School practitioners' receptivity to reform influences the success of policy implementation. In Taiwan, the Ministry of Education launched a curriculum reform in 2019. To determine how to enhance school agency for the policy, we explored the individual and contextual factors affecting receptivity to the new curriculum. With a survey design, this…

Purpose: The importance of teacher leadership in enhancing school outcomes is recognized, but there remains a scarcity of research addressing the conditions for principals to nurture such leadership. This study examined how school contextual factors, i.e. faculty trust and academic emphasis, moderate the impact of principals' distributed…

This study integrated environmental issues as the initial problem to explore the process of problem-solving of high school students and proposes the concept of environmental problem-solving (EPS) to probe the interaction between high school students' scientific performance and EPS strategies. There were 139 high school students in Taiwan who…

STEM integration has attracted considerable attention in educational research, yet there has been a dearth of research exploring how STEM integration is perceived and implemented in regular school settings. The purposes of the study were to explore Taiwanese junior secondary teachers' conceptions of STEM integration with regard to their practices,…

Losing contact with nature has become a serious concern in recent years, not only because it depletes children and adolescents' physical health and well-being, but also because it creates apathy towards natural environments. Most past research has developed scales to measure adult's connection with nature (CWN), leaving adolescents' CWN a less…

Digital learning has become an inevitable trend with many benefits for students' learning performance and motivation. However, Virtual Reality, a pervasive mode of digital learning nowadays, has incurred ambivalence among teachers over the years due to its high cost and other technical concerns. Panoramic image VR (PIVR) is a cost-efficient…

Are we having high school students in different tracks be equally knowledgeable, concerned about, and active for the environment while they learn different curricula that suit their aptitudes? 798 students of academic high schools and 751 students of technical high schools in Taiwan participated in a survey of their environmental literacy and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among homework time, homework frequency, and learning achievements of Taiwanese students. Applying a 2-level hierarchical linear modeling on the TIMSS 2007 and 2011 data, our findings were as follows: (1) Within the context of TIMSS 2007 and 2011 students, the frequency of mathematics…

While inquiry-based pedagogy is expected to prepare students well for their future life and work in the modern world, research indicates that teachers still prefer the more traditional lecture-based teaching practices. To explore better the issues underpinning the adoption of inquiry-based teaching, this study hypothesized that inquiry-based…

As teacher well-being is impacted by the leadership ability of school management, which helps establish trust and cooperation among the teaching faculty, it is an important subject of research. Therefore, this study aims to explore how the authentic leadership of school principals impacts (1) the teacher-school relationship (based on…

Psychometrically sound and practical measures of emotional intelligence of school principals, psychological climate, and teacher motivation were developed. The aim of this study was to explore the relationships and effects among these variables and to compare the differences between high school and vocational high school, as well as public and…

During the worldwide pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 pandemic), online learning is increasingly vital for students to learn at home, and online learning platforms provide learning opportunities to students. The Junyi Academy online platform is an online learning platform that both helps lower-achieving students review lessons and…

This study examined changes of test anxiety under the reform of the examination system in Taiwan. We sampled 46,361 Grade 9 students in Taiwan for 9 consecutive years starting from 2011 to collect data on their test anxiety, cram school attendance frequency, and academic achievement. Students' test anxiety level was compared between three periods:…

Scholars generally agree that financial deprivation negatively affects students' educational outcomes. However, while absolute levels of resources are important, individuals' perceived relative economic wellbeing also shape their educational outcomes. This article asks whether attending school with peers from comparably richer families is related…

Aim and background: This study investigated the effects of information and communication technology (ICT) use patterns, moderated by socioeconomic status (SES), on science and mathematics achievements. This investigation aims to address the issue of whether ICT use has 'conditioned' (linear and quadratic) effects on achievements with SES as social…