Introduction to Vol. 12 No. 3 (2024)

Dear reader,

I am very happy to announce that a new issue of Frontline Learning Research has recently been published, comprising four articles. The four articles contribute novel insights that push forward the important areas of learning across contexts, understanding of expertise, support of student well-being, and cognitive rating processes. At the same time, the articles illustrate new methods, or new uses of known methods, to investigate these areas.

Bronkhorst and colleagues investigate young adults’ learning across their engagement in climate activism and other life-contexts such as family, friends, education, and work. Through interviews with 12 self-defined climate activists, the authors document the activists’ experiences of discontinuities between these life-contexts. They further point to the important learning involved for the activists in their efforts to re-establish continuities, as well as to structural barriers hindering this reestablishment. The activists’ learning concerns areas such as climate, politics, democracy and power structures, as well as skills in navigating these areas, and forming and expression of own identity.

Gegenfurtner and colleagues present a novel conceptualization of expertise as recurring adaptation to dynamic task constraints. This conceptualization is called for in the many workplaces where change is a recurring feature, and where the traditional understandings of expertise as maximal adaptation to stable task constraints is therefore inadequate. The authors have used retrospective, qualitative biographical interviews with five experts to elicit episodes where the experts had experienced technological change in their work setting. The authors identify four types of resulting adaptation: successful, problematic, contingent and failed.

The article by Räihä and colleagues addresses the important question of supporting university students’ well-being, in the light of the increase in mental health problems in higher education. The authors investigated how an online course based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy affected the well-being and study ability of a group of students with different levels of study burnout and engagement at the beginning of the intervention. Latent profile analysis was used to establish four initial profiles. The analysis showed that across all profiles, well-being, psychological flexibility, and organized studying increased, whilst exhaustion decreased, but the profiles differed in the changes observed in cynicism, inadequacy, and engagement.

In the article by Vinokic and colleagues, the authors seek to understand the underlying cognitive processes shaping ratings of teaching quality based on first impressions (thin slice ratings). They do this through an innovative mixed-method research design where participants rate short classroom videos of 30 seconds (first rating situation) or longer videos of 10 minutes (second rating situation). Findings suggest that in the first rating situation, only cognitive System 1 is used and ratings tend to be negative, whereas ratings in the second rating situation rely on both System 1 and System 2, with the latter modifying initial System 1 judgement.

With the warmest wishes for the upcoming holiday season,

Professor, Dr. Nina Bonderup Dohn

Editor-in-Chief, Frontline Learning Research