SOE Faculty Members Gave Reports in the HKERA-APERA International Conference (2023)

On December 8-10, YANG Xi, Associate Professor and CUI Haili, Assistant Professor from the School of Education attended the sub-forum and gave reports in the HKERA-APERA International Conference (2023). The international conference was held from December 8th to 10th at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the theme is “Wellness, Engagement and Futures of Education in Post-Pandemic Societies: Global Perspectives and Local Initiatives”. This forum opened 40 parallel sub-forums, attracting thousands of people to sign up for participation.

On December 8th, Dr. CUI Haili participated in the sub-forum A5 "Teachers’ Well-Being" and gave a speech titled "How is the level of Social and Emotional Skills of Primary and Secondary School Teachers in growth mindset?---Analysis Based on SESS International Evaluation Data".Dr. CUI Haili and Professor Huang Zhongjing from the Faculty of Education of East China Normal University worked together finishing this paper. Her report started from the research background and raised research questions about the social and emotional skills of primary and secondary school teachers, which is the level of growth mindset, the differences, and whether different training can help improve the level of growth mindset. Based on the teacher survey data of the OECD international assessment of  adolescents’social and emotional skills, various econometric methods were used to examine the differences in growth mindset levels of primary and secondary school teachers with different characteristics in terms of social and emotional skills, as well as different stages (pre-service and in-service training),The differences in the effectiveness of social and emotional ability education to different degrees (different training durations) on individual the growth mindset of social and emotional skills.

The finding showing that, primary and secondary school teachers in Suzhou city generally possess a certain level of social and emotional skills growth mindset, that is, they believe that their social and emotional skills can be changed. Among them, compared to teachers under the age of 30 and with a master's degree or above, teachers aged 30-50 (accounting for half of the sample teachers) and teachers with a bachelor's degree or below have significantly lower levels of growth mindset of social and emotional skills. In terms of the impact of training on social and emotional skills and their development, whether it is pre-service education or on-the-job training, social and emotional skill education does not have a significant impact on the growth mindset of Chinese primary and secondary school teachers. After the sharing, Dr. CUI Haili communicated and discussed relevant issues with the attending teachers and students.

On December 10, Associate Professor Dr. YANG Xi participated in the sub-forum F5 "University Education" and gave an oral presentation on the topic of "A study on the impact of interdisciplinarity on research innovation for young talents in research teams of Chinese universities". This paper is the result of the undergraduate research training program (PRP) supervised by Professor YANG and completed by LIN Xinyue, an undergraduate student in Education Minor. The presentation showed that scientific innovation is an important driving force for China's economic development, and interdisciplinary research provides a breakthrough for the solution of major problems of national development. Although the construction of research teams in China's universities is paying more and more attention to interdisciplinary research, there is still some theoretical controversy about the relationship between interdisciplinarity and scientific innovation. Based on the theories of knowledge production modes and disciplinary tribes, the study summarizes the theoretical controversy of the impact of interdisciplinarity on research innovation. Furthermore, this study took the young talents of the national key laboratories in universities as the research object, and explored the relationship between the interdisciplinarity of young talents in university scientific research teams and the performance of scientific innovation. The disciplinary richness, disciplinary balance, and Brillouin index were used to reflect the interdisciplinarity of scientific research. It is found that interdisciplinarity has promoted the research performance of young talents in the stage of knowledge integration. However, in the knowledge diffusion stage, interdisciplinarity has no significant effect on the research output and high-quality publications of young talents. In both stages, interdisciplinarity has a significant negative effect on the average number of citations of young talents. In addition, the impact of interdisciplinarity on the scientific innovation performance of young talents varies among different disciplines. Based on the above findings, the study made several policy recommendations from the perspectives of individual academic development, team building, and interdisciplinary research policies. After the meeting, Dr. YANG discussed topics such as disciplinary differences in higher education and the development of research in interdisciplinary fields with students and faculty.

Written by YANG Xi and CUI Haili

Edited by CHEN Ruoxi