The number of Chinese international students in the United States has stayed high. They face various challenges in personal and academic life, one of which is cultural adaptation to the stark differences between Chinese and American cultures. This study explores how Sino-US cultural differences influence students' social willingness and subsequent academic performance with a literature review based on findings in existing studies. Based on multiple studies from credible sources, this study is deliberately designed to cast light on not only key dimensions of cultural differences but also students' adaptation strategies with a focus on how their social willingness mediates their academic integration. The findings suggest that Chinese international students are susceptible to collectivism, high-context communication and face culture in Chinese culture, which suppress their cross-cultural social willingness because American individualism and low-context communication encourage active social interactions. Consequently, Chinese international students in the United States often remain silent in class and avoid seeking academic help, which form a vicious cycle; however, peer social support can buffer this negative effect. This study concludes that enhancing cross-cultural social willingness can make a significant difference to Chinese students' academic success in the United States.

The transition to elite academic institutions often presents significant psychological challenges for high-achieving students, who must navigate heightened competition and shifting self-concepts. After entering highly competitive elite campuses, numerous high-achieving students are prone to psychological adaptation issues including identity confusion, anxiety and even depression. Based on the literature review method, this paper sorts out the causes of anxiety among this group from three dimensions: neurodevelopmental imbalance, overreliance on external labels and hidden competition induced by a single evaluation system. It analyzes the logical transition of students' self-cognition from passive to rational, and proposes practical educational strategies from cognitive, behavioral, and environmental perspectives to build an intervention pathway of Identification-Acceptance-Transformation. It include establishing multidimensional evaluation systems, promoting emotional awareness and cognitive restructuring, and implementing progressive task challenges with reflective mechanisms. By fostering self-awareness rather than self-consciousness, the proposed framework not only alleviates academic anxiety but also supports sustainable personal growth and resilience.

This paper investigates the cognitive and psychological explanations for the acceptance of false realities and the process of awakening in the films Pleasantville and The Truman Show. Through a literature review of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Gnosticism, media theory, and psychology, along with a comparative case analysis of the two films, this study explores why individuals remain committed to constructed worlds even in the presence of contradictions. The findings indicate that awakening is more than the acquisition of knowledge. Psychological mechanisms, including confirmation bias, biased assimilation, cognitive dissonance, and fear conditioning, contribute to the maintenance of false realities by influencing responses to anomalous information. Specifically, these cognitive processes can delay, resist, or reinterpret new information. This paper's interdisciplinary approach of connecting theology, philosophy, film analysis, and cognitive psychology can contribute to a deeper understanding of belief formation, perception, and the dismantling of established worldviews.

Developmental trauma is harm to children caused by living in an unstable, neglected or dangerous environment for a long time in their early years. The experience will also have some long-term effects on emotion regulation, social skills and personality development; it may be passed down through the family over time in interactions with parents and children. Research abroad has been conducted from the aspects of attachment, parenting behavior and emotional functioning, but an integrated explanation of the inner psychological mechanisms of intergenerational transmission is still relatively weak. According to the attachment theory and mentalization theory, this paper will carry out a review of the literature and theoretical integration to study the psychological mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of developmental trauma, with an emphasis on how attachment functioning, emotion regulation and mentalization are related. Based on the results, unresolved early traumatic experiences can cause insecure attachment and problems with emotion regulation; when there is strong emotional arousal, these may be worse and hinder a person's ability to mindfully observe and respond to the emotions and mental states of young children, thus increasing the risk of passing on the trauma to the next generation.

Against the backdrop of intensifying academic competition and rising learning pressure, academic anxiety has become highly prevalent among student populations. Conventional school-based psychological interventions are constrained by insufficient professional resources and high levels of student resistance. As a flexible, accessible, and non-pharmacological intervention, music therapy has been increasingly integrated into school mental health services. Employing a combination of literature review, case analysis, and comparative research, this study examines three core functioning mechanisms of music therapy—emotional regulation, cognitive defusion, and interpersonal support. It further proposes a three-tiered intervention model and analyzes key influencing factors from both intervention design and individual student perspectives. Evidence from studies on Orff-based group music therapy indicates that group music interventions can significantly alleviate anxiety symptoms, and artificial intelligence technologies can facilitate its scalable implementation in school settings. Currently, the field faces two prominent bottlenecks: a shortage of trained professionals and insufficient targeted empirical evidence. Future efforts should strengthen workforce development, promote interdisciplinary collaboration, and establish standardized school-based intervention systems. This study provides practical guidance for optimizing the mechanism of music therapy in alleviating academic anxiety within school mental health intervention frameworks.

As an important way for China to cultivate well-rounded individuals, aesthetic education plays a fundamental role in shaping character and value, inspiring wisdom and nourishing the heart. In 2023, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China issued the Notice on the Comprehensive Implementation of the School Aesthetic Education Immersion. It emphasizes immersion as the goal and path of school aesthetic education in China, and puts forward new requirements for training school music teachers in the new era. This study adopts case study and text analysis to analyze the master's training program at C Conservatory of Music in China. The research is carried out from four dimensions: training philosophy and goals, curriculum structure, course content, and program characteristics. The results show that the Master of Music Education Training Program of Conservatory C adheres to the concept of "people-oriented, practice-focused, and application-driven." In terms of teaching methods, the project emphasizes "experience, singing, and expression" aiming to promote the comprehensive development of students in the three dimensions of knowledge, skills, and ability.

This article reviews recent empirical and theoretical research, systematically examines the evolution of models, technological integration, and effect validation, and critically analyses their limitations from an ecological perspective. It sorts out three progressive developmental stages of college English blended teaching research, ranging from simple structural online-offline blending, specific disciplinary technical fusion to AI-driven educational ecological reconstruction, and combines theoretical frameworks adopted in relevant literature. After reviewing the studies and reviews, the paper found that the research field is moving towards interdisciplinary and technological integration. The paper uses constructivism, data-driven learning, and ecological models to frame the blended teaching mode. The blended teaching model integrates technology with traditional offline teaching, including corpus-based data-driven learning tools, intelligent learning platforms and adaptive AI teaching systems. Likewise, empirical data from controlled experiments consistently prove that such integrated teaching designs significantly lift learners' comprehensive linguistic performance, cross-cultural awareness and autonomous inquiry ability. This has positive effects on students' learning outcomes, learning initiatives and innovative competence, etc. Though the overall results are positive, technological determinism, cross-cultural disparities, and methodological limitations can still be discovered. To break through the existing theoretical problems and experimental evidence bottlenecks identified in the literature review, three targeted improvement paths are put forward: The development of teacher ecological support, more application of vertical validation in the research projects, and updates to disciplinary theories are the directions for future research and studies.

Peer tutoring, broadly defined as a structured arrangement in which one student helps another learn. While peer tutoring has been applied extensively as an intervention strategy in higher education institutions around the world, there is inconsistency in the findings on the impacts of peer tutoring due to the methodologies used, the disciplines under review, and the theories on which the studies are premised. The current dissertation seeks to explore how peer tutoring programs impact students' academic outcomes in higher education institutions based on a desk analysis of primary literature in the form of empirical studies conducted from 2015 to 2025 and any supplementary literature where applicable. Using a social constructivism theory that incorporates concepts from Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development theory and Piaget's cognitive equilibration theory, the thematic analysis of 45 sources related to peer tutoring, theoretical literature, and methodology yields five themes: academic performance and content mastery; motivation and engagement; communication and collaboration; effectiveness determinants; and learner resistance to tutoring participation. It emerges from the analysis that peer tutoring impacts students' academic achievements positively with moderate to large effect sizes. Specifically, individual tutoring is highly effective in fostering students' academic performance, and tutoring situations where the tutors are professionally trained yield the highest gains. However, a critical evaluation of current literature reveals ongoing weaknesses in terms of methodology, such as insufficient control groups, disciplinary and geographic biases, and underdeveloped theoretical mechanisms explaining relationships between peer tutoring programs and outcomes. Structural factors, namely unskilled peer tutors, weak cooperation between teachers and peer tutors, and poor quality of peer tutoring programs, together with students' opposition based on language anxiety, competitive academic environment, and peer expertise delegitimization, inhibit peer tutoring effectiveness.

Educational equity is a vital manifestation of social justice in education. This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis of 1,462 valid CSSCI and Peking University core journal papers on educational equity (2021-March 2026) from CNKI, using VOSviewer and RStudio Bibliometrix to draw knowledge maps. The number of relevant published papers has stayed at a relatively high level; Beijing Normal University leads institutional output, while scholar collaboration is locally clustered yet insufficiently connected across institutions. Eight keyword clusters identify mainstream research hotspots: compulsory education balanced development, digital transformation and digital justice, Double Reduction governance, higher education equity, rural education revitalization, educational resource spatial allocation, international policy comparison, and substantive equity for disadvantaged groups. Future work should shift to small‑scale, evidence‑based, and long‑term studies, match national goals to explore AI for fairer education, and encourage cooperation across disciplines and regions; this would help achieve real equity.

As intercultural communicative competence (ICC) has become a key objective of International Chinese Language Education, increasing attention has been paid to cultural representation in Chinese language textbooks.However, few studies have examined how cultural content supports learners' ICC development.This study examines the cultural representation in Experiencing Chinese: Basic Course 1 and 2 by applying Byram's ICC framework. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to examine cultural elements in dialogues, reading passages, illustrations, cultural notes, exercises, and communicative activities. The identified cultural elements were classified into ten cultural categories and coded according to five ICC dimensions: attitudes, knowledge, skills of interpreting and relating, skills of discovery and interaction, and critical cultural awareness. The findings indicate that the textbooks emphasize factual cultural knowledge but devote considerably less attention to higher-level intercultural competencies. Activities promoting cultural comparison, intercultural interaction, and critical reflection remain limited. The findings provide implications for textbook development and Chinese language teaching.