Maura Pilotti

Student populations from the Global South are often overlooked as contributors to mental health findings. A glaring instance of this imbalance is the underrepresentation of female students from a Middle Eastern country that has only recently emerged from a strict patriarchal system. When these women begin their university studies, challenges greatly intensify, with the freshman year being particularly arduous. Academic success relies on their ability to adapt to tasks whose cognitive demands have increased in novelty, complexity, and amount. It also relies on their ability to minimize gender-stereotype threats, which make women feel unwelcome in professional pursuits. As a result of these challenges, their well-being may be at risk. Within this context of competing demands, the present study offers a snapshot of female freshmen’s functioning at both the cognitive and emotive levels. Purposive sampling was utilized to select 1141 female freshmen from a Saudi Arabian English-medium university. Participants’ emotional and cognitive difficulties (anxiety and memory failures) and strengths (self-efficacy and high school grade point average [GPA]) were surveyed. In this study, STEM-bound and non-STEM-bound students differed in self-reported cognitive and emotional difficulties, but not in their current academic attainment as measured by first-year GPA. However, STEM and non-STEM students’ difficulties and strengths were differentially predictive of their first-year GPA. These findings suggest that for this underrepresented student group, the effectiveness of preparatory and remedial activities may rest on acknowledging that the academic attainment of STEM and non-STEM students has dissimilar contributors.

The present study focused on an underrepresented population of female undergraduate students from Saudi Arabia, a society that has only recently given women and men equal rights in education and employment. The country's economic sustainable development plan has made young women's educational attainment a critical constituent of its envisioned success. Yet, social media use among the youth has increased exponentially, leading to concerns. The study examined, through a mixed-methods approach, subject variables that might be differentially linked to academic attainment: social media use (as measured by the Bergen Social Media Addiction scale), self-efficacy (as measured by the General Self-Efficacy questionnaire), prospective and retrospective memory concerns (as measured by the Prospective and Retrospective Memory questionnaire). In regression analyses, problematic use of social media was associated with poor grade point average (GPA). More modestly, GPA decreased with retrospective memory concerns and increased with self-efficacy. Female undergraduate students held ostensibly contradictory beliefs on the relationship between social media usage and academic attainment. They viewed social media tools as useful rather than harmful to academic attainment or memory functioning, and even capable of broadening their self-efficacy. Conversely, they labeled the distractions that social media introduced in their lives as difficult to control. These findings suggest that workshops illustrating evidence of cognitive functioning under conditions of distraction may prevent students from minimizing the costs of problematic social media use.

Findings of educational science are too often defined by the contribution of student populations of the Global North. This imbalance is particularly notable in an understudied population of female first-year learners from a country that has only recently emerged from a strict patriarchal order. For these students, the freshman year is considerably challenging, as it requires countering persisting gender stereotypes. This dataset (https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KT8UTE) offers a snapshot of their functioning. It contains demographic information, self-reported memory functioning, anxiety, and self-efficacy. Data can enrich existing data sets, thereby contributing to the development of prediction models inclusive of human diversity, and, more broadly, to cross-cultural research.

The first year of college requires adjustments that are often described as cognitively and emotionally demanding, thereby potentially fostering symptoms of anxiety. It is particularly demanding for young female students (age range: 18-25) from a society emerging from patriarchy. Among this understudied population, the prevalence of symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is largely unknown. The present study examined the distribution of such symptoms, as well as the degree to which students subjectively perceived them as impairing academic and home activities and relationships (i.e., impact estimates). Then, students’ reports of prospective memory (PM) and retrospective memory (RM) slips were surveyed to determine the extent to which they could be differentially predicted by self-efficacy and GAD. Both prospective and retrospective memory slips increased with GAD symptomatology but were unrelated to either general or academic self-efficacy. T

Scholarship can be viewed as a space for teaching and learning. In the Arab Gulf, this space is inhabited by several modes of communication. A traditional one is Majlis (also named Diwaniya), which gives people opportunities to exchange knowledge and engage in critical thinking to solve problems. Exchanges may range from quotidian events to scholarly matters of interest to the community. They can give rise to genuine dialogue, thereby transforming the acquisition of knowledge and the decision‐making process that follows into participatory activities. The format gives rise to the emergence of instances of servant leaders whose thoughts and actions are meaningful to the community. In this sense, Majalis (plural form) embody both the traditional form of scholarship (acquiring specialized knowledge and circulating it among the few) and a more popular form in which the goal is to involve a broad array of people. In the digital age, some Majalis have moved online, broadening their reach. In this manuscript, the Majlis phenomenon is explained as a form of impactful and transparent scholarship for people from different walks of life. This type of knowledge exchange invites us to rethink the notion of audience and the privileging of text over speech.

Most research on the link between exam completion speed and performance has come from student populations of the Global North and is a few decades old. Within this body of research, little or no attention has been paid to the language (native or foreign) in which the exam is administered. In the present action research study, participants comprised a convenience sample of female undergraduate students from a country that has recently emerged from patriarchy. We investigated whether undergraduate students’ timing of submission of the final exam in a general education course can account for the grades they earn. We also examined whether students’ confidence in their academic abilities (i.e., a general disposition) or their subjective readiness for the final exam (i.e., a context-specific disposition) differentiates students who are early and late submitters. Participants were enrolled in a course that they judged to be challenging due to the material, instructional format, and language of delivery (English, the participants’ second language). The final exam comprised short-answer critical-thinking questions. In this study, early submitters received lower final exam grades than late submitters. Early and late submitters, however, did not differ in confidence (i.e., self-efficacy). Early submitters, but not late submitters, overestimated their preparation for the upcoming exam. The findings of this study highlighted the need for a culture of informed decision-making that tempers the impact of unrealistically optimistic predictions on choice behavior. In such a culture, students would face recurrent opportunities during the semester for self-assessment of their behavior during testing and guided reflection on its consequences.

For second-language freshmen enrolled in a topical course of the general education curriculum, writing anxiety can be an obstacle to desirable performance. A key component of writing anxiety is worrying, which depletes students’ working memory of the necessary resources to carry out writing. This study first examined the extent to which, before the final exam, students experienced second-language writing anxiety and particular worries. Then, it assessed whether these epiphenomena were related to one another and could account for poor performance. Participants belonged to an understudied population of female undergraduate students whose access to gender-equitable education is of recent making. Purposeful sampling yielded 203 English-Arabic bilingual speakers. Since most of the evidence about second-language writing anxiety had been collected from courses specifically devoted to writing, students were selected from a writing-intensive topical course of the general education curriculum taught in English. Before the final exam, students’ writing anxiety and worries were measured. Final exam performance was then collected. Female students were mainly worried about time and academic performance, and reported the most writing anxiety arising from appraisal concerns. At moderate levels, this type of writing anxiety and worrying predicted desirable final exam performance. In conclusion, appraisal concerns specific to writing or academic performance can propel effort in courses where the acquisition of topical knowledge is demonstrated through writing. Yet, the degree to which these epiphenomena are experienced may determine whether they operate as promoters or impediments. Thus, interventions intended to regulate students’ emotive reactions can optimize learning in such courses.