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Situational engagement plays a critical role in promoting students' academic performance. In a smart classroom environment, this study collected longitudinal real‐time data for 105 college students at a university in central China to investigate the relationship among situational engagement, personal characteristics and learning environment perceptions. Hierarchical linear modelling showed that environmental perception and students' personal factors have different effects on situational engagement. Specifically, (1) social support perceptions, autonomous motivation and controlled motivation have a significant impact on behavioural engagement; (2) perceptions of social and media support, autonomous motivation and controlled motivation have a significant impact on shallow cognitive engagement; and (3) perceptions of teacher and social support, self‐efficacy and autonomous motivation significantly predict deep cognitive and emotional engagement. This study suggests that the effect of the perception regarding advanced technology‐supported learning environments on students' situational engagement is limited, and instructors should pay more attention to improving students' perceptions of teacher and social support, self‐efficacy and autonomous motivation to promote students' situational deep cognitive engagement in smart classrooms. Practitioner notesWhat is already known about this topic Compared with overall engagement, situational engagement fluctuates and changes with time and context.Situational engagement is a product of environmental and personal factors.Few studies have focused on the nature of situational engagement and how environmental and personal factors influence situational engagement in smart classrooms.What the paper adds This study contributes to the existing literature by investigating the critical factors that predict situational engagement, using the experience sampling method in a smart classroom at a Chinese university.Environmental perception, self‐efficacy and students' motivation factors have different effects on situational engagement in a smart classroom.Perceptions of teacher and social support, self‐efficacy and autonomous motivation significantly predict deep cognitive and emotional engagement, while perceptions of media support only have a significant impact on shallow cognitive engagement.Personal factors (controlled and autonomous motivation) moderate the relationship between environmental perception factors and situational engagement.Implications for practice and/or policy Rather than only providing external technology‐rich conditions, instructors should focus more on improving students' perceptions of teacher and social support, self‐efficacy and autonomous motivation in the smart classroom environment.Instructors should promote students' perception of teacher support and their autonomous motivation to enhance their deep cognitive engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's higher education system has undergone a rapid expansion over the last two decades. By drawing on hand‐collected data, we explore students' experiences in college and in the labor market post‐graduation in the wake of this expansion. According to our data, the largest employer of college graduates in the labor market was the state sector, followed by the domestic private sector. To explain the returns to college education in China, we explore three mechanisms: human capital, social networks, and signaling. We find that human capital measures, apart from a student's college English test scores, cannot explain the college wage premium, whereas both social networks (for example, membership of the Communist Party) and signaling matter significantly. This seems to indicate that in China, connections are crucial for student success in the labor market, whereas the higher education system itself is more a system for selecting talented individuals than it is for educating them. Finally, students allocate their time accordingly, for example, by spending more time studying English in college than any other subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with fully face‐to‐face or online learning environments, implementation of hybrid learning spaces is costly given the spaces making all learning options available for learners. Therefore, decisions on investments in hybrid learning are critical for institutions. Satisfaction and experience of learners is one of the important indicators for assessing the cost‐effectiveness of learning space implementation; thus, predictions of learners' satisfaction and experience can inform institutions' decision making on learning space investments. Moreover, learning competences are found correlated with learners' satisfaction and experience in general and e‐learning settings. Therefore, the present study aimed at exploring predictive learning competences for hybrid learners' experience and satisfaction. A hybrid learning space was built upon a proposed model at Shanghai Open University. 211 students' learning competences and their satisfaction and experience in the hybrid learning space were examined. The results showed that except cognitive engagement competence, most predictive competences were not significantly associated with hybrid learners' satisfaction and experience. The findings indicated that since hybrid learning keeps all options available, to experience satisfying learning, students need not have certain competences but cognitive engagement competence, which is correlated with learners' cognitive ability to figure out the right mix of learning options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is central to successful teaching and learning. Despite extensive research on the relationship between feedback, pedagogy and learning, there remain no conclusive answers as to how feedback can be effectively utilized by learners. Recently, there is emerging research exploring how feedback is conceptualized as dialogic processes to facilitate provision and uptake of feedback; and how feedback utilization is best supported by learner active involvement in the iterative feedback process for future learning. Drawn from this knowledge base, this article aims to review four aspects of feedback scholarship including nature, paradigms, issues and trends which serve as a theoretical basis, together with instructors’ interviews, to inform how five common assessment tasks in one social sciences faculty could be strategically revamped to promote feedback utilization. The article concludes with pedagogical insights to suggest three conditions wherein feedback could be made sustainable to support learning through a redesigning of conventional assessment tasks in the higher education contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]