Purpose: In today's highly competitive global business environment, there is a growing demand for professionals who possess well-developed soft skills. Such abilities include flexibility, effective communication and other skills. Soft skills are personal attributes and qualities that are more closely related to the emotional side of human beings.…

Black men's experiences in education are often marked by isolation, imposter syndrome, and racial microaggressions. This qualitative case study, guided by the five enactments of Cross and Fhagen Smith's (2001) model of Black identity development, explored the experiences of 20 Black men doctoral students as they navigated and continually redefined…

Background: Integrating computational thinking (CT) into STEM education has recently drawn significant attention, strengthened by the premise that CT and STEM are mutually reinforcing. Previous CT-STEM studies have examined theoretical interpretations, instructional strategies, and assessment targets. However, few have endeavored to delineate the…

The Positive Youth Development Scale-Short Form (PYD-SF) is a 34-item questionnaire assessing the Five Cs model of PYD that has received little interest in contexts outside of the United States. This study aimed to validate the PYD-SF for use with older adolescents in a French-Canadian context, by testing the bifactor structure and examining its…

Purpose: Highly developed and agile learners who can clearly convey and call on their skills are sought in all walks of life. Diverse demand for these capacities has called attention to how the skills and knowledge gained during doctoral study can be conveyed, translated and leveraged in non-academic settings; however, the complex learning reality…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between life design and student leadership development at Bowling Green State University. Life design is a creative problem-solving framework that empowers students to apply design thinking mindsets and methods in their own lives to creatively solve problems (Burnett & Evans, 2016).…

While leader identity development (LID) and meaning making are interwoven and essential for student development, little research has explicitly explored their intersection. In this article, we briefly summarize the work of two research projects that explored the intersection of LID and meaning making, including a review of the findings that…

Stress levels are high among college students in the United States. Growth mindset and stress-is-enhancing mindset interventions offer ways to reduce stress, but minimal research has examined them. This study's aim was to examine the effect of mindset interventions on mindsets, stress, academic motivation, and responses to hypothetical academic…

This qualitative descriptive study examined the process of purpose development of nine (seven females, two males; M[subscript age] = 20.2, age range 18-21 years) college students who completed interviews in fall 2017 and spring 2019 at a private university. Across the two time points, participants engaged in an iterative process that led them to…

The number of college athletes in the US has gradually increased, and in the 2020-2021 academic year, a record high of approximately 480,000 athletes participated in NCAA sports (NCAA Research, 2024). Along with this growth, scholars have highlighted various factors influencing college athletes' career development (e.g., career maturity, athletic…

Despite its presence on many colleges and universities and substantial financial investment in higher education, very little research has explored whether and how participation in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) shapes college students' experiences and development. Using data from interviews with 20 cadets in one U.S. Army ROTC…

How do service learning and self-directed learning connect and what are the implications for early adolescent students? The authors explore both the service learning and self-directed learning literature and research to discover the connections between the two approaches and concepts. This essay reviews existing frameworks for self-directed…

Drawing on a study involving interviews with 20 students each semester until graduation, this article examines how participants understood and articulated their writing processes and how they perceived those processes changing over time. Although they initially struggled to find language to describe what they were doing when they wrote, falling…

TOOLBOX is a school-based social and emotional learning (SEL) program to teach and reinforce 12 tools (e.g., Breathing Tool, Courage Tool) for healthy youth development. Although TOOLBOX has been broadly adopted, it remains largely untested. This quasi-experimental study aims to examine the relationship between TOOLBOX implementation and the…

Service-learning has become a popular approach for supporting students in higher education settings, but less is known about its link with the learner's self-efficacy, which are known to play an important role in higher education. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of service-learning approach on students' self-efficacy…