ObjectiveNumerous studies have demonstrated that religious belief is associated with prosocial behavior. However, how do they maintain cooperation in societies with a predominating atheist population, such as China? Different primings and a quasi-experiment are used to examine the link between communist authority and prosocial behaviors among college students in China.Materials and methodsIn Study 1, the subjects’ communist authority in the university lab was primed by a communist-authority video. In Study 2, we compared the priming effects of communist authority and religion (...) on prosocial intention. Study 3 investigated the priming effect of communist authority on prosocial behaviors by employing a scrambled sentence task in the university lab. A quasi-experiment was conducted in Study 4.ResultsResults showed that communist-authority, a reminder of secular authorities, increased prosociality among college students. And empathy moderated the relationship between secular authorities and prosociality in Study 3 and Study 4.DiscussionCommunist authority, a secular authority prime, has a positive effect on promoting prosocial behaviors. These results provided a feasible yet novel way to reveal the mechanism of the relationship between secular authorities and prosociality in China. (shrink)

This study aims to identify research trends of scaffolding in the field of science education. To this end, both descriptive analysis and co-word analysis were conducted to examine the selected articles published in the Social Science Citation Index journals from 2000 to 2019. A total of 637 papers were retrieved as research samples through rounds of searching in Web of Science database. Overall, this study reveals a growing trend of science educators' academic publications about scaffolding in the recent two decades. (...) In these sample papers, from 1,487 non-repeated keywords, we extracted 286 author-defined keywords shared by at least two studies as a benchmark dictionary. A series of co-word analyses were then conducted based on the dictionary to reveal the underlying co-occurring relationships of the words in title and abstract of the sample papers. Results showed that “scaffolding,” “support,” and “design” were the top three most frequently used keywords during 2000 and 2019. Visualization of co-word networks in each 5-year period further helps clarify both educators' common research foci and relevant research trends. Derived discussion and potential research directions are also provided. (shrink)

The study of education systems as social phenomena has led scholars to question the role of education in modern society. The question of how to improve education naturally leads to concerns about what is wrong with the present education system. If education is meant to elevate the next generation, how can it meet the goal of ensuring a meaningful existence for those being educated? Scholars have demonstrated that education has been reduced to a process of the construction of objects, where (...) curriculum as techne commodifies students into products with market value. We propose that the tendency of interpreting techne as technology is a perspective of the modern age, and the rules of modern education are based on the rules of modern technology, under the guidance of the paradigm of productivity. We will introduce a broader interpretation of techne which frames it as the cultivation of virtue, i.e., virtue-techne. On this basis, education could be viewed as techne in the sense of praxis, rather than as fabrication in the sense of production. We highlight the rising rate of student suicides in Taiwan in recent years, where we determine the education system lacks a focus on praxis. This article investigates alternative praxis-oriented notions of education, from Aristotle's cultivation of virtue to Hadot's "spiritual exercises," to advocate for a shift away from the production paradigm. Indebted to Heidegger, we clarify his "techne as revealing" by emphasizing two frameworks for education: The first, modern education being valued by its adherence to metrics based in the paradigm of production. The second, education as a process wherein its value is derived from the life context of the participating individual. Finally, as a comparative study, we explore the current state of education in Russia and Taiwan, and present the case of one high school in Taiwan which has adopted the practice of spiritual exercises in its curriculum, including a required hike to the peak of Taiwan's tallest mountain, to cultivate a sense of the liberated life before its students graduate. (shrink)