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"learning"

Developing students' sustainable agriculture competencies requires the alignment of curriculum content to encompass the full complexity of the dynamics of agriculture. However, empirical evidence from sustainable agriculture research indicates that actions oriented towards fostering students' competencies are scarce. To advance understanding, this study monitored and evaluated the development of students' sustainability competencies for smallholder farming during the implementation of a Participatory Integrated Planning (PIP) module—A sustainability learning programme that elaborates on cross-cutting issues of long-term integrated planning, which is normally not taught. A total number of 104 students from two vocational agricultural schools (N1 = 63; N2 = 41) were involved in the PIP learning module that was implemented from April 2022 to June 2023. Survey data on the development of the students' competencies were collected at the beginning (April 2022), in-between (December 2022) and end (June 2023) of the implementation of the PIP module. A one-way repeated measures MANOVA test was used to evaluate the effect of the PIP module on the development of students' competencies. Findings revealed that the PIP module significantly contributed to fostering all intended competencies, including facilitator of change, leadership, innovation and creativity, planning, system thinking, stewardship, auto-determination and interdisciplinarity. Improvement of these competencies was much higher in the earlier stage of the learning process compared to the later stage, implying that sustainability learning requires going beyond ‘business-as-usual’ to retain the interest of students and competencies development. Findings also revealed that competencies development levels differ depending on schools' context, implying that sustainability learning programmes should be flexible and adaptive for learning to occur in a real-context environment. These findings have practical implications for policies related to designing and upscaling sustainability learning programmes in vocational agriculture schools. © 2025 The Author(s). International Journal of Training and Development published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Transversal skills describe a broad spectrum of skills that are considered to be essential for thriving in today’s society and tackling the challenges of the twenty-first century. Therefore, a high demand is placed on educators to teach these skills to their students. Unfortunately, the conceptualization of transversal skills remains vague with different frameworks reporting on various transversal skills, which complicates a translation of these skills into educational practice and research, thereby making them a “blind spot” in psychological research and educational practice. This paper brings the blind spot on transversal skills to a direct focus. First, we propose a conceptualization of transversal skills through a review and integration of existing frameworks. We organize transversal skills into four core concepts: cognitive skills (e.g., creativity and problem-solving), citizenship (e.g., democratic participation and respect), well-being (e.g., mental and physical health), and social-emotional skills (e.g., collaboration and communication). Second, we highlight possible ways to implement these core concepts into educational practice by providing specific examples on how to integrate specific skills into five subjects: language, mathematics, science, social studies, and arts and music. Third, a research agenda is proposed that considers the structure and underlying processes of transversal skills, their development and interventions at different stages, their predictive validity for success, and cultural differences and diversity. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025.

The removal of forests has become a major challenge for indigenous students in Malaysia called Orang asli. The younger generations of Orang asli need to equip themselves with relevant knowledge to deal with changes within their living environment. However, they faced difficulties during learning such as irrelevant curriculum, lack of materials and inappropriate approaches. A project-based environmental module is constructed which employs the analyze, design, develop, implement and evaluate (ADDIE) instructional model with three projects: the construction of habitat, soil acidity and infiltration of pesticides. This study aimed to develop this module and assess its suitability to inculcate scientific attitudes and noble values among the Orang asli primary six students. The data were collected through validation questionnaires that were given to three validators. The data obtained are further analyzed to identify their improvement towards the module. The validation results show that the module is very feasible (85.83%) to be used. Many opine that this module creates a learning experience for them through scientific reasoning, inquiring, cooperating, and decision-making so that they find the relevancy of knowledge in the Orang asli context. The enhancement of this module provides useful educational guidance to learn environmental knowledge from a scientific perspective. © 2025, Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved.