Journal of Educational Sciences

  Complete Edition

  Content

  The use of digital storytelling to address school-related burnout among 10-11 grade students
Anita Lanszki, Nóra Kunos

Abstract
The paper presents how digital storytelling was used as an empowerment tool among high school students diagnosed with school-related burnout (N = 13) in Hungary. The aim of applying digital storytelling was to change students’ time perspective, which was measured with Stanford Time Perspective Inventory before and after the digital storytelling intervention. The creative method allowed students to express their personal school experiences on verbal and visual levels while using digital technologies. The outcomes of the digital storytelling process were first-person video narratives, which presented the school career and self-reflections of students in a very expressive and touching way. Students’ temporal profile changed after the digital storytelling intervention; they became future-oriented. In most cases, students reflected on their past and present experiences at school, and they found a solution and developed a perspective for their future educational career. Digital storytelling as a complex arts-based method had a positive effect on students. While working on the project, the change of students’ time perspectives (Zimbardo & Boyd, 2008) from past-negative and present-fatalistic to future-oriented was measured, which helped all the participants find a way to be more determined and optimistic.

Keywords: school-related burnout, digital storytelling, multimedia technology, time perspective, self-expression

  Raising intercultural awareness through short stories in EFL classes
Pınar Tural, Feryal Cubukcu

Abstract
Teaching culture is an indispensable part of language teaching as language and culture are intertwined. Awareness of one’s own culture and the target culture is necessary to be able to communicate efficiently. To raise intercultural awareness among EFL learners, literary sources can be a great source as they are authentic and reflect cultural elements. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of short stories on intercultural awareness. In this quasi-experimental study, an experimental and a control group were chosen among B1 level of EFL students. The research was carried out in the School of Foreign Languages at a university in the Western part of Turkey. In a six-week implementation period, the experimental group (18 students) read short stories with cultural themes from different cultures. On the other hand, the control group (19 students) read nonliterary texts again with cultural themes in them. In the study, quantitative data was collected through the Intercultural Awareness Questionnaire prepared by Zorba (2019), and the questionnaire was implemented as a pretest and posttest to gather data. The findings of the study showed that there was no meaningful change in the intercultural awareness of the study group before and after the implementation in terms of intercultural awareness. Furthermore, no significant difference was observed between the experimental and control groups. In the study, it was also concluded that gender and international experience did not lead to a difference in terms of intercultural awareness of participants. The overall conclusion that can be made from this study is that intercultural awareness focus in language teaching may ameliorate the language competence of learners, but it might take time to increase awareness among learners, so institutions should prioritize increasing awareness of EFL learners with various activities.

Keywords: Intercultural, language learning, short story.

  The role of critical motivation in the development of altruistic behaviour in youth
Gabriela Monica Assante, Mariana Momanu

Abstract
The main objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between critical motivation, altruism and peer caring as the moral foundation of social life. Although the direct relationship between critical consciousness and prosocial involvement has for some time entered the realm of educational research, the mechanisms by which the components of critical consciousness influence behaviour are not clearly defined. Therefore, we investigated the mediating role of the tendency to protect others as a moral foundation in the relationship between critical motivation and altruistic behaviour. The study involved 308 young people aged 18–24. Participants were recruited from various urban high schools and universities, and invited to complete a set of questionnaires. The results emphasise the importance of critical motivation as a predictor of altruistic behaviour. Moreover, the data indicate that the tendency to protect others mediated the effects of critical motivation regarding altruistic behaviour. These results provide a clearer perspective on the process by which critical motivation can influence the behaviour and involvement of young people in different social contexts. The results emphasise especially the importance of developing and stimulating critical motivation in schools in order to increase the active involvement of young people in the current social context.

Keywords:critical consciousness; critical motivation; youth; altruistic behaviour; moral foundation

  Impact of the mentoring relationship on the development of talented students – a narrative review
Tina Vrabie, Carmen Mihaela Crețu

Abstract
In order to provide quality instruction for students, to cultivate free and entrepreneurial spirits, the educational system needs teachers capable of acting as mentors for their students; inspiring them, teaching them about moral values and helping them develop their cognitive and career-orientation skills. Through the impact that it has on the development of students in general and on the talented students in particular, mentoring is one of the most appropriate strategies for achieving this goal. This article is a narrative review of the studies identified in the literature that describe a series of mentoring programs especially designed for talented students, which have contributed to their development on the psychosocial and cognitive level, as well as on career orientation. Complete research articles related to mentoring programs for talented students were gathered from online database searches and needed to meet several criteria: (1) the program evaluated needed to involve mentoring as the practice has been defined like an ”ideal type” of mentoring in the literature (Grassinger, Porath, & Ziegler, 2010); (2) the study had to examine the impact of involvement in a mentoring program on the development of talented students on several levels: psychosocial, cognitive, career support; and (3) the sample used in the evaluation of the program needed to include the talented students that are more predisposed to benefit from a mentoring program: talented primary, gymnasium and high school students and twice-exceptional students (Goff & Torrance, 1999; Subotnik, Olszewski‐Kubilius, Khalid, & Finster, 2021). The results of this review underline the impact of the talented students’ involvement in a mentoring relationship on their development and the necessity for this type of programs to be sustained in an educational context, not only at an informal level but also through formal programs specifically designed and implemented for this purpose. The paper concludes by presenting a series of recommendations on how such programs can be effectively implemented at the educational institutions level.

Keywords:mentoring, development, talented students.

  A counselling model of career guidance for youth
Sanda Nicoleta Popescu

Abstract
The dynamics of the labour market are characterized by several important aspects such as: the emergence of new trades and the disappearance of others, the emergence of the phenomenon of technology, of the tendency to replace the human activity with the computerized activity in many fields, the replacement of office work with telework, the replacement of the physical space of professional activity with the virtual space. According to these considerations, the school should provide support to adolescents by applying counselling strategies in their choosing of a career. The novelty compared to the previous studies is that the present research provides a dynamic perspective in counselling adolescents on the approach of a career, which is based on a quadric-dimensional model, founded on four determining vectors for the career decision-making: identification of the problem, analysis of the individual profile, analysis of the socio-economic environment and projection of the career plan (involving the completion of some activities), which can be achieved over time whenever indecision or any other change occurs. The counselling model sets out an applicable approach whenever the adolescent faces fluctuating occupational interests against the background of social and economic uncertainties plus the prospect of a poor self-knowledge of their own resources but also an insufficient analysis provided by the school in relation to the labour market. This research is advancing the hypothesis that counselling and guidance services are supposed to be valued as important by most educational factors. From this perspective, in the descriptive study undertaken, we engaged the methodology of the questionnaire and observation and the results obtained reinforce the idea that school is the main factor that can determine the career success of the adolescent. The quadri-dimensional model of counselling the adolescents in choosing a career can be an effective tool in terms of the ratio of the results obtained from the application to the effort involved.

Keywords:model, career, decision, adolescents, guidance

  Teachers’ digital competences in the first educational policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in four countries
Mihaela Mitescu-Manea, Leyla Safta-Zecheria, Eszter Neumann, Valentina Bodrug-Lungu, Valentina Milenkova, Vladislava Lendzhova

Abstract
With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences – particularly those of teachers - were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers’ learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers’ learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the future.

Keywords:digital competences, teachers’ learning and professional development, emergency remote teaching.

  Autonomia copilului de vârstă mică. Repere pedagogice. Book review
Gina Florentina Tudorache, Mihaela Badea