Wenlong Song

Based on social cognitive career theory, this study aims to explore the mechanisms influencing the participation of Chinese university professional course teachers in career education, with a specific focus on the roles of self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and career goals. Employing a mixed-methods approach combining quantitative and qualitative research within this theoretical framework, the study systematically analyzes key variables including self-efficacy, personal capital, institutional constraints, and personality traits. The results show that: teachers’ self-efficacy is positively correlated with their perceived capability to implement career education; personal capital enhances motivation to participate, while administrative and research demands constitute significant barriers; the construction of value regarding the relevance of career education strengthens intrinsic motivation that transcends formal institutional requirements; recognition of professional goals improves teaching engagement, particularly among teachers with perfectionist, helper, and achiever personality traits. The findings confirm the applicability of social cognitive career theory in the Chinese higher education context and emphasize the importance of intrinsic and personal factors in motivating teachers. The study provides policy implications for promoting comprehensive engagement in career education: there is a need to reduce administrative and research burdens while leveraging teachers’ values and personal characteristics. This research extends social cognitive career theory to the Chinese educational context, revealing culturally specific predictors of teacher motivation and offering a nuanced understanding of how individual and systemic factors interact to shape engagement in career education.

This article examines how digital media discourse mediated Germany’s secularization between 2020 and 2024. Drawing on a corpus from Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, and other outlets, this study combines text mining, sentiment profiling, and frame analysis. Mentions of “faith” and “religion” rose sharply, while reporting stabilized around a neutral tone with a slight positive drift. Coverage centered on public order and institutional roles, relocating religion from moral authority to a civic function. Time-series evidence shows that peaks in discourse preceded increases in non-affiliation by about two months, suggesting a spiral relation in which media both mirror and accelerate secularization. The analysis identifies a three-stage mediating mechanism: communicative reconfiguration, which decentralizes religious narration; cognitive shaping, where neutral framing encourages functional evaluation; and feedback reinforcement, where expanding secular discourse normalizes non-religion. Generational and regional contrasts sharpen this process. Nearly 60% of Germans aged 18–30 identify as unaffiliated, and Eastern regions display both higher secularization and more critical frames than the West. This study contributes empirical evidence for how digital discourse structures belief change in a high-penetration society and extends secularization and mediatization theories by showing how discursive circulation links structural transformation with individual cognition in the digital age.

This study explores the transformative role of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping religious cognition, with particular emphasis on its implications for religious education. By examining the biases inherent in AI-generated content, this research highlights how these biases influence user perceptions and interactions with diverse religious teachings. Through experimental frameworks and pre/post-interaction evaluations, the study reveals that generative AI not only reflects but amplifies cognitive biases, affecting users’ understanding of religious doctrines and cultural diversity. The findings underscore the potential of generative AI to act as a double-edged sword in religious education: enhancing personalized learning and cross-cultural understanding while risking the reinforcement of prejudice. These insights call for ethical guidelines and oversight mechanisms in deploying generative AI within religious contexts. This research contributes to the growing discourse on AI ethics and its pivotal role in shaping inclusive and unbiased religious education in the digital era.

The effectiveness of digital resources in teaching remains a widely debated issue, particularly in the field of physical education. This article aims to examine the impact of digital resource learning on the learning outcomes of undergraduate physical education courses, with a specific focus on the role of students’ awareness and competence in using digital resources. Using a questionnaire survey method, the study analyzed data from 310 undergraduate students from five universities in China. The results showed that digital use ability, use awareness and resource environment had a significant positive effect on satisfaction with learning outcomes. Digital usage awareness fully mediated the effect of digital learning confidence on learning outcome satisfaction and partially mediated the effect of digital usage ability and resource environment on learning outcome satisfaction. These findings suggest that enhancing students’ digital usage awareness and learning confidence can significantly improve learning outcomes in physical education courses. The article recommends that educators better utilize and refine digital resources in teaching and enhance students’ digital learning skills and awareness to improve the effectiveness of physical education teaching. This study enriches the content of the digital teaching model, reveals the intrinsic mechanisms of how digital resource learning affects learning outcomes, and provides new insights and methods for improving the teaching effectiveness of physical education courses.

The China-Europe Railway Express, also known as the China-Europe Freight Train, is a flagship initiative of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Since its inception in 2011, it has linked over 200 cities in China and Europe, establishing itself as a critical logistics channel. This study employs quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine seven years of news reports from China Daily, the Middle East News Agency (MENA), and PR Newswire. Using the LexisNexis news database and AntConc software, the study explores high-frequency keywords, collocations, and clusters within the corpus to identify reporting trends and biases. The findings reveal that Chinese media coverage significantly exceeds that of international outlets, which frequently contextualize the railway within the broader BRI framework, indicating limited global familiarity. Moreover, Chinese media focus on the railway’s economic benefits, whereas foreign outlets highlight specific hub cities and development projects.The study recommends that Chinese media adopt a more targeted approach, emphasizing individual routes, specific cargo types, and localized benefits to enhance global understanding and support for both the BRI and the China-Europe Railway Express.

This paper examines the mechanisms of differentiated discursive disciplining for immigrants of different religious backgrounds in the French media. Based on a sample of 120 articles on immigration in the French mainstream media, textual analyses and comparisons were conducted. Results show that influenced by religious factors, the French media use secularism as a tool to portray completely different images of immigrants through different discursive logics. Muslim immigrants present a paradoxically biased negative image in the French media discourse as a collection of invaders and the disciplined. In contrast, the media image of Ukrainian immigrants of Orthodox Christian background is positive on the whole, with a certain degree of deliberateness in the details of its construction. The difference in the symbolic characterization between Catholicism and Islam enables the exclusionary media discourse against Muslim immigrants. The paper also discusses French media discourse flaws and policy dilemmas. The logic of French media discourse is paradoxical in its inability to maintain an intact secularist identification and to effectively influence political issues to the detriment of promoting immigrant integration.

This article offers a new and easily overlooked perspective on today's global geopolitics that looks beyond Western-centrism. There are many strengths in this article, and I won't list them all. With regard to this article, perhaps the following poin...

As the country hosting the most significant number of refugees in Europe, Germany’s Merkel government’s refugee policy has been repeatedly adjusted and plagued by inconsistencies and management failures. What factors have influenced the formation of the Merkel government’s refugee policy and its two shifts? The traditional rational decision-making model does not effectively explain government decisions’ motivation in complex challenges. This article develops a framework for analyzing “bounded rational decision-making”. It identifies the three factors that influenced the Merkel government’s refugee policy: (a) strict border controls, (b) welcome culture, and (c) welcome culture under restrained policies. It explains the process and logic of their development. Based on the theory of “bounded rational decision making”, the article examines the “key events and problem identification”, “goal selection”, “national interests”, and “political psychology”. We found that in the early stages of the refugee crisis, (a) public opinions and pressure, (b) the pursuit of a positive national image, and (c) a shift in the leader’s psychology led Merkel to shift away from a pragmatic and rational course. These factors led to the first shift in German refugee policy from “hesitation” to a “welcoming culture”. At the end of 2015, however, the shortcomings of the irrational policy were quickly revealed, and the frequency of refugee-related social problems reversed German public opinion, forcing Merkel’s government to seek a balance between humanitarianism and national interests. As a result, refugee policy was adjusted for the second time, returning to a strict refugee examination system. The development of the Merkel government’s refugee policy exposed the shortcomings of the traditional crisis decision-making model. Moreover, it provided a new perspective for rethinking the governance of the refugee crisis.