Laurent Lima

With the evolution of distance and hybrid education in recent years, synchronous distance education has gained prominence as a mode of instruction. Recent studies have highlighted the challenges of student engagement in synchronous distance courses and the associated risks of academic disengagement. Consequently, addressing these concerns has become a primary focus within educational research. This paper uses the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method to investigate the impact of cooperative learning methods within synchronous distance education. Our objective was to provide insights into the current state of knowledge, identify gaps in the literature, and offer directions for future research and practice. We also look at the complexities of student engagement and retention in the context of synchronous distance learning, while exploring the potential of cooperative learning strategies to mitigate these challenges. Thanks to its examination of relevant studies, this review contributes to our understanding of effective pedagogical approaches in synchronous distance education from high school through to university, and provides valuable insights for educators and researchers striving to enhance student engagement and academic success in online learning environments.

Working in factories fashioning bricks by hand seems the epitome of hazardous child labor. Yet, efforts to remove children from this work have shown little success; impoverished families balance the value of their children’s contribution against the risks they see. Unfortunately, psychosocial impacts are often not visible, and are rarely taken into consideration when designing interventions. A comprehensive occupational health study of children working in brick factories included a module on psychosocial risks and impacts. This analysis reports on the Pakistan and Afghanistan portion of the study which was administered to 450 child brick workers and 486 controls, aged 11–17. Factorial ANOVAs confirmed that working in brick factories was the strongest predictor of respondent’s psychosocial health. However, they also identified subgroups of children that escape this prediction. Older girls, for example, actually felt better when working, compared with staying at home. Schooling had positive associations, especially in younger boys and adolescent girls. In fact, the results of this study showed that those who are at greatest psychosocial risk were girls who do not go to school. These findings underscore the importance of assessing psychosocial impacts and tailoring policy and interventions to specific gender and age categories of young workers.

Background: In academic contexts, teachers' judgements are central to instruction and have many consequences for students' self‐perceptions. Understanding the cognitive biases that may exist in teachers' judgements is thus of central importance. Aims: This paper presents two studies in which we aimed to investigate the presence of a halo effect in teachers' judgements (Study 1 and Study 2) and to clarify the conditions for the emergence of this halo effect by analysing the influence of judgement certainty (Study 2). A major contribution of these studies was to provide a new measure of the halo effect in order to achieve these goals. Sample(s): In the first study, 25 teachers and their 199 students were asked to complete the measures, while the second study sample was composed of 20 teachers and their 180 students. Method: To analyse the presence of the halo effect in teachers' judgements in the two studies, scholastic achievement was measured using various standardized French language tests. Teachers were asked to indicate, for each of their students, whether they thought the student would answer correctly or incorrectly for each item on the standardized tests. In Study 2, to analyse the influence of judgement certainty, the teachers were asked to indicate after each item how certain they were about their response. Results and discussion: The results of both studies revealed the presence of a halo effect in teachers' judgements for each measure used (i.e., comparison of correlations, factorial analyses, and the new measure comparing variance scores), as the teachers' judgements were more homogeneous than the students’ actual achievement levels. Furthermore, using the new measure, the second study revealed that high judgement certainty resulted in a stronger halo effect.

Transformations affecting higher education are manifold; amongst others one can mention the massification of higher education, trends towards privatization, and changing policy guidelines with a view to unification at the international level. The mobility phenomena accompanying all these transformations represent a challenge for researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, and students in the higher education field. In this article, we first define different types of mobility. Mobility, in its most obvious form, can be understood as geographical movement, national and international, of students and academics. However, the concept of mobility in higher education can also be understood as change in the course of a lifetime for an individual, or change, for an individual, in regard to social, economic, and cultural background. We focus on these two types of international and social mobility and shortly present the articles in this special issue. Finally, we pinpoint methodological considerations and theoretical implications of combining and/or articulating perspectives on international and social mobility in higher education.