Strategies to engage students in learning, minimise educational inequality and improve teacher professionalism

Abstract

In this issue, there is a focus on three aspects – educational equality, engaging students in the classroom and improving teachers’ professional knowledge, which are necessary to enhance students’ learning performance. As teachers build their professionalism through teaching and attending professional development courses, educational researchers should therefore aim to discover the needs of teachers and design quality teacher professional development using effective strategies to help them in building professional competencies. Additionally, the students’ role in building a learning environment tends to be less prominent and passive, as students tend to receive teachers’ teaching and are “shaped” by the educational system (Könings et al., 2014), showing less engagement in learning. However, students’ learning attitude and behaviours also determine the learning outcome. Therefore, the cooperation between teachers and students is essential to enhance students’ learning. The articles in this issue suggest various strategies to promote students’ engagement, improve teacher professionalism, and reduce educational equality, for enhancing students’ learning. The first article in this issue by Serrano and Danya (2022) illustrates the relationship between students’ overuse of mobile devices and students’ procrastination in academic activities and how mindfulness can serve as a mediating variable between students’ usage of mobile devices and students’ academic performance. This research article proposes that overuse of mobile devices and apps leads to the academic procrastination. Students intentionally delay doing academic-related activities regardless of serious consequences, due to using their mobile devices. The delay of doing academic work has a huge relationship with declined academic performance. Since the procrastination in schoolwork is due to the excessive attention to mobile devices, mindfulness is introduced to divert the attention from mobiles to academic work. The current research involves 233 psychology undergraduate students. The students self-reported their habits on mobile usage, mindful attention, and procrastination on schoolwork. As expected, the problematic social media usage has a significant positive relationship with academic procrastination. Interestingly, the problematic social media usage has no relationship with academic performance. However, mindfulness does have a mediative role between the problematic social media usage and academic procrastination. The current research points out that mindfulness may be useful to reduce students’ procrastination in schoolwork and educators should consider implementing mindfulness education in the curriculum to reduce students’ use of mobile devices and minimize students’ procrastination in academic work. Teachers’ guidance is a pillar for students to gain sufficient knowledge in classrooms. Therefore, various teaching modes are developed to maximize the knowledge students can gain. For instance, hands-on learning is essential in science education. Hands-on learning and teaching were stemmed from constructivism. The constructivism argues LEARNING: RESEARCH AND PRACTICE 2022, VOL. 8, NO. 2, 79–83 https://doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2022.2110364