Background/purpose – ChatGPT stands before educational professionals with all its benefits and pitfalls, urging them to maximize its benefits for all levels of education while consistently searching for ways to minimize its risks. In the same vein, it is gradually recognized as a promising tool to serve the needs of students in the contemporary and forthcoming society. To this end, the present paper seeks to accumulate the wealth of opportunities ChatGPT can offer for the benefit of learners and teachers while also arguing over some implications of this new technology for educational leaders and policy makers.  

Materials/methods – This is an argumentative writing based on a review of the literature on the potential benefits of ChatGPT for learning and teaching.

Practical implications – ChatGPT provides students with personalized learning environments, individualized tutoring/feedback, and a great bunch of learning materials.  When used with proper guidance and awareness, ChatGPT can facilitate the development of twenty-first century 4C skills (collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and creativity) as well as supporting students with disabilities or learning difficulties. ChatGPT can also help teachers enrich their instruction through providing them with creative ideas and solutions as well as helping them write lesson plans, develop presentations, reach content and materials tailored to their students’ needs. ChatGPT can also assist teachers while assessing student work or performance, preparing exams, or designing evaluation rubrics. Recent AI-based technologies such as ChatGPT require the combined efforts of educational leaders and policy makers to prepare a digital- friendly ecology in schools to maximize the benefits of such technologies.

Conclusion – ChatGPT offers many opportunities that could transform the goals, content, processes, and approaches of teaching in a way that caters for the needs of students as the citizens of the future society.

Keywords – ChatGPT, education, artificial intelligence, AI-based technologies, teaching, learning, chatbots

Background/purpose – Research tends to focus on understanding the school climate impacts and outcomes on real-life situations and problems while not giving deserved attention to their effects on digital life experiences and behaviors, such as those provided by videogame contexts. This article explores the relationship between school climate openness, sense of self-efficacy, and prosocial gaming behaviors.

Materials/methods – A cross-sectional study using a questionnaire-based survey was conducted among 611 college students aged from 17 to 45 years old from 15 higher education institutions in Porto (Portugal). The analytical procedures involved cluster, multivariate, and meditation analyses.

Results – The study revealed a relationship between students’ perceptions of school climate and their sense of self-efficacy and prosocial gaming behaviors. Students’ self-efficacy was proven to mediate the relationship between their perceptions of school experiences and behaviors in gaming communities.  

Conclusion – The study extends the literature by expanding knowledge about how students’ perceptions of school climate openness for discussion, perspective-taking, and social analysis, and their sense of political efficacy, are related to how they exercise their citizenship while participating in videogame communities. The existence of a spillover effect from real to digital life was concluded.

Background/purpose –The unprecedented developments in AI-based technologies and large language models such as ChatGPT have exhibited a brand-new territory to be explored. Since its first release in November 2022, the potential utility of ChatGPT has garnered incremental attention in the scientific world, and has already accumulated a great number of studies from diverse fields. The current study was conducted with the purpose of exploring the scientific landscape of the evolving knowledge base related to the use of ChatGPT in the field of education and health through science mapping analysis of published research.

Materials/methods – Data were retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus, and a comparative, period-based science mapping analysis was conducted using the SciMAT software.

Results – The results showed that the studies published during the first period mostly focused on machine learning, reproductive medicine, education and first-year undergraduate themes. During the second period, though, the studies featured themes that are closely related to the design and performance of ChatGPT such as large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP) and chatbot while abandoning a focus on artificial intelligence. These results imply that discussions and investigations over ChatGPT were being departed from those in the field of artificial intelligence, and the focus was becoming more central to the features of ChatGPT as a language model that can process huge amounts of information to generate human-like texts. Plagiarism and research ethics were also emerging themes during the last period.

Conclusion – The results of the science mapping showed a growing interest into the opportunities and risks of ChatGPT, particularly for fields of education and medicine, and indicated that much research is warranted to discover the potential of GPT technology as an uncharted territory.

Background/purpose – The pandemic threatened education through two significant shocks: the closing of educational institutions across all levels and the financial recession. This overnight shift from face-to-face to an online mode of education became the reason for various physical, mental, and financial challenges faced by both learners and educators alike. This study investigates the perception of Secondary School Certificate (SSC-level) learners in Pakistan regarding online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Materials/methods – A qualitative research strategy was adopted, with semi-structured interviews conducted via Zoom with 15 SSC learners from renowned schools in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, Pakistan. Structured inductive data analysis technique was adopted in the analysis of the collected data.

Results – The study’s results highlighted problems experienced by SSC-level learners in online classes via Zoom and Google Classroom. These related to technology, personal, and educator issues such as technical problems, adaptability struggles, computer literacy, lack of motivation, poor grades, inability to focus, homesickness, disorganization, skipping classes, failure to dedicate appropriate time to studies, technology shortages, poor sleep habits, lack of routine, power failures due to extreme weather, and uncertainty about the future and fear of SSC final exams.

Conclusion – This study will help policymakers from Pakistan’s Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education System to focus more on development, technology, communication, and support programs, especially for high school learners.

Background/purpose – The research aimed to examine the mediation of emotion regulation strategies in the relationship between Internet addiction and life satisfaction during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Materials/methods – The participants consisted of 357 volunteers, aged 18 or over (257 females, 100 males), who were contacted online during 2021. The study used Young’s Internet Addiction Test-Short Form, the Emotion Regulation Scale, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale as data collection instruments. The researchers employed descriptive statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient, and mediation analysis to analyze the collected data.

Results – The findings of the research revealed a low-level negative (r = -.23, p < .01) significant relationship between Internet addiction and satisfaction with life. A low-level positive (r = .20, p < .01) significant relationship was established between Internet addiction and suppression, whilst no significant relationship was revealed between Internet addiction and reappraisal (r = -.06, p > .05). Based on the mediation analysis, the mediation of reappraisal in the relationship between Internet addiction and satisfaction with life was not shown to be statistically significant, whilst mediation of suppression was found to be statistically significant.

Conclusion – It was determined that the model examined in the study explained 11% of the total variance in life satisfaction. According to the results of the study, suppression was shown to be an important variable in the relationship between Internet addiction and life satisfaction. The study’s findings were interpreted and discussed within the framework of the current literature, with various suggestions presented.

Background/purpose – Technology education (TE) offers hands-on activities through a design process to be an environmentally-oriented subject. TE can be used to reduce littering, an environmental problem that also has health implications for modern-day society. This research study sought to explore the challenges that impede TE teachers in delivering lessons to raise students’ awareness of littering through the application of the participatory paradigm.

Materials/methods – TE teachers of Grade 8 students were selected using purposive sampling in this qualitative participatory action research (PAR) study. The use of PAR was chosen in order to develop relevant action research-based methods of intervention that can be implemented to address gaps in the literature. Chaos theory was used to ground the study. Interviews were used to generate data from the study participants, which were then analyzed using the content/textual analysis method.

Results – The study identified issues, challenges, and obstacles that impede TE teachers from delivering lessons that raise students’ awareness about littering. Lack of understanding environmental education and subject relevancy were found to be some of the major challenges facing TE teachers in conscientizing students about littering.

Conclusion – The author concludes that TE teachers need to be equipped with environmental pedagogies through inservice training in order that they can incorporate littering issues into their lessons.