personnel, played an active role in helping teachers connect what they encountered in the modules with their everyday classroom routines. This pairing of asynchronous digital content with synchronous human support reflects a growing consensus in the professional development literature: sustained, practice-embedded learning tends to outperform isolated training events, and the presence of a knowledgeable other can make the difference between passive consumption of content and genuine change in instructional behaviour.

To understand how the model worked in practice, the researchers adopted a case study design, interviewing key school-level stakeholders including programme developers, implementers, school leaders, and teachers. Programme documents were also examined in order to reconstruct the processes of design and implementation and to capture participants’ experiences of the model. This methodological choice matters. Case studies cannot establish causal effects, and the authors are explicit on this point: the study does not claim to demonstrate that the programme improved teaching quality in any measurable, causal sense. What it does provide is rich evidence of how a personalised, technology-supported approach to professional development can actually be designed and implemented under resource constraints, and of the conditions required to keep such professional learning alive over time.

The findings from the interviews paint a encouraging picture of teacher engagement. Teachers reported using more interactive instructional strategies in their classrooms, adjusting their questioning practices, and changing the pacing of their lessons. They described returning independently to the audio-visual materials to revisit concepts, and they spoke of becoming more reflective about their own teaching. These are precisely the kinds of behavioural shifts that professional development programmes aspire to produce but often fail to document. Equally significant was the role attributed to the implementers, who helped teachers interpret the digital content and translate it into classroom-appropriate actions. Without that interpretive layer, the study suggests, the modules risked remaining abstract resources rather than becoming catalysts for changed practice.

The challenges teachers encountered were neither trivial nor surprising. Internet connectivity was inconsistent, electricity supply was unreliable, access to equipment was uneven, and some teachers faced long travel to reach schools equipped with AV studios. These obstacles are endemic to technology-based interventions in developing contexts, and the study does not minimise them. Yet the most important insight to emerge from teachers’ experiences was not about infrastructure at all. It was that the technology became meaningful only when it was combined with dialogic professional learning, that is, with interaction among colleagues and with mentors. The technology itself was not the transformative element. Its integration with professional dialogue, mentoring, and collaborative reflection was what strengthened teachers’ engagement and sustained their learning.

This conclusion carries a caution that extends well beyond Pakistan. Enthusiasm for digital solutions in education frequently outruns the evidence, and funders and policymakers are often tempted to equate the provision of devices and content with the achievement of professional growth. The study pushes back against that equation directly, arguing that technology alone is unlikely to transform teacher professional development. Its potential, the authors contend, is far greater when it is embedded within a human-centred system of professional support. The practical implication is a question of balance: digital resources can extend reach, enable self-pacing, and allow repeated access to content, but they require sustained human support to be interpreted, contextualised, and converted into durable changes in teaching.

The wider relevance of the findings lies in what the study offers to other education systems searching for alternatives to one-off, standardised teacher training. The authors are careful not to suggest that the Pakistani model can simply be transplanted elsewhere. Instead, they argue that its underlying principles are what merit adaptation: identifying teachers’ learning needs before designing provision, providing flexible access to professional learning resources, supporting structured reflection, and maintaining local mentoring relationships. These principles, they suggest, could be adapted to different institutional and resource contexts, whether in other developing education systems or in settings where conventional training has similarly failed to engage teachers meaningfully. The emphasis on principles over procedures is a deliberate methodological stance, recognising that the specific configuration of studios, modules, and facilitators emerged from a particular set of local conditions.

The study closes with a sober assessment of what expansion would require. Education systems in developing contexts, the authors conclude, are fully capable of generating contextually grounded approaches to teacher development rather than importing models designed elsewhere. But successful scaling is not automatic. It demands careful planning, reliable infrastructure, continued mentoring, institutional commitment, and sustained investment in both people and technology. In an era when artificial intelligence platforms and mobile learning apps promise to personalise education at scale, this case study from 25 Pakistani schools offers a grounded counterpoint: personalisation in professional learning is less about the sophistication of the technology than about the quality of the human relationships and institutional structures that surround it. For policymakers, programme designers, and researchers interested in teacher development under resource constraints, the message is clear. Build the studios, yes, but build the mentoring around them, because it is the combination, not the hardware, that changes how teachers teach.

Subject of Research: Personalised, technology-supported teacher professional development in resource-constrained Pakistani schools

Article Title: A study from Pakistan offers contextual insights into Personalized Teacher Professional Development

Article References: A study from Pakistan offers contextual insights into Personalized Teacher Professional Development. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: teacher professional development, Pakistan, audio-visual studios, personalised learning, mentoring, ECNU Review of Education, case study, education technology, resource-constrained education, NGO schools, formative assessment, teacher training

The research team, led by Emire Çitaku of Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje and Ekrem Çitaku of the University Clinical Dental Center of Kosovo and Iliria College in Prishtina, set out to fill a conspicuous gap. Although the determinants of medical career choice have been studied extensively in Western Europe and North America, empirical evidence from Kosovo has remained limited. That gap matters for a practical reason: health workforce planners cannot design effective recruitment and retention strategies without knowing what draws people into medicine in the first place and what keeps them committed once they are in practice. The study was conceived explicitly as an exploratory contribution to that planning conversation.

Methodologically, the investigation took the form of a cross-sectional survey conducted between January and June 2019. The researchers recruited 300 participants drawn from three groups that together span the arc of a medical career: current medical students, practicing physicians and dentists. Recruitment used a convenience sampling approach, meaning participants were selected based on accessibility rather than random selection from the full population, a design choice the authors frame as appropriate for an exploratory study but one that warrants caution when generalizing to all Kosovar health professionals. Data were collected with a structured, anonymous paper-based questionnaire administered in Albanian, a format designed to encourage candid responses on a topic as personal as career motivation.

On the analytical side, the team processed the responses using IBM SPSS Statistics version 25. Descriptive statistics, including frequencies and percentages, were used to map the overall distribution of answers, while chi-square tests of independence were applied to probe whether particular variables, such as gender or career stage, were statistically associated with specific attitudes. The significance threshold was set at p less than 0.05, the conventional benchmark in health services research for treating an observed association as unlikely to be a product of chance alone. The study received ethics approval from the Ethics Committee of Iliria College in Prishtina, with informed consent obtained through voluntary participation in the anonymous survey, and the work was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The headline result concerns who actually makes the decision to pursue medicine. Nearly half of the participants, 49.0 percent, reported that they chose their medical career independently, while 39.0 percent indicated that their parents influenced the decision. In other words, in Kosovo’s medical community, self-determination is the single most common mode of career choice, but family influence remains a powerful secondary force touching a substantial minority of professionals. This duality is striking because it captures, in a single dataset, the tension between the individualistic narrative of the self-made doctor and the collectivist family dynamics that characterize much of Balkan society, where parental expectations about prestigious, stable professions continue to carry real weight.

Satisfaction with the chosen profession emerged as another central finding. Overall, 71.3 percent of respondents reported being satisfied or very satisfied with their career choice, a figure that suggests the profession retains a strong core of contentment despite the pressures that come with medical work in a health system still consolidating after decades of political and economic upheaval. Perhaps more intriguing was the comparison across career stages: students demonstrated a slightly higher proportion of being very satisfied compared to practicing professionals. That gradient, small as it is, will be familiar to workforce researchers elsewhere, since the transition from the idealism of medical school to the daily realities of clinical practice, administrative burden and resource constraints tends to erode enthusiasm. The Kosovo data suggest the same pattern may be operating there, though the exploratory design means the authors stop short of causal claims.

Commitment to the profession appears robust. A clear majority of participants, 80.7 percent, indicated that they would not change their profession if given the choice again. That figure is a meaningful signal for retention, because intention to stay is one of the strongest practical predictors of actual workforce stability. Yet the survey also uncovered gendered fault lines that complicate the rosy aggregate picture. The researchers observed a statistically significant association between gender and intention to change profession, with p equal to 0.023, and between gender and willingness to recommend the profession to others, with p equal to 0.007. While the abstract does not detail the direction of these differences, the mere existence of significant gender effects is consequential: it suggests that male and female medical professionals in Kosovo may experience the profession differently, a pattern often linked in international literature to disparities in career progression, work-life balance and workplace support.

For health workforce planners, the implications the authors draw are concrete. They argue that medical career choice in Kosovo reflects a balance between individual autonomy and family influence, and that the generally high satisfaction levels are encouraging, but the differences observed across career stages should inform discussions on workforce support strategies. Their recommendations center on integrating career guidance, mentoring and retention-focused interventions into health workforce planning. In practice, that could mean structured mentoring programs that connect students with practicing clinicians, career counseling that helps young people make informed and self-directed choices, and targeted support for practicing professionals whose satisfaction has dipped relative to their student counterparts. The gender-related associations add a further layer, implying that retention policies may need to be tailored rather than one-size-fits-all if they are to keep both men and women committed to clinical careers.

The study’s limitations deserve honest acknowledgment, and the authors themselves frame the work as exploratory. The convenience sample of 300 participants, while substantial for a small health system, cannot guarantee representativeness of all Kosovar medical professionals. The cross-sectional design captures a snapshot in time, here from 2019, and cannot establish whether the family influence observed at career entry persists or fades over a professional lifetime, nor whether the satisfaction gap between students and practitioners widens with age. Self-reported satisfaction is also inherently subjective and may be shaped by social desirability, particularly in a cultural context where expressing doubt about a prestigious career choice may carry stigma. The data were collected within a Master’s research project under institutional academic oversight, with the 2026 ethics approval covering secondary analysis and publication of the previously collected anonymized data.

Even with those caveats, the research fills a genuine void. Kosovo’s health system faces the same pressures confronting much of the region: emigration of skilled professionals, aging clinical workforces and limited fiscal capacity for retention incentives. Evidence about what motivates people to enter medicine and what keeps them satisfied is a prerequisite for evidence-based workforce policy, and until now, Kosovo has lacked it. By quantifying the split between independent and parental decision-making, documenting that roughly seven in ten professionals are content with their choice and that more than eight in ten would not change professions, and flagging significant gender differences in commitment, the study gives planners a starting baseline. Whether mentoring schemes and career guidance can convert that baseline into long-term workforce sustainability is now the question that policymakers in Prishtina, and researchers watching from abroad, will be asking next.

Subject of Research: Determinants of medical career choice and professional satisfaction among medical students, physicians and dentists in Kosovo

Article Title: Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning

Article References: Çitaku, E., Çitaku, E., Mrasori, S., & Krasniqi, B. (2026). Medical career choice and satisfaction with the chosen profession in Kosovo: exploratory insights for health workforce planning. BMC Health Services Research. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15524-9

Keywords: medical career choice, job satisfaction, health workforce planning, Kosovo, medical education, parental influence, retention, career guidance, mentoring, cross-sectional study, gender differences, physicians

This operational flexibility comes at a human cost. When a cardiology nurse is redeployed to cover a respiratory ward, or an orthopedic team absorbs overflow medical patients, the boundaries that once defined professional identity begin to blur. Success in this environment depends on what researchers call readiness for interprofessional learning, or RIPL, a measurable construct describing a clinician’s willingness and ability to engage in collaborative learning across professional and departmental lines. The new study, led by Na Li, Wenjuan Wang, Juan Zhou, and Xin Yang of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, set out to quantify that readiness and identify the levers that might raise it.

Between June and August 2025, the team administered a cross-sectional survey to 718 clinical nurses recruited through convenience sampling. Participants completed a self-developed demographic questionnaire alongside three validated instruments: the Readiness for Interprofessional Learning Scale, a psychological capital scale designed for nurses, and a perceived organisational support scale. The RIPL scale, widely used in health professions education research, captures attitudes toward shared learning, teamwork, and the value of understanding other professionals’ roles. Psychological capital, often abbreviated as PsyCap, is a composite of four psychological resources: self-efficacy, hope, resilience, and optimism. Perceived organisational support measures the degree to which employees believe their employer values their contributions and cares about their wellbeing.

The headline finding was encouraging. The nurses posted a mean RIPL score of 80.26 with a standard deviation of 11.49, a level the authors characterize as relatively high. In practical terms, this suggests that frontline nurses in a bed-sharing hospital are not resisting the collaborative demands of the model; most arrive at cross-departmental assignments with a genuine openness to learning from colleagues in other specialties. That openness matters because interprofessional learning is widely regarded as the foundation of interprofessional collaboration, which in turn is tightly linked to patient safety, reduced medical error, and smoother care transitions.

But the study’s real analytical weight lies in its regression modeling. Using hierarchical multiple regression, the researchers tested which factors independently predicted RIPL scores after accounting for demographic characteristics. Three variables emerged as significant. Experience mentoring nursing interns carried a standardized beta of 0.096, psychological capital a beta of 0.348, and perceived organisational support a beta of 0.499. Together, the three explained 66.3 percent of the total variance in readiness scores, an unusually large share for research on workplace attitudes, where models often account for far less. All three associations were positive and statistically significant at the P < 0.001 level.

The dominance of perceived organisational support is the finding most likely to catch the attention of hospital administrators. A beta of 0.499 means that, after controlling for other variables, each increment in how supported a nurse feels corresponds to a substantial rise in readiness to learn across professional boundaries. The theoretical framing of the study draws on the Job Demands-Resources model, a well-established framework in occupational psychology that posits every job involves demands that drain energy and resources that sustain engagement. In the bed-sharing context, cross-departmental deployment is a demand; organisational support, in the form of fair scheduling, recognition, adequate staffing, and responsive management, is a resource. The data suggest the resource side of the equation is doing most of the heavy lifting.

Psychological capital ranked second in predictive strength, and its role is conceptually distinct. Where organisational support is external, PsyCap is internal, a psychological reserve that nurses carry with them into ambiguous situations. A nurse high in self-efficacy believes she can master unfamiliar clinical routines; a nurse high in resilience recovers quickly from the friction of working outside her home unit; hope and optimism sustain motivation when the bed-sharing model produces chaotic days. The study’s results imply that these internal resources are not fixed traits but trainable capacities, and that interventions targeting them, such as structured resilience training or efficacy-building mentorship programs, could raise the collaborative readiness of the entire nursing workforce.

The third significant factor, experience mentoring interns, is perhaps the most intriguing because it points to a virtuous cycle embedded in teaching itself. Nurses who had supervised nursing students or interns scored higher on interprofessional learning readiness than those who had not. The authors suggest that mentoring requires nurses to articulate their own reasoning, model collaboration, and reflect on practice, all activities that reinforce openness to learning from others. Teaching, in other words, is not a one-way transfer from mentor to mentee; it reshapes the mentor. This finding hints at a practical, low-cost strategy: hospitals could expand teaching roles for frontline nurses not only to benefit students but to cultivate a more collaborative senior workforce.

The study does have limits that temper generalization. It was conducted at a single tertiary hospital in Jiangsu Province using convenience sampling, which means the participants may not represent nurses in smaller hospitals, rural facilities, or different regional health systems. Cross-sectional design also prevents causal claims; it is possible, for instance, that nurses who are already more ready for interprofessional learning elicit more organisational support rather than the reverse. The authors themselves frame the work as a starting point, calling for future efforts to strengthen organisational support, optimize teaching mechanisms, and enhance nurses’ psychological capital as pathways toward better interprofessional collaboration capacity.

Still, the implications travel well beyond one Chinese hospital. Hospital-wide bed-sharing is part of a global shift toward flexible capacity management, from surge staffing in the United States to floating pools and cross-ward deployment in European systems. Everywhere it is implemented, the same question arises: will nurses adapt, collaborate, and learn, or will they burn out and disengage? This study offers a data-driven answer, identifying psychological capital and perceived organisational support as the twin engines of adaptation, with mentoring experience as an accessible accelerant. For health systems betting on flexible beds as the future of hospital operations, the message is clear: the model’s success will be decided not in the bed-management software but in the minds of the nurses who staff the wards, and in whether their institutions make them feel valued enough to keep learning across the lines that once divided them.

Subject of Research: Readiness for interprofessional learning among clinical nurses in hospital-wide bed-sharing models and its associated factors

Article Title: Clinical nurses’ readiness for interprofessional learning in the hospital-wide bed-sharing model and its associated factors: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Li, N., Wang, W., Zhou, J., & Yang, X. (2026). Clinical nurses’ readiness for interprofessional learning in the hospital-wide bed-sharing model and its associated factors: a cross-sectional study. BMC Nursing. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12912-026-05469-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12912-026-05469-z

Keywords: nurses, interprofessional learning, hospital-wide bed-sharing, psychological capital, perceived organisational support, nursing management, cross-sectional study, mentoring, job demands-resources model, China, tertiary hospital, patient safety

The program, known as Women (Physicians and Scientists) @ Children’s Hospital, or W@TCH, was established in 1999 with a straightforward mission: to support the professional development and advancement of women faculty at the institution. The new report, led by Kashvi Singh and Anitha S. John of the Division of Cardiology at Children’s National, together with colleagues from hospital medicine, pediatric critical care, emergency medicine, and hematology, focuses on one component of that mission, a Women in Leadership curriculum designed and delivered by the W@TCH committee over a five-year period.

The curriculum’s structure reflected a deliberate pedagogical choice. Rather than relying on passive lectures, the organizers built the program around interactive sessions paired with half-day workshops held at the end of each academic year. Topics were selected to address the specific needs of junior faculty, the career stage at which many women physicians and scientists face competing pressures from clinical duties, research expectations, family responsibilities, and the unwritten rules of academic advancement. The end-of-year workshops gave participants extended time to engage with material, practice skills, and build relationships with colleagues they might otherwise rarely meet across departmental lines.

Evaluation of the curriculum relied on post-event surveys in which participants rated aspects of each workshop on a five-point Likert scale, a standard instrument in medical education research that quantifies subjective satisfaction while allowing comparison across events and years. The results were consistent. Attendees rated Women in Leadership events as very effective or highly effective throughout the program’s run. More tellingly, the median satisfaction score rose over time, climbing from 4.5 out of 5 in 2013 to 4.75 out of 5 in 2017. In evaluation research, where scores often plateau or drift downward as novelty fades, a rising trend across five years suggests that the committee was successfully refining content in response to participant feedback.

The study also captured a longer horizon. In a follow-up survey administered in 2024, seven years after the curriculum period ended, 93 percent of respondents expressed interest in more W@TCH-related events. That figure matters because the central weakness of most professional development interventions is durability: enthusiasm measured immediately after a workshop rarely predicts lasting engagement. A demand signal persisting years later indicates that participants continued to see value in the community the program created, not merely in the individual sessions.

The authors frame the Women in Leadership curriculum as one component of a broader institutional initiative rather than a standalone fix. W@TCH, more than 25 years after its founding, remains active across five pillars: mentoring, networking, leadership development, faculty recognition, and advocacy. This breadth is significant from a program-design perspective. Mentoring relationships address individual guidance, networking builds the social capital that influences promotion decisions, recognition counters the visibility gap that affects women’s scholarly reputations, and advocacy targets institutional policy itself. A curriculum alone touches only one of these mechanisms; the sustained architecture appears to be what keeps the program alive.

The technical context for this work is the well-documented disparity structure of academic medicine. Data compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges have long shown that women are underrepresented among full professors, department chairs, and deans relative to their share of medical school graduates. The causes are multifactorial, encompassing differences in access to sponsorship, unequal distribution of service and teaching loads, promotion timelines that collide with childbearing years, and climates that can be unwelcoming in subtle ways. Interventions therefore need to be evaluated not just on whether participants enjoyed them, but on whether they plausibly address one or more of these mechanisms. The W@TCH report is candid about its scope: it demonstrates feasibility, sustained engagement, and high satisfaction, which are necessary but not sufficient conditions for changing promotion outcomes.

That limitation is worth stating plainly, because it defines the frontier of this research area. The study’s evaluation data are drawn from post-event surveys and a retrospective follow-up, and the authors do not claim that the curriculum by itself increased promotions, grants, or leadership appointments among participants. Measuring such outcomes would require long-term tracking of career trajectories against matched comparison groups, a design that few institutions have implemented. What the report does establish is that a volunteer-driven, committee-run program can maintain quality and demand across many years, which is itself a nontrivial finding. Most diversity and development initiatives are episodic; they launch with funding or enthusiasm and fade within a few grant cycles. W@TCH’s longevity, sustained without reported external funding, suggests that institutional embedding and a dedicated committee structure can substitute for dedicated budget lines.

For other institutions considering similar programs, the report offers several transferable design lessons. First, content should be driven by the articulated needs of junior faculty rather than by what senior leadership assumes those needs are; the authors report that curriculum topics were relevant to participants’ needs, and the rising satisfaction scores are consistent with that alignment. Second, interactive formats and extended workshops appear to outperform passive formats in generating engagement, echoing broader findings in adult learning research. Third, evaluation should be built in from the start, because the Likert-scale survey data collected routinely after each event are what made this retrospective analysis possible at all. Programs that skip systematic evaluation forfeit the ability to demonstrate their value when institutional priorities shift.

The broader significance of the study lies in its reframing of what gender equity work in medicine can look like. Rather than a one-off training or a compliance exercise, the W@TCH model treats the advancement of women faculty as a continuous institutional function, comparable to quality improvement in clinical care: measured iteratively, adjusted based on data, and sustained across leadership transitions. The authors conclude that sustained programs such as W@TCH may serve as important mechanisms to promote the advancement, retention, and leadership development of women in academic medicine. As hospitals and medical schools confront persistent attrition among women physicians and scientists, the evidence from Children’s National suggests that the question is no longer whether such programs can work, but whether institutions are willing to commit to them for decades rather than years. The 93 percent of former participants who still wanted more, a quarter-century after the program began, may be the most persuasive data point of all.

Subject of Research: Evaluation of a women's leadership development curriculum in academic medicine

Article Title: Striving for success: essential skills for women in academic medicine

Article References: Singh, K., Shah, N., October, T., Iqbal, S., Luban, N., & John, A. S. (2026). Striving for success: essential skills for women in academic medicine. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10428-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10428-y

Keywords: academic medicine, women in leadership, gender equity, medical education, career development, mentoring, faculty advancement, W@TCH, Children's National Hospital, professional development, leadership training, retention

The research team, led by Tanatuch Tiratrakoonseree and colleagues at the Faculty of Medicine Ramathibodi Hospital, Mahidol University, in Bangkok, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: does the way students get into medical school relate to whether they later engage in research on their own initiative? To find out, they designed what methodologists call a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study, a two-phase architecture in which quantitative patterns are first established from large datasets and then interrogated through interviews that probe why those patterns might exist. This design is increasingly favored in education research because numbers alone rarely reveal the mechanisms behind disparities, and anecdotes alone rarely establish whether disparities are real.

The quantitative phase drew on institutional records from 1,021 students admitted between 2017 and 2022 through two distinct pathways of the Thai University Central Admission System, known as TCAS. The first, TCAS1, is a portfolio-based route in which applicants are evaluated on documented achievements, including academic records and extracurricular accomplishments. The second, TCAS3, is an examination-based route that relies primarily on standardized test performance. The outcome measure was deliberately concrete: at least one eligible extracurricular research activity recorded in institutional documentation from the moment of entry until graduation or 30 September 2023, whichever came first. Eligible activities included securing a research grant, presenting a conference abstract, or publishing a scholarly paper. Crucially, the researchers excluded research that was mandatory within the curriculum or tied to concurrent degree programs, ensuring that the measure captured voluntary, student-initiated engagement rather than required coursework.

The headline numbers were striking. Overall, only 103 of the 1,021 students, or 10.1 percent, had documented extracurricular research participation. But the distribution between pathways was lopsided: 52 of 246 TCAS1 students, or 21.1 percent, had such documentation, compared with just 51 of 775 TCAS3 students, or 6.6 percent. In statistical terms, the team used logistic regression, a modeling technique that estimates the odds of an outcome while adjusting for other variables, to quantify the gap. In a minimally adjusted model accounting for admission pathway and cohort year, portfolio-admitted students showed dramatically higher odds. In the primary model, which additionally adjusted for selected pre-admission characteristics, the adjusted odds ratio was 9.19, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 4.96 to 17.03. A confidence interval that excludes 1.0 by a wide margin indicates a statistically robust association, and this one does not come close to crossing that threshold.

A natural objection is that portfolio-admitted students might simply arrive with stronger academic credentials, particularly higher pre-university grade point averages, and that GPA rather than pathway explains the difference. The researchers addressed this directly with paired complete-case models run on the 854 students for whom pre-university GPA data were available. Before adjusting for GPA, the pathway estimate was 11.25; after adjustment, it was 10.63. The estimate barely moved, which is a classic sign that the pathway association is not confounded by prior academic performance in any meaningful way. Notably, GPA itself produced an imprecise estimate that was not statistically significant, meaning the data could not establish that pre-university grades predicted later research engagement at all. In other words, the admission route, not the report card, carried the signal.

Numbers this stark demand explanation, and that is where the qualitative phase earned its keep. Using the same eligibility criteria extended through 30 September 2024, the team sampled participants for interviews and ultimately spoke with 24 students or graduates, three faculty research advisors, and three members of the institution’s research-support committee. The interviews were analyzed thematically, a method in which researchers code transcripts for recurring patterns of meaning and organize them into overarching themes. Five interlocking themes emerged: prior exposure to research before medical school, research self-efficacy or the confidence to carry out scholarly work, the availability of mentoring and visible entry routes into research, competing priorities and academic pressure that crowd out voluntary activities, and unclear pathways that leave students unsure how to begin.

Perhaps the most intellectually honest element of the study is what the interviews revealed about the limits of the quantitative signal. Contrasting cases, in which the researchers deliberately compared participants and non-participants with similar backgrounds, showed that prior research exposure was neither necessary nor sufficient for later participation. Some students with no pre-medical research history became productive researchers once they found mentors and accessible entry points, while others with substantial prior exposure never engaged, deterred by the relentless demands of the medical curriculum or by other priorities. This nuance matters because it undercuts any temptation to read the odds ratio as a verdict on student potential. The authors are explicit on this point: the association should not be interpreted as causal, nor should admission pathway be treated as a proxy for what a student is capable of achieving.

What the evidence does support is a more structural interpretation. Students admitted through the portfolio route may arrive with different research-related starting conditions, including familiarity with how research works, existing contacts, and a self-image that includes scholarly contribution. But the interviews make clear that post-admission circumstances carry real weight too. Where mentoring is visible, where entry routes into labs and projects are clearly signposted, and where academic pressure leaves room to breathe, students from both pathways participate. Where those supports are opaque or scarce, participation withers regardless of background. The 10.1 percent overall participation rate is itself a sobering datum: even in an environment with institutional research support structures, the large majority of future doctors complete training without a single documented voluntary research activity.

The implications ripple outward well beyond a single Thai institution. Many medical schools worldwide operate multi-track admissions, blending portfolio assessment, standardized examinations, interviews, and holistic review, precisely because each method captures different dimensions of applicant quality. This study suggests that such systems may inadvertently create divergent trajectories that persist for years, quietly shaping who enters the physician-scientist pipeline. With concerns about shortages of clinician-researchers mounting globally, an admission decision made at age eighteen or nineteen appearing to correlate with a nine-fold difference in documented scholarly output is the kind of finding that should prompt institutional self-audits everywhere. The remedy the authors propose is refreshingly practical rather than structural upheaval: make research opportunities visible and accessible across all admission groups, invest in mentoring that reaches students who lack pre-existing networks, and respect that students have diverse priorities, some of which legitimately lie outside the laboratory. Equity in medical education, this study implies, is not only about who gets in, but about what doors remain open once they arrive.

Subject of Research: The association between medical school admission pathways and extracurricular research participation during medical training

Article Title: Association between medical school admission pathways and documented extracurricular research participation: a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study

Article References: Tiratrakoonseree, T., Suppawittaya, P., Srisatidnarakul, I., Kaewkamjornchai, P., & Sungkaworn, T. (2026). Association between medical school admission pathways and documented extracurricular research participation: a sequential explanatory mixed-methods study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10525-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10525-y

Keywords: medical school admission, research engagement, medical education, mixed-methods study, portfolio-based admission, examination-based admission, scholarly activity, mentoring, research self-efficacy, physician-scientists, logistic regression, Thailand

The research, led by Paula Crespí of the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria in Madrid together with colleagues at that institution and the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro in Mexico, is notable precisely because such programs are so rare. A survey of 86 Spanish universities revealed that only 30 offer specific courses in soft skills or generic competencies, and most of those are optional, awarded-degree add-ons or postgraduate offerings rather than compulsory elements of a bachelor’s degree. In Mexico, an analysis of the ten largest universities in one major city found that only six offered such subjects at all. Against that backdrop, the two institutions studied here stand out: at both, every undergraduate, regardless of faculty, must complete courses designed specifically to cultivate intrapersonal and interpersonal competencies.

The Spanish case centered on a first-year mandatory course called Personal Skills and Competencies, taught across all 21 degree programs at the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, a Madrid institution founded in 1993 with roughly 20,000 students. The course pushes students to think about personal fulfillment in its personal, social, academic and professional dimensions, combining classroom work with six one-hour, face-to-face mentoring sessions. Its methodology is experiential, drawing on project-based learning and the creation of a personal development plan. The Mexican case was more elaborate. At the Universidad Anáhuac Querétaro, founded in 2006 and part of an eight-institution network, first-year students take University Formation A, which guides them through an exploration of their identity, values and motivations, alongside Leadership and Personal Development. Second-year students then take University Formation B, which emphasizes emotional intelligence and community engagement, plus Leadership and High-performing Teams, which targets collaboration skills directly. Both Mexican courses embed five half-hour individual mentoring sessions into the semester.

What unites all five courses is a commitment to experiential learning in the tradition described by David Kolb, in which students learn by doing, reflecting and iterating, supported by continuous assessment rather than a single high-stakes exam. This methodological choice matters. The literature on soft skills development identifies a wide menu of possible approaches, from hackathons and role-playing to game-based learning, coaching and student-led initiatives such as clubs and associations. But the authors argue that compulsory, purpose-designed curricular subjects remain the least common and least studied option, despite being the approach most likely to reach every student rather than a self-selected minority.

To measure whether these courses actually work, the team ran three quasi-experimental studies during the 2022–23 academic year: one at the Spanish university tracking the first-year course, and two at the Mexican university, one for each year of the program. In total, 1,353 students participated, 675 in Spain and 678 in Mexico. Each study used a pretest/post-test design without a control group, administering a validated instrument called the Basic Generic Competencies Questionnaire immediately before and after each course. The questionnaire contains 36 items organized into two broad dimensions. The intrapersonal dimension covers introspection, including self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-management, and personal development, including the search for meaning in life, orientation to excellence and proactivity. The interpersonal dimension covers teamwork, spanning cooperative work, work environment management and orientation toward results, and effective communication, spanning verbal, paraverbal and non-verbal communication. Each item is rated on a six-point scale, a choice made deliberately to avoid central tendency bias. The instrument showed excellent internal consistency of 0.94 overall.

The statistical analysis relied on Student’s t-test for related samples to compare initial and final scores, an approach justified by the large sample size despite non-normal score distributions. Differences by gender were tested with t-tests for independent samples, and differences between faculties with one-way analysis of variance, with effect sizes quantified using Cohen’s d and the eta-squared index. In the Spanish study, students reported significant improvements in both dimensions, but the effect was clearly larger for intrapersonal competencies. Every subdimension improved significantly except teamwork, which showed no change, and within it the specific competence of cooperative work even declined slightly. The standout result was self-awareness, with a medium effect size of 0.580, alongside a notable gain in the broader introspection subdimension.

The Mexican results told a broadly consistent story. In the first-year study, both dimensions improved significantly with similar effect sizes, and the strongest gains appeared in verbal and non-verbal communication, self-awareness and orientation to excellence. Cooperative work and work environment management again failed to improve significantly, which the authors consider unsurprising given that these competencies were not the explicit focus of the first-year courses. In the second-year study, only the intrapersonal dimension improved significantly, driven by the personal development subdimension, while the teamwork hypothesis was not confirmed. Across all three studies, gender made no significant difference to outcomes, and faculty effects were either small or absent, suggesting the programs work reasonably uniformly across disciplines, from engineering to health sciences.

The stubborn weakness of teamwork is one of the study’s most intriguing findings, and the authors offer a psychologically plausible explanation. First-year students, they suggest, tend to equate group work with teamwork, assuming that dividing up tasks is all there is to collaboration. This inflates their initial self-perception, leaving little apparent room for improvement. As the courses unpack what genuine teamwork actually requires, coordinating, managing conflict, orienting collectively toward results, students’ self-assessments become more realistic and can even dip. In other words, the apparent decline in cooperative work may reflect a correction of overconfidence rather than a deterioration of skill, a distinction the authors say can only be resolved by contrasting self-perception with actual performance on collaborative tasks.

Why did intrapersonal competencies benefit more consistently than interpersonal ones? The authors point to the individual mentoring sessions woven through every course. One-on-one mentoring, they argue, is inherently suited to developing self-knowledge, self-management and personal direction, complementing the experiential classroom work. This aligns with earlier findings by the same team on the impact of mentoring on transversal competence development, and with broader meta-analytic evidence on the effectiveness of structured character and competence education programs. The practical implication is concrete: universities designing soft skills courses should treat mentoring not as an optional enrichment but as a core component of the pedagogical model.

The study’s conclusions come with candid caveats. The quasi-experimental design lacked a control group, so factors such as prior experience, motivation or general maturation over an academic year cannot be ruled out as alternative explanations. The measurement relied entirely on self-report, which is an indirect indicator of actual competence, associated with self-efficacy rather than demonstrated performance. Sample attrition between measurements also forced the abandonment of one faculty-level hypothesis. The authors recommend that future work adopt mixed methods, longitudinal designs tracking whether gains persist across a degree program, control groups for stronger causal inference, and performance-based assessments that observe behavior directly. Still, as a first empirical test of a rarely studied curricular model, the message is striking: compulsory courses built specifically for soft skills, taught through experiential methods and reinforced by individual mentoring, can move the needle on the competencies that employers increasingly prize and that traditional curricula so often neglect. For universities still treating soft skills as an afterthought, the evidence now suggests there is a tested blueprint waiting to be adopted.

Subject of Research: Effectiveness of compulsory soft skills curricular courses on university students' transversal competencies in Spain and Mexico

Article Title: Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico

Article References: Crespí, P., López González, J., Rodríguez-Barroso, J., & Virués, R. (2025). Effectiveness of soft skills curricular subjects: a case study of two universities, Spain and Mexico. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 14(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-025-00035-y

Keywords: soft skills, higher education, transversal competencies, intrapersonal competencies, interpersonal competencies, mentoring, experiential learning, curriculum design, quasi-experimental study, Spain, Mexico, employability

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

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

The research team, led by Mia F. Williams, MD, MS, and Rachel Schwartz, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, together with Colleen A. McGourty, Crystal Liang, and Mitchell D. Feldman, conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with fifteen leaders within a large academic Department of Medicine. The participants ranged from division and section chiefs all the way up to the dean’s office, capturing perspectives from those who control access to many of the opportunities that determine advancement in medical academia. The researchers used an inductive thematic analysis approach, coding the interview data to identify patterns in how leaders described their sponsorship practices, their understanding of the sponsor role, the principles guiding their decisions, and their views on what institutions could do better.

Perhaps the study’s most striking finding is its universality: every single leader interviewed engaged in sponsorship. Yet their conceptions of what sponsorship meant varied widely. Some leaders saw it simply as an embedded part of their leadership responsibilities, something they did routinely without special reflection. Others described it as a passion and a core mission, framing sponsorship as central to their identity as leaders and to their obligation to cultivate the next generation of academic physicians. This variation matters, the authors argue, because sponsorship often occurs out of sight, without metrics or tracking mechanisms, which means the distribution of sponsored opportunities may depend heavily on each individual leader’s style, awareness, and priorities rather than on any consistent institutional standard.

What drives a leader to sponsor one faculty member over another? The interviews surfaced several recurring factors. Familiarity with potential sponsees loomed large, including their previous and potential performance and the clarity of their career goals. Leaders described watching for faculty who demonstrated excellence and ambition, then deliberately connecting them with opportunities such as leadership roles, high-profile projects, and introductions to influential colleagues. Another prominent theme was equity in the distribution of opportunities. Some leaders consciously worked to spread sponsored chances across their faculty rather than concentrating them on a favored few, while others acknowledged that sponsorship naturally flows through relationships and networks, raising questions about who gets noticed and who remains invisible.

That network dependence emerged as a double-edged sword in the findings. Leaders emphasized that effective sponsorship relies on robust professional networks and institutional influence, their own accumulated social capital being the raw material they spend when they vouch for someone. As one theme captured in the study’s title suggests, leaders described sponsorship in vivid terms of access: they can open doors that remain closed to others. But social capital is unevenly distributed, and prior research cited by the team, including a 2024 scoping review by Schwartz, Williams, and Feldman, has questioned whether sponsorship actually promotes equity in career advancement in academic medicine or instead amplifies existing disparities. Studies of gender differences in sponsorship, including work on National Institutes of Health grant recipients and on women in anesthesiology and emergency medicine, suggest that men are more likely to be sponsored into positions of influence, and that women and faculty from underrepresented groups often face narrower pathways to the networks that sponsorship requires.

The leaders themselves recognized this tension. Interviewees highlighted the inherent bias embedded in sponsorship practices, acknowledging that informal, relationship-driven advocacy tends to favor those who resemble the sponsors or who already move in the same professional circles. Several participants called for additional infrastructure to support equitable sponsorship, arguing that institutions cannot rely on individual goodwill alone to level the playing field. This aligns with a growing body of literature arguing that mentorship is not enough: as Ayyala and colleagues wrote in Academic Medicine in 2019, career advancement in academic medicine requires deliberate sponsorship structures, and Gottlieb and Travis argued in 2018 that the time for formal sponsorship models is now.

Even the most committed sponsors in the study faced significant barriers. Inadequate time was the most commonly cited obstacle; sponsorship is labor-intensive, requiring leaders to make introductions, advocate in meetings, and follow through on commitments, all on top of clinical, research, and administrative duties. Uncertainty about best practices compounded the problem, with leaders unsure whether they were sponsoring effectively or fairly. A lack of institutional support rounded out the barriers: because sponsorship is invisible and unmeasured, leaders receive little recognition for doing it well and no feedback when they fall short. The result is a system in which the engine of career advancement runs on personal initiative rather than institutional design.

The study’s conclusions point toward concrete reform. Williams and her colleagues call for explicit definitions of sponsorship, transparency about how sponsored opportunities are allocated, and institutional support structures that make sponsorship visible, accountable, and equitable. Practical implications could include tracking who receives sponsored opportunities, training leaders in sponsorship practices, building formal sponsorship programs that pair faculty with senior advocates, and embedding sponsorship expectations into leadership job descriptions. Such measures, the authors argue, are essential to promote equitable career advancement, particularly for women and underrepresented minority faculty who research shows are less likely to benefit from informal sponsorship networks. In a field where positions of power remain disproportionately concentrated, the difference between a mentor who advises and a sponsor who opens the door may be the difference between a stalled career and a leadership role.

For the broader scientific and medical community, the study is a reminder that career pipelines are not built on merit alone. The invisible labor of door-opening shapes who becomes a department chair, who sits on national panels, and whose research gets amplified. Making that labor visible is the first step toward ensuring it serves everyone. As academic medicine confronts persistent disparities in its leadership ranks, this research suggests that the question is no longer whether leaders should sponsor their faculty, since all of them already do, but whether institutions will finally build the scaffolding to make that sponsorship deliberate, transparent, and fair.

Subject of Research: Sponsorship roles and practices among leaders in academic medicine and their impact on equitable faculty career advancement

Article Title: “I Can Open the Door”: Sponsorship Roles and Practices in Academic Medicine

Article References: Williams, M. F., Schwartz, R., McGourty, C. A., Liang, C., & Feldman, M. D. (2026). “I Can Open the Door”: Sponsorship Roles and Practices in Academic Medicine. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10573-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10573-6

Keywords: sponsorship, academic medicine, mentoring, career advancement, faculty development, workforce diversity, gender equity, leadership, qualitative research, professional networks, Open, Door