Learning styles are critical to educational psychology, especially when investigating various contextual factors that interact with individual learning styles. Drawing upon Biglan’s taxonomy of academic tribes, this study systematically analyzed the learning styles of 790 sophomores in a blended learning course with 46 specializations using a novel machine learning algorithm called the support vector machine (SVM). Moreover, an SVM-based recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) technique was integrated to identify the differential features among distinct disciplines. The findings of this study shed light on the optimal feature sets that collectively determined students’ discipline-specific learning styles in a college blended learning setting.

Media, as important windows for the public to get to know timely information, play a vital role in influencing citizens’ attitudes as well as behaviors. From 2019, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, a global health emergency, has aroused great concern of the international community, including media. Varied in cultural context, political stand, and people’s ideology, however, media in different countries reported the COVID-19 dissimilarly. According to Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) model, it is posited that the discrepancies in the reports of the COVID-19 can reflect ideological differences and have explanatory power in the development of the COVID-19 in distinct countries. Based on this premise, by utilizing the database analysis software AntConc 3.2.4w on self-built corpora, this study analyzed the news reports of different stages on the COVID-19 in China and the UK, i.e., in China Daily and The Guardian, respectively, and attempted to reveal the discourse characteristics in the two media, together with the discussion on their possible relations to the pandemic-controlling practices. The corpus-based analysis showed that China Daily used more objective and neutral words in the descriptions of the COVID-19 and expressed more active attitudes in fighting against the epidemic, whereas The Guardian used more negative words in describing the pandemic and words with weak restricting force when reporting policies concerning the control and prevention of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the comparison between the discourse before and after the lockdown demonstrated that the descriptions of the COVID-19 in the UK media transformed into a more objective and neutral one than before with an increased use of expressions of restriction and social conflicts. The same comparison in the discourse of China Daily found that words about sharing experience and promoting cooperation augmented noticeably. The above-mentioned findings were also discussed together with these two countries’ domestic epidemic situations and ideological differences, respectively.

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With an increasing number of information has disseminated in the digital form, digital reading, a sub-construct of ICT literacy, is significant for young generations to succeed in the digital era. gender differences, however is ob-served in students’ digital reading performance which calls for meticulous ex-amination. This study aimed to explore whether ICT self-efficacy and ICT in-terest could explain the gender differences in digital reading, and how ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest are associated in explaining the gender differ-ences in digital reading. Data from 6,173 samples from 192 schools in Estonia who took part in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 were collected. Multilevel serial mediation analysis showed that both ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest mediated the gender differences in digital reading, the lower level of ICT self-efficacy and ICT interest girls had could explain the decrease of their digital reading performance. Results also indicat-ed that girls were not inherently less interested in ICT, and the seemingly less ICT interest girls had was largely owing to their lower level of ICT self-efficacy shaped by the general sex-role stereotype of computer use. Pedagogi-cal intervention on strengthening girls’ ICT self-efficacy was suggested to in-crease girls ICT interest and their digital reading performance to empower them in the digital era.

Critical thinking (CT) formation is a complex and abstract process that hasn’t been studied comprehensively by any existing learning model today. Connectivism, a new learning theory of the information era, provides brand new perspectives to learning, thus has gained considerable attention. The purpose of this study is to examine CT formation in the scope of cognitivism by contrasting this theory to the previous learning theories. This study used the key concepts of chaos, network model, ecology, flow inhibitors, and flow accelerators in connectivism to illuminate some areas of the formation of critical thinking that have not been examined fully. In the scope of connectivism, this study also provides constructive suggestions to teachers to facilitate students’ critical thinking cultivation, i.e., introducing some learning materials that might trigger students’ critical analyzing; evaluating students’ learning procedure from a network perspective; paying more attention to students’ CT disposition development and establishing healthy CT ecology, etc.

Gender differences in reading have become a heated topic, and a reoccurring pattern of results is that girls outperform boys significantly. As digital reading prevails, the discrepancies in digital reading between girls and boys are also prominent. For the purpose of exploring the reason why boys lag behind in terms of digital reading performance and therefore unveil the underlying mechanism in improving students' digital reading literacy, this study used multilevel mediation analysis to investigate whether students' metacognition, i.e., metacognition of understanding, remembering, summarizing and assessing credibility, explain the gender differences in digital reading performance. This study adopted Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), launched by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as the data source. Results of 12,058 samples from 361 schools in China showed that their better achievement in metacognition significantly mediated girls' excelling performance in digital reading. Pedagogical implementations focusing on metacognition were given to render help for both genders in digital reading performance.

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This study compared the effects of extracurricular synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (ASCMC) between students and teachers on students’ digital reading performance at different frequencies. 392,269 samples from 53 countries/regions that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2018 were collected. Multilevel regression analysis showed that SCMC negatively influenced digital reading performance across countries/regions. As the frequency decreased, the negative effect of SCMC diminished. In contrast, ASCMC at a moderately low frequency could facilitate digital reading performance in some countries/regions; however, as frequency increased, the positive effect became negative. These results showed that synchronicity played a role in predicting students’ digital reading performance. This study also explored the mediating effect of metacognition with Nelson and Naren’s metacognitive control-monitoring model. A multilevel mediation analysis proved that the effects of SCMC and ASCMC on digital reading performance were mediated by students’ metacognition of assessing credibility. Practical implications and suggestions for students’ self-paced learning were discussed with the purpose of promoting the effective use of extracurricular CMC between students and teachers and improving students’ digital reading achievement in the post-COVID-19 pandemic era.