National-level processes have been given a central position in the study of borders, citizenship, and mobility. There are reasons for such ‘methodological nationalism’ as people’s movement is usually international. The phenomenon of cross-border students (CBS) between Shenzhen and Hong Kong presents a unique case because the border between these two regions does not easily conform into the categories of an international border or internal boundary. Despite holding Hong Kong permanent residency, CBS often find themselves torn between their mainland Chinese and Hong Kong identities, as they are not fully accepted by either side of the border. This paper focuses on the factors behind the identity predicament faced by CBS and discusses their consequences, not only for the children and their families but also for the shifting dynamics of the mainland China-Hong Kong border. This paper presents two primary arguments: 1) The Chinese government views the identity predicament of CBS as part of the broader ‘Hong Kong problem’, seen as a potential threat to national sovereignty; 2) China’s efforts to mitigate the identity predicament are linked to its goal of promoting integration between mainland China and Hong Kong, paving the way for a new form of regional citizenship.

In recent years, the Chinese government has implemented a series of dramatic crackdowns on various business sectors in China, one of which, beginning in July 2021, targeted the private tutoring industry. This article offers a new interpretation of this crackdown on private education companies, arguing that it is part of a new comprehensive education policy called the “Double Reduction” (DR) policy. Although the policy’s main goal has been to reduce students’ educational burden, this article also links the policy to China’s core objective of advancing indigenous innovation to enable national rejuvenation. The analysis of the DR policy also reveals two contradictions that currently characterize China’s educational path: first, the contradiction inherent in the authoritarian and paternalistic state using tough measures to enforce parental compliance with policies aimed at fostering more democratic parenting styles; and second, the contradiction inherent in policies aimed at fostering happy childhoods for the purposes of global competitiveness.

Orit Hazzan and Avital Binah-Pollak consider how the data science perspective helped to predict the transformation of Israel’s 2023 social protest. Think about your most personal ritualistic event—walking your dog, grocery shopping, or a weekly meetup with your friends. Most likely it takes place in the same place, close to home, with the same people, and at a certain frequency. Rituals occur also on the social level; for example, Sunday Mass, birthday parties, and sports competitions.

The significance of ethics in data science research has attracted considerable attention in recent years. While there is widespread agreement on the importance of teaching ethics within computing contexts, there is no clear method for its implementation and assessment. Studies focusing on methods for integrating ethics into data science courses reveal that students tend to neglect ethical concerns in their data analysis. Based on the data we collected from questionnaires distributed to undergraduate science and engineering students, this paper expands the discussion beyond human concerns and ethics in data science education. As we will show, students tend to neglect the context when attempting to solve data science questions. We argue that gaps in understanding the context relating to the data result in gaps in the analysis as well as in the interpretation of the data. Thus, we propose anthropological thinking as a pedagogy to overcome the context neglect. Placing the spotlight on the context promotes a holistic understanding of the phenomenon being analyzed, as it includes important considerations that do not necessarily fit the more commonly used term human concerns.

Success in cognitive tasks is associated with effort regulation and motivation. We employed the meta-reasoning approach to investigate metacognitive monitoring accuracy and effort regulation in problem solving across cultures. Adults from China, from Israel, and from Europe and North America (for simplicity: “Western countries”) solved nonverbal problems and rated their confidence in their answers. The task involved identifying geometric shapes within silhouettes and, thus, required overcoming interference from holistic processing. The Western group displayed the worst monitoring accuracy, with both the highest overconfidence and poorest resolution (discrimination in confidence between the correct and wrong solutions). The Israeli group resembled the Western group in many respects but exhibited better monitoring accuracy. The Chinese group invested the most time and achieved the best success rates, demonstrating exceptional motivation and determination to succeed. However, their efficiency suffered as they correctly solved the fewest problems per minute of work. Effort regulation analysis based on the Diminishing Criterion Model revealed distinct patterns: the Western participants invested the least amount of time regardless of item difficulty and the Israelis invested more time only when addressing the hardest items. The Chinese group allocated more time throughout but particularly in moderate to difficult items, hinting at their strategic determination to overcome the challenge. Understanding cultural differences in metacognitive processes carries implications for theory (e.g., motivational factors) and practice (e.g., international teams, education). The present findings can serve as a foundation for future research in these and other domains.

The discourse on science and engineering education focuses on ways of preparing students, as future employees, and global citizens. While this discourse deals with the purposes and characteristics of engineering education, it tends to neglect the students' perspectives. The purpose of this study was to provide insights into the perspectives of undergraduate science and engineering students with respect to six factors, during the Covid-19 pandemic- end-of-semester exams, financial situation, social life, extension of study duration, the future of the labor market, and how the world will look. A comprehensive questionnaire was distributed to all undergraduate students in a research science and engineering university in two consecutive academic years. Descriptive statistics and content analysis were applied. Our findings show that science and engineering students were mostly concerned about their end-of-semester exams. Their social life was the only factor that changed between the two periods in terms of the percentage of students who were concerned with it. As for the other factors, the percentage of students who were concerned about them remained comparatively the same in both academic years. The findings highlight the confidence students had during the pandemic, and demonstrate the resilience of science and engineering, especially in times of volatility.

Prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress among university students worldwide is high. In most cases, stress intervention is individual-based and involves small groups for relatively short periods. New evidence shows that stress increased during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021), when learning moved to online formats and social distancing was enforced worldwide. Our research focuses on a course on adjusting to stressful situations that moved online after many years of being taught in class. Based on qualitative and quantitative analyses, we showed that the course offered students two main benefits. First, the course structure was designed as a ritual, providing students with a sense of control. Second, students were engaged in a group activity, further contributing to their ability to adjust to stressful situations, as it created a platform for sharing. Findings are discussed in the context of the ongoing pandemic, and implications for coping with student stress post COVID-19 are suggested.

For some years now, there has been an increase in the number of Chinese students travelling abroad to pursue higher education. The outbreak of COVID-19 has created new challenges for international students around the world. Based on an analysis of online forums during the pandemic (January–July 2020), we focus on the challenges Chinese transnational students have been facing. From the state's point of view, being at the front of China's internationalization progress, the students are expected to have both a ‘vision of globalization’ (国际化视野) as well as a deep ‘Chinese feeling’ (中国情怀). However, in practice during the pandemic, the students found it extremely difficult to achieve a balance between their multiple identities. In this article, we argue that discrepancies between the students’ identities may be due to the pandemic having highlighted several existing conflicts that have so far received only meagre attention or were even overlooked.

This posting continues the discussion about the integration of research in undergraduate programs published in TP Msg. #1785 “Course-Based Undergraduate Research - Crazy Observations, Audacious Questions”, offering a different approach for exposing undergraduate student to research. While the TP Msg. #1785 discusses course-based research, which is the inclusion of research projects in the curriculum, in this posting we introduce the implementation of a new undergraduate course - ‘Exposure to Research at the Technion’, whose main goal is to expose undergraduate students to research carried out in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology – campus. In this course, students’ exposure to research occurs in several stages: 1) Students listen to lectures by Technion researchers and are exposed to research ideas and studies from various areas which take place at the Technion. 2) Students participate in meetings with researchers in their labs. 3) Each week students write a reflection on the research they were exposed to. This step is a significant type of involvement in research because it encourages students to express their opinions as well as to offer a new perspective about the research they heard, rather than being only passive listeners. Based on our findings, we argue that the course is highly beneficial for undergraduate students for four main reasons: 1) In many cases, when research is promoted among undergraduate students, it is usually through special programs aimed at excellent students. This course is open to all Technion undergraduate students as an elective course. 2) Undergraduate research programs are often short and are guided by one researcher. In this course, students are exposed to research from a variety of faculties. 3) Each lecture is self-contained; in this sense, if a student missed one lecture it would not influence their understanding of the following lecture. 4) Research is accessible: the visits to the labs are provided with thorough explanations about the labs’ goals and activities. In addition, we found that the exposure to research turned out to be a dialectical process which benefits both the students and the lecturers: While the initial purpose was that students will be exposed to the research that takes place at the Technion, the outcome was that the lecturers, who presented their research in the course, expressed their interest to expose their research to new and broader audiences from different fields of knowledge. A researcher from the faculty of medicine explained: “I decided to lecture in the course to raise interest in students who are not from medical science, and to hear from them how do they see things from a different perspective, their perspectives as engineers”. A lecturer from the faculty of civil and environmental engineering mentioned that, “research today in the civil and environmental engineering faculty is very interdisciplinary and there is a need to get researchers from other fields of knowledge. The course is one way to achieve that”.

Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong. By examining the women’s motivations for migration and lived experiences in relation to the discursive, political, economic, and social circumstances of mainland China and Hong Kong, Avital Binah-Pollak demonstrates how these marital practices are causing the expanding and blurring of borders, so that there is a much wider strip of border in which the dichotomies of the rural/urban, periphery/center, and hybrid/national identities become more complex and negotiable. While this is particularly interesting and valid in the case of the border between mainland China and Hong Kong because of the particular nature of the relationship between these two societies, it may also apply to borders between many other societies worldwide.