The study, published in Frontiers in Education by Nape Matheko Phahlamohlaka and Vukani Siphesihle Ncwane of the Central University of Technology in Bloemfontein, set out to fill a conspicuous gap. Supplemental instruction, often abbreviated as SI, has accumulated decades of evidence in chemistry, anatomy, and mathematics, where it is routinely deployed in modules with failure rates exceeding 30 percent. Yet empirical data on its role in Physics, particularly within health sciences education in South Africa, have remained thin. That gap matters because Physics is the conceptual backbone of radiography: x-ray imaging principles, radiation physics, and clinical applications all rest on ideas that students frequently find abstract and mathematically demanding. Previous research has suggested that radiography students struggle to apply radiation physics concepts when they reach clinical training, making the module a high-risk bottleneck for the profession.

The researchers recruited a convenience sample of 183 students from an eligible population of 350, collecting data between April and June 2025 through structured questionnaires offered in both paper-based and online formats. Of those approached, 81.42 percent responded, and after one age-based exclusion, 148 participants entered the analysis. The design was quantitative, retrospective, and observational, comparing two sequential self-reported assessment categories among students participating in SI. Grades for Test 1 and Test 2 were self-reported, a methodological choice the authors acknowledge as a limitation, since recall and social desirability may have shaped the answers. The findings were interpreted through Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of learning, which holds that learning occurs through social interaction with more knowledgeable others within the zone of proximal development.

The statistical results were striking. Among the 108 participants with matched Test 1 and Test 2 data, the median self-reported grade category was one category higher in Test 2 than in Test 1, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0 to 1, a Wilcoxon signed-rank statistic of Z = −5.941, and a p-value below 0.001. The effect size, r = 0.57, is large by conventional standards. Of the matched participants, 51.9 percent reported an improvement, 39.8 percent remained unchanged, and only 8.3 percent reported a lower grade category. The median grade category rose from 56 to 60 percent for Test 1 to 61 to 70 percent for Test 2, suggesting that the cohort as a whole drifted upward across the assessment sequence.

Attendance patterns added nuance to the picture. Lecture attendance showed a moderate positive association with Test 1 grades, with a Spearman correlation coefficient of rho = 0.336 and p < 0.001, and a weaker association with Test 2 grades, rho = 0.239, p = 0.012. Supplemental instruction attendance, by contrast, showed no evidence of an association with Test 1 grades, rho = 0.025, p = 0.769, but a weak positive association with Test 2 grades, rho = 0.191, p = 0.048. The researchers suggest that formal lectures and SI sessions may fulfil complementary educational roles: lectures deliver foundational disciplinary knowledge, while SI offers opportunities for collaborative application and reinforcement. Most students reported attending 80 to 100 percent of scheduled lectures, and nearly three-quarters attended at least 40 percent of SI sessions, with a median SI attendance category of 60 to 79 percent.

Satisfaction with the peer facilitators themselves was favourable. More than half of the respondents, 53.0 percent, rated the facilitation of SI sessions as either good or very good, with a median rating of good and an interquartile range of 3 to 4 on the rating scale. A further 34.7 percent rated facilitation as average, while 12.3 percent rated it as poor or very poor. Perhaps more telling was the perception of content alignment: 70.5 percent of valid respondents agreed or strongly agreed that SI content aligned with the Physics lecture material, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 62.0 to 77.8 percent. Only 4.7 percent disagreed. This alignment is no accident. The university’s SI programme is deliberately engineered to keep peer sessions synchronised with formal teaching, with facilitators co-creating worksheets in consultation with the module lecturer and maintaining weekly communication via email or WhatsApp.

The mechanics of the programme reveal how much infrastructure underpins what appears to students as an informal study group. SI facilitators are selected from senior radiography students with the highest academic performance scores in Physics, identified by the module lecturer, and each facilitator is responsible for a single year group for the remainder of the academic year. Before interacting with students, facilitators complete a one-day training workshop covering the facilitation process, group management, active engagement, collaborative problem-solving strategies, questioning and feedback techniques, and approaches for promoting learner independence. Sessions are interactive and discussion-based rather than repeated lectures, using questions, prompts, explanations, peer discussion, and a whiteboard to guide students through challenging problems. Approximately 20 sessions are offered per academic year, attendance is recommended but voluntary, and the module lecturer conducts quarterly visits to SI sessions to review progress and provide timely feedback.

The theoretical framing of the study gives the intervention its intellectual coherence. Within Vygotsky’s framework, Physics lecturers act as subject experts who introduce core concepts during formal lectures, while trained senior students, a postgraduate tutor, or an intern medical physicist serve as near-peer more knowledgeable others, facilitating scaffolded problem-solving within the zone of proximal development. Through guided discussion and collaborative learning, SI is considered to enable students to strengthen conceptual understanding, build confidence, and develop independent problem-solving skills. Previous studies have reported that SI may support academic confidence, motivation, social integration, and a sense of belonging, outcomes consistent with the possibility that supportive learning relationships facilitate cognitive development through dialogue rather than passive knowledge transmission. The authors are careful, however, to note that engagement and the proposed learning mechanisms were not quantitatively measured in this study.

The researchers are equally candid about the limits of their evidence. The study lacked randomisation and a comparison group, so the observed improvement between Test 1 and Test 2 cannot be attributed solely to SI. Regular teaching, maturation, assessment familiarity, differences in test content or difficulty, lecture attendance, independent study, and other academic support may all have influenced performance. Self-selection into SI may have introduced selection bias, and self-reported attendance may have been affected by recall and social desirability. Missing Test 2 data reduced the matched sample to 108 participants and may have introduced attrition bias. The single-institution setting and non-probability sample further limit generalisability. The authors call for future research using prospective, controlled, multi-institutional designs and validated measures to determine whether SI genuinely improves academic performance rather than merely accompanying it.

Nevertheless, the findings carry practical weight for institutions grappling with high-risk STEM modules. The results support the continued provision of SI as a student-support strategy in the Physics module for the BRad programme and Extended Curriculum Programmes at the South African university. The ECP itself is an initiative of South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training that extends an undergraduate qualification by one academic year to provide integrated foundational support for students who have the potential to succeed but require additional preparation. Within the Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, ECPs span five programmes, including medical laboratory sciences, clinical technology, environmental health, radiography, and somatology. As universities worldwide search for scalable ways to keep underprepared students in demanding science programmes, the Bloemfontein data suggest that structured peer-assisted learning, carefully aligned with formal teaching and grounded in sociocultural theory, may be one of the more promising tools available, even if the definitive causal verdict still awaits a controlled trial.

Subject of Research: Students’ experiences of supplemental instruction and self-reported academic performance in Physics within the bachelor of radiography and extended curriculum programme

Article Title: Students’ experiences of supplemental instruction and self-reported academic performance in Physics within the bachelor of radiography and extended curriculum programme

Article References: Phahlamohlaka, N. M., & Ncwane, V. S. (2026). Students’ experiences of supplemental instruction and self-reported academic performance in Physics within the bachelor of radiography and extended curriculum programme. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1937898. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1937898

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1937898

Keywords: education, physics, radiography, peer learning, South Africa, Students, experiences, supplemental, instruction, self-reported, academic, performance

The stakes are considerable. Despite years of federal investment—programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, and the Conservation Stewardship Program together represent roughly $6.7 billion in public spending—key practices like cover crops, no-till, prescribed grazing, and improved nitrogen management still cover less than 14 percent of current US land capacity. More troubling, practices that were once adopted are being abandoned. Recent analyses of farm-level panel data show that intermittent use and disadoption of cover crops and reduced tillage may be far more common than previously recognized. Because many soil health benefits, from improved aggregation and infiltration to gains in organic carbon and microbial communities, require sustained management over multiple years, this churn undermines the very outcomes the programs were designed to deliver.

The research team approached the problem through the lens of diffusion of innovation theory, which explains how new ideas spread through social systems, and social learning theory, which describes how people learn by observing and imitating peers. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, they conducted in-depth interviews lasting up to two hours with eight farmers who had actively participated in the Nebraska Soil Health Initiative, a five-year demonstration project launched in 2016. Seventeen farmers initially enrolled, managing a combined 1,793 acres, with randomized, replicated side-by-side comparisons of soil health practices against their conventional systems. The interviews probed where farmers got their soil health knowledge, how information moved through their networks, and how their experiences with experimentation shaped long-term management decisions.

Four interrelated dimensions emerged from the analysis. The first was peer influence and social interaction, which farmers experienced through three distinct channels: land tenure arrangements, perceived acceptance within their communities, and farming traditions. The second was co-learning, the collaborative construction of soil health knowledge through one-on-one exchanges with trusted peers. The third was the expansion of farmer networks through on-farm experimentation, field days, and demonstration activities. The fourth was the set of experiential tradeoffs farmers weighed as they tested practices on their own ground and adjusted management over time.

Land tenure proved to be one of the most consequential social factors. Roughly 39 percent of US agricultural land is farmed under operator agreements, and farmers in the study described how short-term cash-rent arrangements, particularly with absentee landowners focused on rental income, discouraged long-term conservation investments. One participant explained that under a one-year lease he would not plant field-edge pollinator habitat, because a different renter the following year would likely tear it out. Another described how high cash rents forced tenants to prioritize yield on every acre, leaving nothing for soil-building investments. Yet the interviews also revealed landowners acting as conservation advocates, with one family stipulating cover crops as a condition of their lease agreement. Farmers noted that degraded or marginal fields offered a lower-risk entry point for experimentation, where visible improvements in productivity could persuade skeptical landowners that soil health practices pay off over time.

The social cost of deviating from local norms, which the researchers call perceived acceptance or the cost of perception, emerged as a second barrier. Farmers described being seen as different, weird, or bad when they adopted practices outside the dominant corn-soybean template. One participant recalled a neighbor asking what he was doing in the field with a drill in December, when the short winter window for cover crop establishment in Nebraska makes the practice look eccentric. Another noted that untilled fields simply do not look as good in spring, giving conventional neighbors an early-season visual advantage. Interestingly, farmers with integrated crop-livestock operations reported less peer pressure, because livestock gave them alternative work that made the race to plant and harvest first feel less urgent. Farming traditions added another layer, with participants describing both the pull of grandfather’s rotations and legumes from the 1950s and the deliberate rejection of the plow-and-disk systems their fathers used.

Against these social frictions, the study documented powerful facilitators. Co-learning, particularly one-on-one exchanges with farmers who had already worked through the learning curve, built confidence and practical know-how. Early adopters functioned as credible sources of information, fielding calls about cover crop mixes, termination timing, and herbicide strategies. Participants emphasized that soil health improvement needs to be a community-based effort, and several called for small local peer learning groups distributed across Nebraska’s diverse Great Plains environments. On-farm experimentation itself expanded networks: farmers met people they would never otherwise have encountered, hosted field days that drew late adopters and young farmers curious about trying cover crops, and found that real-time information sharing at these events reinforced their own commitment to sustained practice use.

The experiential dimension was equally important. Farmers unanimously stated their intention to continue practices after their conservation program contracts expired, with one noting he would keep splitting nitrogen and planting cover crops regardless of whether he remained in the Conservation Stewardship Program. But they were clear-eyed about tradeoffs. Reduced tillage improved infiltration and reduced erosion but created challenges with soil trafficability and weed resistance. Cover crops offered nutrient cycling and erosion control but raised concerns about yield reduction, pest pressure, input costs, and the narrow window to fit them into a corn-soybean rotation. Diversified rotations and crop-livestock integration promised resilience and income diversification but demanded machinery, labor, and access to markets that often did not exist nearby. Farmers described iterating on these practices year after year, adjusting timing and species based on weather, observed outcomes, and advice from their networks.

The researchers emphasize that adoption is not a one-time decision but a dynamic, evolving process embedded in social relationships and institutional arrangements. They argue that policymakers and extension professionals should prioritize social components when designing on-farm research: supporting landowner-tenant conversations about soil health, fostering peer groups and roundtable discussions rather than one-way information delivery, and integrating opinion leaders with beginning and non-adopter farmers. With the average age of US farmers now 57.5 years and rising, the study suggests that young and beginning farmers, who tend to have broader connections, could serve as key vectors for spreading soil health information. The findings also point toward rethinking traditional extension models that privilege scientific expertise over local, experiential knowledge.

For a field that has long measured success in acres treated and tons of soil saved, this research makes a compelling case that the human dimension deserves equal billing. Soil health, it turns out, is cultivated as much through conversation, trust, and community as through cover crop seed and reduced tillage. The farmers in this study kept experimenting not because a program paid them to, but because their networks gave them the confidence, the evidence, and the social permission to keep going. Understanding and strengthening those networks, the authors conclude, may be the most underutilized tool in the effort to make soil health management stick.

Subject of Research: How farmers' social networks and interactions sustain soil health management in the US Midwest

Article Title: Exploring the influence of farmers’ networks and social interactions to sustain soil health management

Article References: Krupek, F. S., Ruth, T., Redfearn, D., & Basche, A. (2026). Exploring the influence of farmers’ networks and social interactions to sustain soil health management. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 10, Article 1823295. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1823295

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsufs.2026.1823295

Keywords: soil health, farmer networks, social learning, on-farm experimentation, conservation adoption, land tenure, cover crops, no-till, Nebraska, diffusion of innovation, sustainable agriculture, peer learning

The intervention rested on a deceptively simple idea drawn from psychology rather than medicine. Instead of inviting each student to interrogate frontline HIV workers individually, an impossible logistical burden for a class of more than a hundred, the researchers trained two student volunteers to conduct structured interviews with experts while the entire class observed and participated through guided activities. The approach operationalizes Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, in which people acquire knowledge and behaviors by observing models they identify with, and David Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, which links concrete experience to reflection, conceptualization, and active application. Because the interviewers were peers rather than faculty or outside professionals, the researchers theorized that observers would find the models relatable, feel less performance anxiety, and process the exchanges more deeply.

The study was conducted during the 2025-2026 academic year at a private medical college affiliated with a 750-bed tertiary care teaching hospital that runs an Integrated Counselling and Testing Centre and an Anti-Retroviral Therapy facility. Participants were fifth-semester students in the Community Medicine rotation who had already completed basic pathology and microbiology coursework, including introductory HIV content. The cohort was nearly evenly split by gender, with 52.9 percent female and 47.1 percent male students, and a mean age of 21.4 years. The research protocol was approved by the institutional ethics committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with written informed consent obtained from all participants.

The program consisted of two 90-minute sessions held one week apart, each following an identical format. A 15-minute introduction set out the learning objectives and observation guidelines, followed by 60 minutes of structured peer-conducted interviews with built-in reflection pauses, and a final 15-minute facilitated discussion in which observing students could question the experts directly. In the first session, two students interviewed an ICTC counselor with two years of experience on HIV testing and pre- and post-test counseling, and an ART counselor with seven years of experience on treatment adherence and adverse event management. The second session shifted from clinical care to program mechanics, featuring a Cluster Prevention Officer, a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer with 15 years of experience, and a representative from a local Targeted Intervention non-governmental organization who discussed reaching high-risk populations, countering stigma, and pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Critical to the design were the scaffolds that kept observers mentally active rather than passively present. Preparation materials containing background readings and suggested questions were distributed a week in advance, students met beforehand to draft questions for the experts, structured note-taking templates focused attention during the interviews, and designated reflection periods allowed the class to consolidate what they heard. Seating and a microphone system ensured clear sightlines and audibility for everyone in the room. These elements matter because observational learning only works when the environment supports attention, retention, and mental rehearsal, a point long emphasized in the instructional design literature.

Measurement was unusually rigorous for a classroom intervention. The knowledge instrument was a 13-item multiple-choice questionnaire covering HIV transmission, clinical management, the structure and phases of India’s National AIDS Control Program, targeted interventions, and treatment principles. A panel comprising an experienced HIV clinician, a public health specialist, and a medical education researcher validated the items, yielding a content validity index of 0.92, well above the recommended threshold of 0.80, and Cronbach’s alpha of 0.78, indicating acceptable internal consistency. Attitudes toward people living with HIV and toward the professional role in reducing stigma were captured with five psychometrically tested Likert-scale items addressing stigma reduction, social determinants, ethical considerations, and health equity.

The quantitative results were remarkable. Mean knowledge scores rose from 9.53 to 12.00 out of 13, a Cohen’s d of 1.72, which by conventional standards qualifies as a very large effect. Attitude scores climbed from 4.29 to 4.81 on a five-point scale, an even larger effect of d = 1.93, with both paired comparisons statistically significant at p < 0.001. Notably, the largest knowledge gains appeared in programmatic domains that textbooks rarely cover in operational depth: understanding of District AIDS Prevention and Control Units improved by 47.1 percent, and comprehension of bridge populations rose by 47.0 percent. The comparatively smaller gains in clinical content likely reflect a ceiling effect, since students arrived with solid baseline knowledge from prior coursework.

Exploratory qualitative responses, analyzed through inductive thematic analysis with dual independent coding and substantial inter-rater agreement of Cohen’s kappa = 0.82, revealed three dominant themes. In 89 percent of responses, students described enhanced practical understanding of how HIV services actually function, with one remarking that the sessions changed their view of challenges never covered in textbooks. Some 76 percent reported increased empathy and reduced stigma, one student reflecting that hearing about real struggles with discrimination made them grasp how much a future doctor’s attitude matters. Another 68 percent expressed new appreciation for the sheer complexity of implementing a national AIDS control program, particularly the difficulty of reaching high-risk populations while maintaining quality across settings. The authors are careful to note that these self-reported perceptions contextualize, but cannot causally explain, the quantitative improvements, and that social desirability bias cannot be excluded.

Why might watching a peer interview a counselor outperform conventional lectures? The researchers point to the identification effect: observers learn most powerfully from models perceived as similar in competence and stage of learning, and a fellow student fits that description better than a professor. Peer-mediated formats may also lower defensive reactions, which is especially consequential when the subject is stigma and discrimination, topics that can provoke discomfort and resistance in a lecture hall. Meanwhile, the expert interviewers preserved the authenticity and fidelity of frontline knowledge, including candid narratives about patients’ lived experiences. The authors suggest that these indirect narratives appeared to evoke empathy-building effects similar to those documented for direct intergroup contact, even though students never met people living with HIV themselves.

The study has clear limitations that the authors acknowledge candidly. It lacked a control group, was conducted at a single institution with a homogeneous student population, measured attitudes by self-report, and assessed outcomes only immediately after the intervention, leaving long-term retention and behavioral change unknown. Still, the magnitude of the effects, the validated instruments, and the systematic qualitative procedures give the findings unusual weight for an educational study. The team calls for randomized controlled trials against alternative teaching methods, structured qualitative work to unpack the mechanisms of vicarious learning, longitudinal follow-up, and replication across other institutions and stigmatized health topics. If those follow-ups hold up, the message for medical educators is compelling: when it comes to socially complex subjects like HIV, letting students take the microphone may teach the whole class more than any lecture, and at a fraction of the logistical cost of one-on-one exposure.

Subject of Research: Peer-led expert interviews as vicarious experiential learning to improve HIV/AIDS knowledge and attitudes among Indian medical students

Article Title: Student led expert interviews improve knowledge and attitudes toward HIV and AIDS among medical students

Article References: Parmar, S., Das, L., Shah, U., Patel, G. M., Bharadva, N. A., & Dave, P. (2026). Student led expert interviews improve knowledge and attitudes toward HIV and AIDS among medical students. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1167. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02053-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02053-0

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, medical education, vicarious learning, experiential learning, student-led interviews, peer learning, National AIDS Control Program, stigma, Community Medicine, Bandura social learning theory, attitude change, India

The concept of risk of social exclusion sits at the heart of the study. The researchers define it as a multidimensional construct encompassing economic, social, cultural, health and other aspects of disadvantage and deprivation that can affect a child’s present life and development as well as future life opportunities in adulthood. Crucially, the framework rejects the idea that any single characteristic of a child or their environment determines an unfavorable outcome on its own. Instead, disadvantage emerges from the interaction of multiple risk factors and protective factors present in the child’s individual characteristics and surroundings. This analytical lens differs from, and complements, the broader principle of inclusion: while inclusion is a normative orientation toward equitable participation for all children, the risk-of-social-exclusion perspective identifies specific, potentially cumulative configurations of disadvantage that inclusive practices must be equipped to address. For professional development, this distinction matters because recognizing intersecting risks allows a more differentiated understanding of the knowledge and support teachers actually require.

The scale of the problem is considerable. International research cited in the study suggests that roughly twelve percent of children are exposed to at least two different risks by the time they start school, while a representative Croatian study of children aged five to seven found that twenty percent were at risk of social exclusion. Estimates vary depending on whether teachers or parents make the assessment, with parents reporting somewhat greater exposure. Against this backdrop, the stakes of early childhood education are high: the European Council has emphasized that high-quality early childhood education and care is an essential tool for fighting inequality and educational poverty, capable of preventing early skills gaps and breaking intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. Yet paradoxically, children at risk of social exclusion are more often enrolled in less effective programs than their peers, and the professional needs of the practitioners who teach them remain insufficiently documented.

To fill this gap, the research team, working within the Croatian Science Foundation project MORENEC, conducted semi-structured interviews averaging forty-five minutes with teachers working with children aged five to six. The institutions were purposively selected to capture variation across geography, community size, founder type and institutional scale, spanning nine of Croatia’s twenty-one counties, six boroughs and nine cities, nine public and six private settings, and sizes ranging from two to forty-five educational groups. All participants were female and gave written informed consent. The analysis followed the inductive thematic analysis procedure developed by Braun and Clarke, with three researchers independently familiarizing themselves with the data, generating initial codes and searching for themes before jointly reviewing, defining and naming them. Coding was performed in NVIVO12, and harmonization on a sample of five interviews achieved at least ninety-five percent agreement between the authors.

The first major finding concerns the sheer breadth of risks teachers encounter daily. Among risks arising from children’s own characteristics, developmental difficulties dominated, with speech and language difficulties the most frequently mentioned, followed by behavioral issues ranging from aggression and vulgarity to profound social withdrawal. Risks stemming from family circumstances included divorce, poverty, adoption, neglect and abuse, and these often co-occurred in layered combinations. One teacher described a girl whose parents went through a bitter divorce, who then moved to a new kindergarten and lost her familiar environment, whose father was subsequently killed, and who was only now beginning to show the emotional fallout in the form of sadness, confusion and emerging aggression. A third cluster of risks related to cultural minority identities, including children of Ukrainian refugees, children of Filipino or Albanian parents who did not speak Croatian, Roma children, and children from religious minorities. The diversity and co-occurrence of these risks, the authors note, point to the complexity of the situations teachers are expected to navigate in everyday practice.

When it came to the support available for professional development, a clear pattern emerged: teachers rely overwhelmingly on resources within their own institutions. The most valued forms of support were shared reflection between the two teachers who work with the same group of children, peer learning in communities of practice, and coaching and consultation provided by the pedagogues, psychologists and educational rehabilitation specialists employed in kindergartens. Teachers described daily exchanges of experience in small kindergartens, joint problem-solving with colleagues, and experts who observe a child interacting with the group and then discuss strategies with the teaching team. Yet this picture was far from universal. Several teachers reported a lack of collaboration, colleagues withholding information, expert help that arrives too late or goes no further than a formal meeting with minutes, and institutions missing specialists such as speech therapists or special needs experts entirely. The variation suggests that different organizational cultures prevail across Croatian kindergartens, some functioning as loosely coupled institutions where professional exchange is sporadic rather than systematic.

Support from outside the institution exists but is unevenly distributed. External experts such as speech therapists, psychologists, social workers and social pedagogues occasionally visit, and the national Education and Teacher Training Agency organizes workshops, seminars and trainings, as do universities, non-governmental organizations and bodies like UNICEF. Some teachers described constructive sessions on sensorimotor disorders or modules completed at a faculty of education and rehabilitation sciences. Others reported collaborating with social welfare centers or faculties of education. But a substantial number reported no collaboration at all with the local community or external services, and even enthusiastic participants noted that the volume of support falls short of growing demand. The content of external provision also skews heavily toward children with developmental difficulties, leaving teachers of children facing poverty, family breakdown or minority-related risks largely without targeted training.

The third research question, concerning teachers’ own definitions of their professional development needs, produced perhaps the most actionable findings. On the content side, teachers wanted help understanding concepts of inclusion and social exclusion, practical skills for timely recognition of risk and for supporting children’s socio-emotional development, strategies for handling aggression, tantrums and grief, knowledge about autism spectrum disorders, giftedness and speech and language difficulties, culturally informed approaches to working with Roma and migrant families, and, significantly, communication skills for engaging the parents of vulnerable children, whom several teachers identified as the weakest link in their practice. On the form side, the preferences were unambiguous: small-group workshops, interactive sessions combining a theoretical basis with the sharing of concrete experiences, mentoring and coaching in which experts model their work with real children, and self-directed learning through professional literature. Large-group lectures were explicitly rejected as a waste of time, with one teacher noting she could read the content of an hour-long lecture herself and decide what to apply.

This rejection of lectures carries particular irony, because lectures are the dominant format offered by the national agency responsible for in-service professional development, and most Croatian teachers participate in formal programs only one day a year or less. The study’s discussion situates this mismatch within international evidence: meta-analytic findings indicate that effective professional development programs rely on workplace coaching, combine workshops and lectures, and last forty-five to sixty hours, whereas Croatian provision is characterized by short one-day sessions focused on general pedagogical competences. The authors frame the results through the Who, What and How components of professional development models, and through the tension between outside-in learning, in which expertise is delivered by external authorities, and inside-out learning, in which professionals take responsibility for their own growth. Notably, the teachers expressed both: they craved specialist knowledge and modelling when facing situations that exceeded their competence, while simultaneously embracing peer reflection, learning communities and personal investment in professional literature.

The implications extend well beyond Croatia. The study argues that effective continuing professional development for work with children at risk of social exclusion must be practice-oriented, embedded in professional collaboration, and responsive to context-specific challenges, combining external expertise with the professional learning that happens inside institutions. Responsibility cannot rest with individual teachers alone; institutions must build organizational cultures that support shared reflection, learning communities and access to multidisciplinary expertise, while providers should shape external programs around the needs teachers actually encounter. The authors acknowledge limitations, including the absence of quality indicators in the interview protocol, potential interviewer effects from the nine-person research team, purposive rather than representative sampling, and reliance on self-reported experience rather than observed practice. Still, in a field where twenty percent of children carry risks that their teachers feel unequipped to meet, the message resonates far beyond the kindergarten walls: the professionals closest to vulnerable children are not asking for more lectures, but for the time, trust and collegial structures to learn from each other in the middle of real, messy, everyday practice.

Subject of Research: Continuing professional development of early childhood education and care teachers working with children at risk of social exclusion in Croatia

Article Title: In-service ECEC teachers’ professional development aimed at educating children at risk of social exclusion

Article References: Domović, V., Drvodelić, M., & Bouillet, D. (2026). In-service ECEC teachers’ professional development aimed at educating children at risk of social exclusion. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1164. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02205-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02205-2

Keywords: early childhood education and care, continuing professional development, social exclusion, in-service teacher training, Croatia, inclusive education, peer learning, coaching, thematic analysis, educational inequality, teacher collaboration, at-risk children

The research, conducted by Juan A. Sepulveda and Ariane Luttecke Anders at the Escuela de Tecnología Médica of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, was published in BMC Medical Education. The pair set out to answer two questions: whether participation in an asynchronous clinical case discussion forum was associated with better academic performance in an undergraduate ocular semiology course, and how students actually perceived the experience. Their approach was an exploratory observational mixed-methods design, combining quantitative correlation analysis with a qualitative thematic analysis of student responses.

Semiology occupies a peculiar position in the health sciences curriculum. It is the discipline that transforms textbook knowledge into clinical reasoning, teaching students to elicit and interpret physical signs. Yet it is notoriously difficult to teach, because it requires the simultaneous integration of foundational science with the messy realities of disease presentation. In many programs, including the one studied here, semiology is delivered before students have any clinical exposure, which makes the abstraction even harder to overcome. Educators have long experimented with case-based learning to give students a taste of clinical thinking in a controlled setting, and online forums extend that idea by allowing discussion to unfold over days rather than in a single lecture hall session.

In the implementation studied, students in the ocular semiology course took part in a forum-based learning activity built around clinical cases. The asynchronous format meant that participants could read a case, post their interpretations, respond to classmates and revisit the thread at their own pace. This design taps into well-established principles of self-directed and peer-based learning: students must actively construct differential explanations, defend them in writing and evaluate alternative viewpoints, all of which are thought to strengthen clinical reasoning more than passive listening does.

On the quantitative side, the researchers examined the correlation between how much students participated in the forum and their final course grades. They found a modest positive correlation, with a Spearman coefficient of 0.36, a 95 percent confidence interval running from 0.013 to 0.65 and a p-value of 0.048. In plain terms, students who engaged more with the forum tended, on average, to score somewhat higher in the course. The result just crossed the conventional threshold for statistical significance, but the margin was thin.

That thin margin mattered. When the authors ran sensitivity analyses, excluding either students who were repeating the course or those who were exceptionally active in the forum, the association between participation and grades lost its statistical significance. This is a crucial methodological point. Small samples in single-course studies are easily skewed by a handful of outliers, and the fact that the correlation dissolved under these checks means the quantitative evidence should be treated as suggestive rather than conclusive. It also raises the familiar chicken-and-egg question: motivated students may simply participate more and perform better for reasons that have nothing to do with the forum itself.

The qualitative arm of the study relied on a study-specific, non-validated questionnaire of six open-ended questions exploring student perceptions. Only six students responded, a small number that the authors themselves flag as a limitation. Thematic analysis of those responses revealed a generally positive view of the forum as a complementary activity for clinical subjects. Students saw value in discussing cases with peers outside scheduled class time and appreciated the opportunity to practice clinical thinking in a low-pressure environment.

At the same time, the respondents were not shy about proposing changes. They suggested that future implementations include structured feedback from instructors, so that participants know whether their reasoning is on track, and a small grade component to incentivize meaningful engagement. Both proposals address a well-known weakness of voluntary online discussions: without external motivation or timely expert input, participation tends to cluster among a few enthusiastic students while the rest lurk or drop out entirely. The students’ feedback thus aligns neatly with broader findings in the e-learning literature on how to sustain engagement in asynchronous formats.

The authors conclude that a virtual discussion forum may be a useful strategy for supporting self-directed and peer-based learning in ocular semiology, but they are careful to temper that conclusion. The quantitative association was not robust in sensitivity analyses, and the qualitative findings rested on a very small number of respondents, so the results should be interpreted cautiously. What the study does offer is a realistic picture of what a modest educational intervention can and cannot demonstrate: a plausible signal, honest uncertainty and a clear roadmap for better-designed follow-up studies with larger samples, validated instruments and controlled comparisons.

For educators in optometry, medical technology and the wider health sciences, the takeaways are practical. Asynchronous case forums are inexpensive, scalable and compatible with courses that must teach clinical reasoning before clinical placements begin. They appear to be accepted by students as a complement, not a replacement, for traditional teaching. And their measurable impact on grades remains an open question that future research, ideally with the structured feedback and light grading incentives the Chilean students themselves requested, will need to settle. The study received no external funding and was approved by the university’s bioethics and biosafety committee, with informed consent obtained and data anonymized.

Subject of Research: Asynchronous case-based discussion forums in undergraduate ocular semiology education

Article Title: Teaching ocular semiology through asynchronous case-based discussion: a forum-based learning experience

Article References: Sepulveda, J. A., & Luttecke Anders, A. (2026). Teaching ocular semiology through asynchronous case-based discussion: a forum-based learning experience. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10508-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10508-z

Keywords: ocular semiology, medical education, asynchronous learning, discussion forum, case-based learning, clinical reasoning, e-learning, optometry, health professions education, peer learning, student engagement, mixed methods

The research team, led by Edward Afum Banahene and Enoch Kwame Tham-Agyekum of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, with collaborators at the University of Pretoria, Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere University of Agriculture and Technology, the University of Cape Coast, and the Malawi University of Science and Technology, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which communication channels actually move farmers from awareness to action? Climate variability in Ghana—erratic rainfall, prolonged dry spells, and progressive soil degradation—continues to undermine agricultural productivity and food security. Climate-resilient agricultural practices, ranging from drought-tolerant and early-maturing crop varieties to intercropping, conservation tillage, agroforestry, organic manure application, rainwater harvesting, cover cropping, and the use of weather forecasts, have been promoted for years. Yet adoption remains low and inconsistent, despite growing policy support.

The researchers argue that the bottleneck is not the existence of technologies but the communication mechanisms that carry knowledge of them. Farmers must be aware of a practice, understand how it works, and trust the source before they will implement it. Drawing on Diffusion of Innovations theory and the framework of Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems, the team compared multiple pathways within a single analytical framework: face-to-face extension, community radio, digital platforms and social media, mobile-based services, cooperatives and farmer organizations, peer learning networks, farmer field schools, demonstration plots, agricultural shows, participatory video, community theater, and village knowledge-sharing platforms. Crucially, they combined farmers’ perceptions of trust, accessibility, credibility, and convenience with measurable behavioral outcomes, and used multivariate statistics to control for socio-economic factors such as education, gender, farm size, income, and extension contact.

Methodologically, the study employed a descriptive, quantitative design. From a population of roughly 40,000 smallholder farmers in the municipality, a sample of 396 was drawn using Yamane’s formula at a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error. Two-stage sampling first purposively identified communities cultivating climate-sensitive crops, then randomly selected farmers from lists supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture and farmer-based organizations. Structured questionnaires with Likert-scale items were administered face-to-face in December 2025, with reliability confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha values between 0.78 and 0.81 across the constructs of accessibility, relevance, effectiveness, and trust. Ethical clearance was granted by KNUST’s Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, and participation was voluntary and anonymized.

The results paint a vivid picture of a communication landscape in which social embeddedness trumps broadcast reach. Cooperatives and farmer organizations emerged as the most frequently used pathway, with a mean usage score of 3.92 on a five-point scale, followed closely by community radio (3.77), digital platforms and social media (3.73), peer learning networks (3.73), and farmer-to-farmer communication (3.60). But frequency of use is not the same as influence. Spearman rank correlation analysis revealed that peer learning networks and farmer-to-farmer communication exhibited the strongest positive and statistically significant associations with nearly every climate-resilient practice measured. Peer learning networks correlated at 0.756 with intercropping, 0.714 with conservation tillage, 0.523 with organic manure application, and 0.479 with the use of climate information. Farmer-to-farmer communication showed similarly strong associations with intercropping (0.630), conservation tillage (0.606), mulching (0.565), and cover cropping (0.440).

These correlations, the authors argue, reflect the mechanics of social learning. Peer exchange allows direct observation of outcomes, experimentation, and feedback, reducing the uncertainty that surrounds new practices. Trust, shared norms, and cumulative experience shape decision-making in ways that one-way broadcasts cannot. Climate-resilient farming, in this view, is not a solitary undertaking but a collective one, embedded in social systems. Extension strategies that institutionalize peer-based learning—lead farmers, farmer champions, group-based experimentation—are therefore more likely to achieve sustainable and scalable resilience than top-down information delivery.

The study’s regression analysis added a socio-economic dimension. Farmer group membership significantly predicted the use of agricultural shows and exhibitions (β = 0.315, p < 0.05), community theater (β = 0.338, p < 0.05), and participatory video (β = 0.423, p < 0.05), suggesting that organized groups act as gateways to collective, experiential communication formats. Engagement in off-farm income activities significantly predicted farmer-to-farmer communication (β = 0.309, p < 0.05), indicating that time-constrained farmers gravitate toward fast, trusted peer exchanges rather than formal training sessions. Intriguingly, education, age, gender, farm size, and income were largely insignificant predictors of pathway use, hinting that in this setting, social dynamics matter more than individual human capital. A possible substitution effect also surfaced: farmers with frequent extension contact showed marginally lower use of community radio and digital media, suggesting imperfect integration between formal and informal information systems.

Not every finding flattered conventional wisdom. Farmer field schools and demonstration plots—long staples of agricultural extension—displayed significant negative correlations with adoption, including −0.327 for intercropping and −0.297 for conservation tillage. The authors attribute this to poor contextualization, infrequent delivery, didactic teaching styles, and time lags before benefits materialize. NGO and donor-funded groups showed weak negative effects, and climate adaptation networks were largely ineffective, likely lacking visibility, structure, and sustained engagement. Community radio, digital and social media, and participatory video showed low or insignificant correlations with actual adoption, reinforcing the argument that while mass media excels at awareness creation, it lacks the interactivity and specificity required for behavioral change. Mobile-based services occupied a middle ground, with moderate but consistent positive correlations, particularly with drought-tolerant varieties (0.161) and climate information use (0.212), positioning them as valuable tools for the knowledge and early decision stages of adoption.

Perception data reinforced the hierarchy of trust. Extension officers were the most trusted information actors (mean 4.25), followed by farmer networks and cooperatives (3.84), while trust in mobile applications (3.02) and social media (3.22) remained moderate—evidence that exposure does not automatically breed confidence. Farmers rated information clarity highly (4.05) and peer-to-peer interaction as especially effective for knowledge transfer (4.07), but field demonstrations (2.01) and climate adaptation networks (1.96) scored lowest, pointing to weak institutional embedding rather than intrinsic ineffectiveness. The study also identified barriers to adoption using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance, which confirmed significant consensus among respondents. Risk aversion and fear of yield loss ranked as the most critical constraint (mean rank 3.66), followed by lack of access to accurate and timely climate information, low education and technical knowledge, labor and financial constraints, distrust in information sources, and land tenure insecurity. Notably, language barriers ranked least significant, suggesting that most information in Techiman is already delivered in familiar local dialects.

The implications extend well beyond Ghana. The authors recommend scaling peer learning platforms, integrating timely and localized climate information into channels farmers already trust, developing visual, stepwise communication materials, providing financial and labor support mechanisms such as collective labor schemes and staggered input repayment, and delivering advice through credible local actors including opinion leaders and farmer representatives. They caution that the cross-sectional design limits causal inference and that self-reported data may carry recall and social desirability bias. Still, the central message is clear and potentially transformative for adaptation policy across Africa: psychological and informational barriers outweigh structural ones, and the most powerful communication technology in climate-smart agriculture may not be a smartphone or a radio transmitter at all, but the trusted voice of a fellow farmer standing at the edge of a demonstration field, describing what actually worked.

Subject of Research: The relationship between communication pathways and smallholder farmers' adoption of climate-resilient agricultural practices in Techiman Municipality, Ghana.

Article Title: Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana

Article References: Banahene, E. A., Tham-Agyekum, E. K., Ndosi, J., Ankuyi, F., & Nyengere, J. (2026). Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Keywords: climate-resilient agriculture, communication pathways, smallholder farmers, peer learning, Ghana, adoption, agricultural extension, climate information, farmer organizations, diffusion of innovations, Techiman, risk aversion