STEM/STEAM education is an interdisciplinary pedagogical approach that cultivates skills in science (S), technology (T), engineering (E), arts (A), and mathematics (M) while also fostering 21st century skills like teamwork, problem-solving, critical thinking, and creativity in learners. Enhancing STEAM and 21st century skills for engineering students facilitates their swift adaptation to STEM/STEAM employment demands in the 4.0 industrial revolution and the ongoing digital transformation in Vietnam. This study aims to investigate the effect of STEAM project-based learning on the 21st century skills of 47 mechanical engineering technology students at a public university in Vietnam. The findings of a one-group pretest-posttest design and an analysis of engineering student groups’ STEAM project-based learning products revealed that there was a significant improvement in students' 21st century skills at a 95% confidence level. Among the three 21st century skills studied, engineering students’ collaboration skill showed a moderate effect size, while problem-solving and creative thinking skills demonstrated a large effect size after implementing STEAM project-based learning in the “Workplace Skills” course. Some significant limitations were identified, including (a) the lack of a comparison group, which may have influenced the difference between the pretest and posttest; and (b) the sustainability of 21st century skills developed through STEAM project-based learning in the “Workplace Skills” course was not investigated. Therefore, studying the effect of other factors on engineering students’ 21st century skills and exploring their sustainability were main recommendations for further research.

Assessing children’s development plays a crucial role in Early Childhood Education, enabling teachers to identify children’s progress across physical, cognitive, language, emotional, social, and aesthetic domains. Assessment enables teachers to design educational plans tailored to each child’s needs, create a positive learning environment, and support holistic development. In addition, assessment provides information for educators, schools, and parents to collaborate effectively in fostering children’s growth and learning. Despite its importance, the integration of experiential learning activities to develop competency in childhood development assessment for Early Childhood Education students in Vietnam remains underexplored. This study investigated the impact of organizing experiential learning activities to develop competency in childhood development assessment among third-year Early Childhood Education students at Ho Chi Minh City University of Education. We employed a one-group pretest-posttest experimental design involving 87 randomly selected students during the second semester of the 2023–2024 academic year. The methods employed included questionnaire surveys and an analysis of student activity products. The results showed significant improvement among students in competency in childhood development assessment after the intervention. This finding underscores the effectiveness of targeted instructional strategies—particularly experiential learning activities such as observation, problem-solving scenarios, and practical assessments—in enhancing students’ evaluative skills. This study provides valuable insights into teacher training reforms in Vietnam, emphasizing the need for practice-based pedagogical approaches to better prepare future preschool educators.

Online teaching has become an inevitable trend in education as technology and engineering advance. It is necessary to train and foster online teaching competence for lecturers at higher education institutions. This article uses the literature review and the theoretical method to analyze the existing proposals on models and frameworks of online teaching competency by many different authors worldwide. Based on the discovery of the commonalities and gaps between these perspectives combined with analyzing the characteristics of online teaching at the university level, the article proposes a framework of online teaching competencies for the higher education faculty along with relevant knowledge related to these competencies. This framework includes eight competencies with specific performance criteria. This article also builds a process for training online teaching competence for lecturers at higher education institutions. According to the PDCA deeming cycle, this process consists of three stages: planning, implementation and improvement to support lecturers in adapting to the virtual teaching environment.