Given the importance of student engagement for educational success, it is essential to explore how teachers can stimulate student engagement in online learning environment. However, relatively little research drawing from self-determination theory has examined the links between teaching motivations and student engagement. To this end, this study was conducted to survey 414 Chinese college students’ perceptions of teaching motivations, their own intrinsic and extrinsic motivations during the learning process, as well as their engagement with online learning. The findings indicated that the survey had satisfactory validity and internal consistency. Structural equation model revealed the interrelationships between autonomy-supportive teaching motivations, controlling teaching motivations, student intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and student engagement. The results showed that in online learning environments, autonomy-supportive teaching motivations and student intrinsic motivation were positively related to student engagement. Unexpectedly, controlling teaching motivations and student extrinsic motivation had no significant effect on student engagement. Moreover, the mediating effects of student intrinsic motivation including perceived autonomy, competence, and relatedness offered a deeper understanding of the association between autonomy-supportive teaching motivations and student engagement. The main findings and practical implications together are discussed in depth. Implications for practice or policy: Teachers could adopt autonomy-supportive teaching strategies and stimulate students’ intrinsic motivation as they have shown to be positive factors for student engagement. Developers and educators could enhance student engagement through nurturing inner motivational resources in online learning environment. Researchers could verify more factors that influence student engagement and clarify how they could be manipulated in future studies.

With the development of China, learning the Chinese language has received more and more attention from international students. Teaching Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) is crucial for spreading Chinese culture and promoting cultural exchanges. In recent years it has become the focus of attention of many scholars, and the heterogeneous cultural backgrounds and diverse language needs of learners determine that TCFL should promote the development of students’ intercultural communication competence in language practice with the use of educational technology. In this study, 82 preservice teachers as an experiment group and 64 preservice teachers as a control group participated in this study; this research aims to improve the quality and level of TCFL, using innovative teaching tools as a means to target preservice TCFL teachers and create a teaching–learning design strategy based on the smart teaching tools Moso Teach (MT) and Rain Classroom (RC). The findings from this research show the importance of the use of smart teaching tools and the improvement of preservice teachers during the experiment compared to preservice teachers with traditional methods. This paper answers the following questions: (1) How to improve preservice TCFL teachers’ competencies by integrating smart teaching tools into their learning process? (2) How to integrate technological, pedagogical, didactic, and social competencies into preservice teachers’ daily teaching CFL?

Academic self-efficacy is an important condition to ensure learning effectiveness and improve the sustainability of online learning quality. The present study intended to examine the relationship among online teacher support, academic procrastination, and academic self-efficacy by employing a questionnaire survey and structural equation modeling in the online learning environment. We report on survey data from N = 827 college students from China. The results showed the following: that online teacher support and its emotional, cognitive, and autonomy support dimensions have significant positive effects on academic self-efficacy, and it can predict the academic self-efficacy of college students through the mediating effect of academic procrastination. Therefore, in order to enhance the academic self-efficacy of online learners, it is crucial to increase online teacher support, provide guidance and motivation to online learners, reduce academic procrastination, and improve the emotional, cognitive, and autonomy support perceived by students in online courses and learning activities. The findings contribute to the exploration of the impact and mechanism of online teacher support regarding the academic self-efficacy of learners, providing theoretical and empirical support for enhancing academic self-efficacy in online learning and the development of a sustainable quality of teaching.

Group metacognition is essential for effective collaboration. However, existing research mainly focuses on individual metacognition in collaborative learning, and some studies focused on interpersonal metacognition. The understanding of group metacognition is limited. Less attention has been paid to how multilevel metacognition, including individual metacognition, interpersonal metacognition, and group metacognition, functions. There is also less research on whether group metacognition influences collaborative learning through other levels of metacognition. To investigate the emergence of multilevel metacognition among learners with varying achievement and its effects on group performance and regulation patterns, this study employed both traditional and process analyses to examine how the distribution and interactions of multilevel metacognition influence group performance and group regulation. The study revealed that in collaborative learning, group metacognition exerts the most significant influence on group performance compared to other metacognitive levels, such as individual metacognition and interpersonal metacognition. Specifically, the study identified three collaborative achievement categories by judging the degree of collaborative benefit based on individual preparation and group performance: H_T category, EF category and L_T category. The H_T and EF categories performed better and developed more group metacognition, while the L_T category exhibited poorer performance and less group metacognition. The study highlights the role of other levels of metacognition in forming group metacognition, with multilevel metacognitive interactions elucidating the mechanisms of group metacognition. These insights provide practical insights for multilevel metacognition and offers guidance for collaborative learning interventions, particularly those targeting group metacognition.