Over the past few years mental health problems in middle school and high school students have gained increased attention from both the academic community, teachers, and the public. Adolescents are at an age of change when they are more concerned about approval from peers and acceptance from the group. As their social attention shifts more towards peers, peer interaction becomes an important source of emotional support, social belonging and interpersonal feedback. Peer relationships can be a source of social pressure and have a detrimental impact on students' mental health, while positive peer relationships can reduce social pressures and contribute to psychological well-being. The method of this research is literature review which is used to sort out the results of existing studies in China and abroad to uncover the inherent correlations among peer interaction, social anxiety and mental conditions. The findings show that healthy peer relationships reduce adolescents' social anxiety, and promote their psychological health, while peer problems typically exacerbate anxiety symptoms and negatively impact on children's psychological state. The obtained conclusions can provide the theoretical foundations for the implementation of mental health education and peer interaction counseling for adolescent groups.

The U.S. education and insurance systems are shaped by distinctive historical and ideological foundations. Both fields reflect the tension between market-driven principles and evolving efforts to address inequality, despite persistent structural gaps. This study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of American education policy and insurance policy, focusing on their societal goals, implementation mechanisms, and policy outcomes. The analysis adopts literature reviews, case studies, and horizontal and vertical comparisons to identify similarities and differences. Findings show that U.S. education policy is characterized by decentralized governance, where federal authorities provide broad frameworks but local governments and school districts hold primary responsibility. It emphasizes diversity, inclusivity, and the cultivation of critical thinking through flexible curricula and student-centered practices. By contrast, the U.S. insurance system is divided into public and private sectors, is not universally free, and often ties access to employment. While education-related financial policies such as student loans mitigate risks, they do not function as insurance in a strict sense. Comparatively, both systems aim to promote social stability but differ in scope and implementation. Education policies prioritize management and resource allocation, while insurance policies emphasize financial risk-sharing under social security or commercial frameworks.

At present, digital transformation, intelligent construction and the restructuring of engineering supply chains are changing the form of engineering project management, promoting its transformation from single-subject control to multi-subject collaborative governance. In view of the shortcomings in the cultivation of engineering management majors in terms of supply chain collaboration, digital platform application, data-driven decision-making and cross-organizational communication, this paper constructs a D-KCJP five-element coupled competency cultivation model, which integrates digital context, knowledge graph, competency system, job tasks and curriculum pathways, and forms a cultivation logic of "demand traction — graph support — competency transformation — job anchoring — curriculum implementation — evaluation feedback". This paper further proposes reform paths covering knowledge graph, six-dimensional competency framework, curriculum system optimization, job mapping and implementation guarantee, so as to provide reference for the cultivation of inter-disciplinary talents in engineering management.

Play is a major means through which children interact with the world. It is significant for a child's mental and physical development. Autism is a developmental disability that affects how children interact with the environment and socialize with others. Children with autism are often immersed in their own world and face challenges in social interaction and communication. Play is often used as a kind of intervention for children with autism. The aim of play-based intervention is to provide autistic children with a comfortable way to interact with the world and express themselves, and to integrate them fully into broader social activities. Play-based intervention benefits the social development of autistic children by improving their social communication skills. Different types of play-based intervention have different focuses. Play-based intervention has some limitations and is not yet widely adopted as a treatment for autistic children. More studies need to be done in the future to provide a comprehensive understanding of play-based intervention.

This synthesis article applies the multi-level framework to analyze how the macro-level factors (cultural norms and exam-oriented system) in China moderate the relationship between teachers' beliefs and gender bias (meso-level factor) and gender disparities (micro-level )in early science education. In the literature review, the author summarizes the evidence about how teachers' expectations, gender stereotypes, and instructional beliefs influence young children' s science learning opportunities. It also examines how the macro-level factors reinforce these beliefs. In the conclusion, the article indicates that teachers' beliefs are influenced by cultural norms about gender roles and systemic pressure like exam-oriented system. This impact continually affects how teachers design their instructional practices and provide differentiated feedback in the classroom. This review analyzes and connects findings across multiple levels of influence. The article concludes with implications and the goal of future studies on training programs for teachers, educational policy which can promote equitable science learning environments and eliminate gender disparities in early education.

Over the recent decades, performance-based incentive systems have emerged as a significant policy tool in global education reform to enhance teacher motivation as well as educational achievement. However, performance-based pay became established in primary and secondary schools in China in a nationwide reform introduced in 2009, entailing performance evaluation as a part of teachers' pay, making external incentives such as performance pay and excellence awards central to the operation of schools. This research is a synthesis of literature (domestic and international) on teacher performance incentives and work behaviors, aiming to address the issue of the correlation between them based on the literature review and synthesis method. Findings indicate that external incentives positively affect teachers, although in a non-linear way: rational designs increase professional commitment, whereas the excessive emphasis on outcomes and rankings among teachers results in the need to comply with the evaluation system instead of improving their teaching. The subjective factor that matters in the effectiveness of incentives is that of teachers. Therefore, the design of the incentive systems needs to balance the efficiency of management with the psychological perception for teachers and their needs of the professional development, which can offer valuable ideas on how to optimise the basic education teacher incentive mechanisms in China.

This study focuses on integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into art education, with dance education as the core research subject. Through bibliometric analysis of 210 articles from Web of Science (2015-2025) using VOSviewer, systematic review of 809 records from CNKI (2014-2024), and case study of the "AI Mina" virtual dance teaching project, combined with the TPACK theoretical framework, this research explores how AI tools transform traditional art pedagogy and examines their fundamental limitations. The study highlights four major limitations of AI in art education: lack of emotional expression, one-way interaction, technology-culture misalignment, and implementation barriers, especially the "form without spirit" problem in physical arts like dance. It also identifies three core application areas: personalised learning, creative assistance, and automated assessment. Findings indicate that although AI can improve teaching efficiency, it cannot replace human teachers' core role in emotional transmission, cultural interpretation, and creative guidance. Sustainable integration of AI in art education requires a human-machine collaborative teaching model. This study provides practical pathways for educators to incorporate AI technology while maintaining the humanistic essence of art education.

Within research on early childhood cognitive development, schema accommodation—a core Piagetian construct—refers to the cognitive restructuring process through which individuals revise existing schemas or form entirely new ones when encountering information that contradicts their prior knowledge. This mechanism is essential for cognitive growth, as it enables the child to resolve conflicts between entrenched mental frameworks and novel experiences. For instance, a child who initially believes that "all flying things are birds" must adjust that criterion after discovering that bees fly but are not birds. This adjustment involves not merely adding new facts but fundamentally altering the classification rule, thus exemplifying accommodation as a deep reorganization of the original cognitive structure, rather than simple assimilation. This study explores how questioning-based and descriptive-only parent-child dialogue affect preschoolers' schema accommodation and its age differences. Forty children aged 3–5 joined a randomized pretest-posttest experiment. Results show questioning-based dialogue better promotes schema accommodation, especially for 4–5-year-olds, and guides children to focus on functional features. The findings offer evidence-based guidance for parents' daily cognitive guidance.

Adolescence is widely recognized as a critical stage in cognitive development, during which individuals gradually undergo a transition from concrete, experience-based reasoning to more abstract, logical, and systematic thinking, which is essential for advanced learning across academic domains. However, this developmental shift is not always fully achieved in a stable manner, and many adolescents still fail to develop consistent abstract reasoning abilities, which may hinder their academic performance and higher-order problem-solving. Metacognition has been identified as a key factor supporting higher-order thinking and learning. This paper, through a literature review, explores how metacognitive instruction facilitates adolescents' transition to abstract thinking, with a particular focus on the Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education (CASE) project. The study investigates the ways in which metacognitive methods impact cognitive development, drawing on developmental psychology, neuroscience, and empirical educational research. The findings indicate that planning, monitoring, and evaluation significantly enhance reasoning ability, problem-solving skills, and learning transfer. The study concludes that integrating metacognitive instruction into classroom practice provides an effective and practical approach to promoting adolescents' cognitive development and supporting their progression toward formal operational thinking.

The behavioral immune system (BIS) detects the pathogen-related cues and can trigger emotional responses such as fear and disgust, but this mechanism does not operate in isolation. This paper integrates Error Management Theory (EMT), which suggests that cognitive adaptations evolved to minimize the cost of false negative and false positive errors in detections of consequential environmental conditions. Together, BIS and EMT operate as a coordinated system, shaping human responses under conditions of disease threat. These adaptations manifest as biases tailored to specific environmental conditions. This paper proposes that the same selection pressure fostered the evolution of a self-biasing ability, allowing us to minimize such costs based on experience and culturally transmitted information. The research indicates that this ability specifically applies to the formation of beliefs or doubts about the existence of an environmental condition that is not adequately perceptible to the senses, e.g., doubt that the man is being honest. A model of this self-biasing process, rooted in signal detection theory, is developed and its explanatory reach is demonstrated through many diverse examples from epistemological and social psychological literatures. These examples feature shifts in evidentiary standards for belief, resulting in systematic over- or under-attribution of environmental conditions. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, lowered evidentiary thresholds for detecting infection risk contributed to the tendency to associate Asians with disease transmission, despite insufficient individual-level evidence. This study aims to correct and significantly enhance EMT by introducing this evolved self-biasing ability.