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The global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus brought about a true revolution in the predominant teaching-learning processes (i.e., face-to-face environment) that had been implemented up to that point. In this regard, virtual teaching-learning environments (VTLEs) have gained unprecedented significance. The main objectives of our research were to define an explanatory theoretical model and to test a multiple serial mediation model with four variables in series (one independent variable plus three mediators) to relate perceived utility (independent variable) in the use of a VTLE and perceived learning (dependent or criterion variable) in such contexts, taking into account the mediation of subjective norm (mediator 1), ease of use (mediator 2), and intention to use behavior (mediator 3), and using the extended technology acceptance model as the theoretical framework. Additionally, we aimed to analyze the direct and indirect relationships and effects among the variables that constituted the proposed model. Methodologically, the research can be classified as a cross-sectional causal ex post facto design. A representative sample of students enrolled in higher education institutions in the Dominican Republic was used as the research population, and a standardized Likert scale was administered to measure the five dimensions of the proposed model. Finally, it is worth noting that the obtained results indicate that all direct and indirect effects considered in the model were statistically significant, except for the indirect effect, where the four predictor variables were arranged in series to verify their influence on the criterion variable: perceived learning.

In April 2023, a group of 1 administrator, 5 faculty, and 20 students from the University of Louisiana Monroe (ULM) traveled to the Dominican Republic to participate in an interdisciplinary service-learning project lasting six days. Disciplines involved included pharmacy (2 faculty members and 9 students), physical therapy/kinesiology (1 faculty member and 5 students), social work (1 faculty member and 4 students), and political science (1 faculty member and 2 students). The home base for the group while in the Dominican Republic was Abba's House Children's Center, a nonprofit Christian organization tasked with feeding, educating, and providing limited medical care to approximately 125 children living in the barrio of Cienfuegos. During the service-learning experience, ULM students engaged in various service and learning activities tied to their programs of study. Students and faculty completed the "Community Service Attitude Scale" (CSAS) before and after the service-learning experience (Schwartz & Howard, 1977). A total of 14 students (70%) submitted both a pre- and post-trip CSAS survey. There was a significant improvement in scores for 21 out of 25 items on the CSAS. This international interdisciplinary service-learning program positively impacted students' attitudes toward community service including awareness of global needs.

Qualities of effective teachers matter because teachers are the number one school-related factor that impacts on student achievement. Although researchers in the United States have studied frameworks for evaluating teacher effectiveness, these frameworks are not focused on teachers working in international schools. Thus, they may not reflect the importance of understanding both the context of working in intercultural settings and the skills that allow teachers to flourish in international schools. Using a systematic configurative synthesis review of 23 studies, this study identifies qualities of effective teachers working in international schools through a synthesis of the study findings. We identified four key attributes that are emphasized, if not unique, in international school effective teacher research: a focus on teacher collaboration and teacher leadership; cultural awareness and responsiveness from multi-national perspectives; and host country language acquisition. Overall, we find that a focus on what makes an effective international school teacher is lacking in the extant research, particularly given the predicted enormous growth of international schools.

The relevance and importance that the topic of Digital Competences for Teachers (DCT) has gained is evident both in the field of training and in research, as can be seen by the increase in the amount of research and meta-analysis carried out on this topic. This article presents the results of an ex post facto research with a cross-sectional research design, based on a descriptive and hypothesis-testing approach. A total of 6,664 teachers from different Latin American universities participated in the self-knowledge they have regarding their Digital Teaching Competence (DTC) according to the DigCompEdu framework of the European Union. Among the results obtained, it is worth noting the intermediate level of digital competences reported by the teachers surveyed, with significant differences with respect to different key variables for their development. Therefore, we conclude by reflecting on the need to establish teacher training plans in this area.

Bullying is a relevant concept in education, composed by different dimensions and it is significantly associated to other variables. Therefore, there is a need for an instrument which can analyze the level of bullying as a single dimension, as the Cisneros Self-test on Bullying (Oñate & Piñuel, 2005). This instrument analyzes the intensity of bullying and to value its relevance on the different variables mentioned above. Our main goal was to validate this instrument in 531 Dominican secondary students. To validate it, we utilized two instruments: the Emotional Instability Scale (Caprara & Pastorelli, 1993) and the Prosocial Conduct Questionnaire (Caprara & Pastorelli, 1993). Several competitive structural models were estimated, and results supported the reliability and validity of this instrument. Therefore, we can conclude that the Cisneros's scale is a good instrument to measure global bullying. We highlight its influence on future interventions considering the relevance that bullying has on many other variables as aggressiveness, prosocial behavior or suicide ideation.

In this study, we present the results of a project, which involved students enrolled at four universities located in Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. The main goal of the project was to raise students' awareness about the conditions that cause epistemic injustice for migrants and refugees. Epistemic injustice is a concept that sheds light on the ethical dimensions of our epistemic practices. It recognizes that individuals can be wronged specifically in their capacity as knowers, a capacity essential to human value (Fricker, 2007). The project material included a set of interviews with migrants and refugees as well as desk research about the status of their national migratory contexts. Students exchanged their testimonies via extended sessions that took place between October and November of 2022. An ethics of listening was cultivated to disrupt conventions of authorized discourse about migrants. Through understanding that labels such as illegal, undocumented and unauthorized are not neutral descriptors but carry implicit association and value judgments that frame and influence debate, students were invited to engage in a form of communication and consciousness to create spaces for unheard, marginalized voices of migration trends (Lipari, 2010.) Our international research with students and migrants was influenced by Arjun Appadurai (2006) who invites us to question established paradigms and critically reflect on contemporary global dynamics of migration contributing to Sousa Santos 'ecology of knowledges' across continents and cultures (2015).

In the rapidly changing atmosphere of the global economy, productivity has become a very important concept for long-term economic growth, development, regional and global competitiveness, raising social living standards and increasing the level of welfare for countries. In the 21st century, when scientific knowledge, technology, innovation, R&D and entrepreneurship manifest themselves in every stage of the production process, human capital has come to the fore as an important and determining factor that increases productivity. In the current study, the effect of human capital, one of the most important outputs of education, on country productivity was analyzed for 24 developing countries, including Turkey, which are in the upper middle income group. In the application part, a panel data set was created for the 24 countries included in the study with the series obtained from the database of PWT10.0 for the period of 1980-2019. The Human Capital Index was used to reveal the human capital status of the countries included in the analysis and the Total Factor Productivity Index was used to reveal the productivity status. The Granger Panel Causality Test was employed to determine whether there is a short-term relationship and the Westerlund Panel Cointegration Test was employed to determine whether there is a long-term relationship between the two variables. As a result of a bilateral causality relationship was found between human capital and productivity in the short-term and a cointegration relationship in the long-term. The study is important and different from other studies in that it focuses on the concepts of human capital and productivity, which have a very limited place in the education literature, although they are directly related to education, and it is grounded on an interdisciplinary approach (bringing together education, sociology and econometrics).

Despite the region's strong historic connection to Christianity, little research exists on Christian universities in the Caribbean. To complicate matters, the Caribbean is also little studied in higher education literature generally. Thus, this study examines how Christian universities in this region operationalize their faith identities in their administrative decisions. Examining 15 institutions, this article presents the national higher education trends for the five Caribbean countries or territories with Christian universities: the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Following an overview of Christian influences and the state of higher education in the Caribbean in general, Christian higher education is examined within each country specifically. Regional trends point to the prominence of Seventh-day Adventist universities, even on traditionally Catholic-dominant islands. Furthermore, using the Operationalizing Christian Identity Guide, Seventh-day Adventist institutions operationalize their faith identity the most visibly in comparison with Catholic and other Protestant institutions. Finally, as a general trend, these universities appear to merge a model of private higher education designed to meet excess demand with their Christian identities, distinguishing them from their secular peers.

Objective: This study explored medical trainees' understanding of collaborative writing sessions in the Dominican Republic as a strategy to strengthen their technical writing and critical analysis skills in health education and communication. Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with seven medical trainees who participated in a series of collaborative writing sessions and published their articles in medical journals. Thematic analysis was used to study coded notes and identify salient themes with quotations and a conceptual model. Results: Five perceived individual- and programme-level enabling factors of the collaborative writing sessions were described: (1) detailed agenda, (2) direct mentorship, (3) effective teamwork, (4) personal investment and dedication, and (5) future vision. Conclusion: Study findings highlight that collaborative writing sessions with direct mentorship offers medical trainees a unique opportunity to acquire key written communication and analytical competencies and publish their articles, as part of their professional development. The incorporation of these valuable health education training exercises for health professional students can help develop an academic culture of writing and publishing on emerging global health topics.

Dominican-born children of Haitian descent are frequently excluded from the public education system in the Dominican Republic. Barriers to participation include poverty, discriminatory government policies, and structural barriers within school settings. Females of Haitian descent face additional barriers due to gender discrimination. The current study used modified grounded theory to analyze qualitative interviews from 32 Dominican females of Haitian descent to explore factors that promote and impede educational resilience. Barriers to school participation included: the economics of school integration and persistence, poor cultural and learning climate within school, and limited structural supports for female students who want to pursue education while pregnant, or raising children. Factors described as promoting educational resilience included: successfully balancing work and study from an early age, having supportive social networks, and holding strong beliefs about the future value of education. Findings challenge and inform dominant discourses about factors that impede and support educational resilience.

An earlier diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder might lead to an earlier intervention, yet knowledge and awareness of autism spectrum disorder in Latin America and Caribbean Countries are limited. A later autism spectrum disorder diagnosis has been associated with negative consequences, as it might imply later access to services. This study aims to identify factors associated with the age of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis as reported by 2520 caregivers of autistic children from six Latin America and Caribbean Countries. Results indicate that on average, caregivers were concerned about their child's development by 22 months of age; however, the diagnosis was 24 months later. Current age of autistic individuals, better language abilities, and having public health coverage increased the age of diagnosis. On the contrary, the presence of medical comorbidities, severity level, and type of diagnosis decreased the age of diagnosis. The age of diagnosis of autistic individuals in Latin America and Caribbean Countries corresponded to the start of formal schooling despite a much earlier age of first noticed developmental concern, highlighting the need to reduce this age gap and increase children's probability of benefiting from early intervention. Taken together, autism spectrum disorder personal/clinical characteristics and access to health service are the main determinants for the age of diagnosis.

The purpose of this study is to predict the mathematical literacy levels of the students participating in the research through the data obtained from PISA 2015 exam organized by OECD using data mining and to determine the variables that affect mathematics literacy. For this purpose, students' mathematics literacy levels and the variables that affect their mathematics literacy levels were analyzed separately for 6 different countries at different proficiency levels. The population of the research is 519334 students from 72 countries, who have taken PISA 2015 exam. The sample that was determined according to the purpose of the study consists of a total of 34,565 students from Singapore, Japan, Norway, the USA, Turkey, and the Dominican Republic, which have been observed to be at different proficiency levels. In the first stage of the study, analyzes were performed using data mining prediction methods. At this stage, WEKA program was employed and M5P algorithm, which is one of the most common methods, was used. In the second stage of the research, the output variable was predicted from the input variables using Artificial Neural Networks methods to determine the extent to which decision trees obtained by M5P prediction method produce valid results. In the analyzes carried out in MATLAB program, the relationship between students' actual math literacy scores and literacy scores predicted from input variables was examined. As a result of the study, the variables that affect mathematics literacy were found to be the socio-economic status index for Singapore, Norway, the United States, Turkey, and Dominic. On the other hand, the variables influencing mathematics literacy for Japan were found to be mathematics learning time and father's education level. The consistency of the results was as follows: 86.10% for Singapore, 40.26% for Japan, 30.10% for Norway, 39.15% for America, 26.43% for Turkey, and 29.24 % for Dominic. As a result of the study, a differentiation was found among the variables that affect mathematics literacy of the countries at different proficiency levels.

Positive personal characteristics such as happiness or wellbeing can motivate students to elevate their school performance in higher education. Orientation to happiness is a construct that combines three sources of happiness: pleasure, meaning, and engagement, all of which have been identified as a predictor of university students' engagement. However, most research in this area has been conducted during ideal situations or face-to-face education, and no crosscountry research has been published examining the relationship between these two concepts during the COVID-19 era, where online education was predominant. This study aimed to investigate the relation between orientation to happiness and student engagement after twelve months of distance education in a sample of 1723 students from six American countries, including the USA, Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Results indicate that university students' engagement is influenced by the orientation to happiness. Further implications of these results are discussed.

Globalization has been a motivating factor for institutions of higher education to reassess their mission statements and consider to how best prepare students for an increasingly globalized world (Green et al., 2008). As a result, universities are developing programs and initiatives to assist in this effort including on and off campus international learning experiences (American Council on Education, 2017). One of these initiatives is the field of education abroad. This narrative research study presents the experiences of university students who participated in an international internship and highlights the factors of their internship success and integration into the host community.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Open Educational Resources (OERs) has increased due to its advantages for academic activities and educational quality. Hence, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have sought to develop strategies to promote curricular and extracurricular activities that favor developing disciplinary and transversal competencies such as complex thinking and its meta-competencies: critical, systemic, scientific, and innovative thinking, oriented to favor problem-solving among students and the academic community. The main objective of this study was to analyze how using OERs in virtual education can promote the development of complex thinking as a transversal competency in higher education. We analyzed the content of 65 educational projects in a webinar aimed at promoting the adoption of OERs in the professional practice of the educational community. Each project had to comply with specific requirements, from the project's identification and description to measuring and evaluating the results and its impact and added value. Once all the projects were reviewed, the responses were classified into defined categories for better presentation; the sub-competency of complex thinking promoted by each project element was identified qualitatively. The results highlight how an OER can, through concrete activities, elicit complex thinking and its sub-competencies in higher education. The present study adds new evidence to the literature regarding boosting OERs as a tool to develop competencies aligned with UNESCO recommendations and contribute to fulfilling the Sustainable Development Goals in education.

This research presents the results of an exploration of special education teachers' understanding of how their participation in workshop-based digital storytelling (DST) would enhance their professional development concerning inclusive education. This study evaluates the usability of the Smart Ecosystem for Learning and Inclusion (SELI) platform for supporting teachers during the workshop-based digital storytelling process. We used a convergent parallel mixed-method research design approach with 47 secondary school teachers working with disabled people in the Dominican Republic. The results of this study indicated that the SELI smart learning platform had shown good usability in supporting teachers during the workshop-based digital storytelling pedagogical process. Besides, two themes emerge regarding how workshop-based digital storytelling can contribute to teacher professional development for promoting inclusive education. The resulting themes are expressing, listening, and learning through digital storytelling; and driving change with digital storytelling to create more inclusive environments. Teachers who participated in the interviews were optimistic about DST implementation. They expressed that the workshop worked for multiple ways of expression, listening from and connecting with other stories, and learning through DST. Teachers could reflect their idea about using DST in terms of its potential impact on inclusion in the classrooms for driving change, building meaningful learning, and influential practice when used in the classroom.

Myriad academic, situational, and organizational factors play an important role in parental decision-making for school choice. We propose a framework for how hot knowledge is processed through the lens of parents' own sociopolitical values (i.e., constraints) to inform preferences. This study employs 8 months of ethnographic case study data from the Dominican Republic to understand how parents make decisions in contexts where a school's values (liberalism) contrast with the majority belief of the community (traditionalism). We observe three primary choice rationalities, ranging from belief in the opportunities that liberal education can provide to rejection of the liberal option. This clash of values between a school and its surrounding community has implications for our understanding of which families may or may not choose to access nontraditional education around the globe.

While US and Dominican officials have traditionally received credit for the expansion of the public school system during the US military occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924, this article offers an alternative account by focusing on the role of guardians, or caretakers, in supporting and creating schools in this period. Drawing from sources from the Department of Public Instruction in the Dominican Republic and analyzing them "against the archival grain," I argue that Dominican guardians were pivotal to the expansion of the Dominican school system and key actors in shaping the educational landscape during this period. Not only did guardians construct and maintain most of the schools opened during the US occupation, but they also shaped school policy. Most significantly, through their grassroots efforts, guardians and other volunteers ensured that schools in the Dominican Republic continued to operate during the financial crisis of 1921 that bankrupted the school system.

Waiting rooms provide an ideal location to disseminate health information. In this mixed-methods study, we evaluated waiting room-based health education talks at two clinics in the Dominican Republic and explored recommendations for implementing this intervention in similar settings. The talks addressed noncommunicable diseases, sexually transmitted infections, family planning and gender-based violence. We conducted pre- and posttests to assess attendees' change in knowledge and conducted semi-structured interviews with a subset of them. We conducted a semi-structured focus group with educators. Analyses included Wilcox Signed Rank Tests and McNemar tests for pre- and posttests, conventional content analysis for individual interviews and transcript coding for the focus group. Patient participants were 69.3% female aged 39.6 years (SD = 13.5) on average at one clinic (n = 127) and 100% female aged 17.4 (SD = 1.3) on average at the second clinic (n = 24). Focus group participants (n = 5) had 4.8 years (SD = 3.3) of health educator experience on average. Pre- and posttests showed significant improvement (P < 0.05) across all talks. Qualitative interviews emphasized engaging, clear and brief content delivery with visual aids. The focus group highlighted the importance of patient-centered design with culturally concordant delivery and identified implementation challenges. Findings demonstrate that waiting room-based education talks improve knowledge and provide suggestions for similar interventions.

School or academic achievement is a relevant topic of study, as it is evidence of the learning achieved by the student. This study aims to explore a model explaining academic achievement while testing the mediator role of learning strategies, study habits and study attitudes. Research design was correlational. 1712 Dominican students from 12 to 20 years old (52.75% female) were sampled through cluster sampling. Data was recruited with a set of validated questionnaires, including measures of academic achievement (marks), learning strategies, study habits, and attitudes toward studies, school engagement, and academic support. Structural Equation Modeling was used to establish and test the mediational model. Main results show that learning strategies and study habits and attitudes play a mediator role between background variables as age, gender, cognitive or behavioral engagement, and students' academic achievement. Learning strategies and study habits play a central role in achieving a good academic performance, by mediating the effects of academic support and school engagement.

Several studies have been published on disengaged test respondents, and others have analyzed disengaged survey respondents separately. For many large-scale assessments, students answer questionnaire and test items in succession. This study examines the percentage of students who continuously engage in disengaged responding behaviors across sections in a low-stakes assessment. The effects on calculated scores of filtering students, based on their responding behaviors, are also analyzed. Data of this study came from the 2015 administration of PISA. For data analysis, frequencies and percentages of engaged students in the sessions were initially calculated using students' response times. To investigate the impact of filtering disengaged respondents on parameter estimation, three groups were created, namely engaged in both measures, engaged only in the test, and engaged only in the questionnaire. Next, several validity checks were performed on each group to verify the accuracy of the classifications and the impact of filtering student groups based on their responding behavior. The results indicate that students who are disengaged in tests tend to continue this behavior when responding to the questionnaire items in PISA. Moreover, the rate of continuity of disengaged responding is non-negligible as can be seen from the effect sizes. On the other hand, removing disengaged students in both measures led to higher or nearly the same performance ratings compared to the other groups. Researchers analyzing the dataset including achievement tests and survey items are recommended to review disengaged responses and filter out students who are continuously showing disengaged responding before performing further statistical analysis.

This study uses PISA 2018 data to analyze, from a multinational perspective, whether interest in environmental issues is a determining factor of science literacy. A relational survey model is used as a quantitative research design to analyze secondary data obtained from the PISA 2018 evaluation data of 98,306 students at the age of 15 in 15 different countries and economies. Several statistical tests, including t-test, multiple regression analysis, and artificial neural network analysis are employed. According to the results of the analysis, significant differences are found between the science literacy scores of students who are 'very interested' in the environmental issues in their country and those who are not at all interested. Similarly, significant differences are found between the science literacy scores of students who are 'very interested' in environmental issues in other countries and those who are not at all interested. In addition, students' relevance to environmental problems are factors that statistically predict students' science literacy in a significant way.

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative comparative analysis and correlational analyses to explore these relationships with publicly available data on socio-economic, cultural, and education conditions, and their association with PISA 2015 results in 49 countries. Findings show that gender and income equality, human development, and individualism were outcome-enabling conditions for PISA 2015 results, and gender equality was the most consistent of these conditions. These factors significantly moderated the relationships between education policy and PISA results. Implications for the identification of meaningful peer countries for comparative educational research, policy transfer, and the future expansion of PISA are discussed.

Parent participation in school management has been promoted as a strategy for holding schools accountable for education quality and outcomes. However, the evidence has proven inconclusive and limited in explaining mechanisms to affect student achievement. By using public school student data derived from the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015, this study examines how 1) participation of a student's own parents in school management, which would affect their learning support at home and 2) participation of a group of parents, which would influence school decisions and thus affect the learning environment at school, are associated with student achievement in Croatia, Georgia, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Korea, Hong Kong, and Macao. I found no evidence that parent participation in school management contributed to improving student achievement. Instead, depending on the country, a negative association is derived from either individual-level or school-level parent participation. The associations are not moderated by parents' socioeconomic status but by school's openness to parental engagement in some of the countries, indicating that what matters might not be participation per se but the degree of engagement. The findings underscore the importance of understanding mechanisms and conditions in which parent participation affects student learning in context to design effective participatory school governance.

A lack of cultural competence can negatively affect engagement among students, professionals, and countries worldwide. For the advancement of global health partnerships, pharmacy practice, and education, stakeholders, including pharmacy students, professors, and pharmacists, need to understand the political, cultural, economic, and health conditions affecting populations in all countries involved. This study explores the cultural factors necessary for fostering collaborations, specifically between the pharmacy faculties/schools in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and their counterparts around the world. First, it provides general information about Caribbean countries and territories, based on bibliographic research. It then presents cultural and health profiles from Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, aiming to inspire the establishment, enhancement, and support of alliances between these Caribbean nations and others worldwide.

Captioning of recorded videos is beneficial to many and a matter of compliance with accessibility regulations and guidelines. Like recorded captions, real-time captions can also be means to implement the Universal Design for Learning checkpoint to offer text-based alternatives to auditory information. A cost-effective solution to implement the checkpoint for live online presentations is to use speech recognition technologies to generate automated captions. In particular, "Microsoft PowerPoint Present Live" (MSPL) is an application that can be used to present with real-time automated captions and subtitles in multiple languages, allowing individuals to follow the presentation in their preferred language. The purpose of this study was to identify challenges that participants could encounter when using the MSPL feature of real-time automated captions/subtitles, and to determine what they describe as potential uses, challenges, and benefits of the feature. Participants were full-time faculty and administrators with a faculty appointment in a higher education institution. Data from five native English speakers and five native Spanish speakers were analyzed. Activities of remote usability testing and interviews were conducted to collect data. Overall, participants did not encounter challenges that they could not overcome and described MSPL as an easy-to-use and useful tool to present with captions/subtitles for teaching or training and to reach English and Spanish-speaking audiences. The themes that emerged as potential challenges were training, distraction, and technology. Findings are discussed and further research is recommended.

This article describes the ways in which study abroad experiences in international settings may help language teachers develop linguistic and cultural consciousness that ideally influence pedagogical practices in their home teaching contexts. Drawing upon the framework of critical multilingual awareness (CMLA; García, 2017), we describe three distinct study abroad programs designed to develop CMLA in pre- and in-service English as a Second Language (ESL) and bilingual educators. Findings indicate that, overall, participants in the three different programs demonstrated evidence of CMLA development with particular regard to awareness of language practices and sociopolitical contexts of language. We discuss how these projects, taken together, represent a unique focus for TESOL professionals engaged in international teaching experiences, and present considerations for those interested in designing and/or participating in such programs.

Trends toward short-term academic service-learning abroad necessitate programs designed to maximize effectiveness and measurement of outcomes. The current study sought to strategically foster and measure increases in global mindedness during an immersive community-based global learning program abroad. University students studying either Computer Science or Spanish collaborated to design curriculum and host a technology summer camp for junior-high students in the Dominican Republic. The semester before the two-week travel experience included extensive pre-departure preparation, collaboration, reflection, and communication among students, program directors, on-site program coordinators, and stakeholders in the host community. Results of pre- and post-tests using the Global Mindedness Scale indicate perceptions of five dimensions of global mindedness (i.e., responsibility, cultural pluralism, efficacy, global centrism, and interconnectedness) were significantly increased after participating in this program. Pre-departure activities, curricular design, and logistical elements of the program are discussed, along with recommendations for future research.

In the last decade, the Communicative Approach has taken an important position within the English language teaching world. Many countries have abandoned their traditional teaching methods to implement this approach. The objectives of this research were to analyze the transitioning to communicative activities in Teaching English as a foreign language in the Dominican Republic, to identify the communicative activities to which the students were more receptive, to research students' attitudes while developing communicative activities, and lastly, to analyze new strategies for successful communicative activities. To carry out the investigation, three interventions were carried out in the classroom where activities such as role-play, group work, mingle, information transfer, opinion sharing, and information gap were implemented. Two interviews were administered to learners. Participant observation was implemented as well as the teacher's diary and note-taking as a way of record the events. Interviews revealed that students had a great disposition towards group work as well as having conversations and activities that involved giving opinions. They also showed that close attention should be paid to activities that involve speaking in front of the class as they raised students' stress levels. According to students' performance and answers during the sessions, group work, information gap, and opinion sharing activities activated their motivation to a greater extent. Modeling and giving clear instructions was fundamental to overcome linguistic gaps that emerged during the sessions. The progressive integration of the target language was more convenient while implementing communicative activities.