The United Nations promulgated Agenda 21 in 1992, thereby recognizing education as the pathway to a more sustainable future. The launch of education for sustainable development (ESD) activities and the growing number of related studies have created an urgent need for a thorough and comprehensive review of the field. Based on 2779 publications from the related literature in the SSCI index from 1992 to 2022, this study outlines the growth characteristics, research areas, and research methods, and conducts a statistical analysis of the contributing forces of countries, institutions, and authors to demonstrate that the literature is mainly generated in developed countries. Meanwhile, this study identifies ten core journals and finds that highly productive institutions are characterized by close relationships and long-term in-depth research and collaboration with authors. Finally, a combination of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) theme models, manual coding, and pyLDAvis visualization tools identified five research themes, including foundations of ESD research, environmental education, higher education for sustainable development, sustainable development capacity, and educational technology innovation. The intellectual structure of research in this emerging interdisciplinary field is revealed, and this study provides a reference for scholars in this discipline.

Inclusive education has become a central issue in global educational reform, advancing the agenda for educational equity and social justice. However, despite significant theoretical and policy developments, research in this field remains fragmented, and no coherent framework currently exists. This study analyzes 3663 SSCI papers published between 2000 and 2024, using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify 15 distinct research themes in inclusive education. By combining LDA with manual coding, four key research areas emerged: concept and connotation, macro needs and support, micro-level implementation, and implementation effects and challenges. These findings highlight the interconnections between policy, practice, and environmental factors shaping inclusive education. Based on these results, an integrated input–process–outcome–feedback (IPOF) framework is proposed to advance the understanding of inclusive education’s evolution, effectiveness, and implementation. This framework offers actionable insights for policymakers and educators, helping to promote inclusive education aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) and advancing global educational equity.

It is well known that the proper allocation of learning time is particularly important for promoting students’ academic performance. Based on the data from PISA 2018, this research used the method of threshold regression and quantile regression to explore the optimal length of learning time to promote the students’ academic performance. At the same time, this research also explored the heterogeneity of the effect of learning time on different academic levels of students. The results show that for four Chinese provinces and cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province, students who study in rural areas and private schools usually have longer learning time than students in cities and public schools. Moreover, it is suggested that there is no significant association between school quality and students’ learning time. The average learning time of students from the four Chinese cities and provinces is obviously longer than that in OECD countries. Moreover, it is found that the impact of learning time on academic performance across subjects is inverted U-shaped, and the optimal study time can be found in the learning of mathematics, science, and reading related subjects. As for the effect of learning time, the results showed that learning time commitment is more effective for students who are academically disadvantaged. At the same time, this study found that there is a relationship between students’ excessive learning time and students’ subjective well-being and attitudes toward learning activities. The non-cognitive factors can influence students’ academic performance gradually. According to the results of this research, it is suggested that students need to balance their learning time allocation against the appropriate learning time standards. Moreover, schools should adopt different learning time allocation schemes for students at different academic achievement levels. The teachers also should uphold a more scientific design of students’ after-school homework, and teachers and parents should also focus on improving students’ learning efficiency.

The literature has shown that teacher leaders’ self-identity is a crucial aspect of teacher leadership development. However, less is known about the factors that influence the development of teacher leadership identity in the Chinese education context. By conducting semi-structured interviews with 23 secondary school teachers and administrators, this study aimed to answer two questions: What are the factors influencing teacher leadership identity development, and how do these factors influence teacher leadership identity development in the Chinese education context? Research identifies diverse factors that can influence teacher leadership identity. The personal factors comprised a sense of responsibility, the teachers’ personality, personal working experience, beliefs about leadership capacity. The organizational-level factors included the relationship among organization members, the role of principals, the formal selection mechanism for teacher leaders, personal working capacity, time, and energy, opportunities for the emergence of leadership, the nature of teachers’ work, and the atmosphere of the school. At the societal level, national cultural values also influenced teacher leadership identity. This article provides practical experience of developing teacher leadership identity in the Chinese context and tries to supply the cross-culture understanding of education administration from the perspective of improving teacher leadership identity.

With the transformation of the knowledge production model, the research system of educational research is becoming more extensive, and academic collaboration has become an important productive method of promoting the sustainable development of educational empirical research. Given this situation, what kinds of relationships will sustainably improve educational empirical research output quality? Taking the influence of educational empirical research article as an example, we selected 4610 empirical research articles in 15 education journals for analysis, published between the years of 2015 and 2020. In the sustainable development progress of educational empirical research, the optimal scale phenomenon has been verified in cooperative research. Identity collaboration, institutional collaboration, international collaboration, and discipline collaboration were all found to have a strongly significant influence on the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research output quality. Meanwhile, the output quality of educational empirical research is affected by the heterogeneity of the number of cooperators and cooperating identities. These findings suggest that the optimal proportion of teacher–student collaboration should be 2–3, and the optimal scale of colleague collaboration should be 3–4. Compared with teacher–student collaboration, colleague collaboration, including cross-organization and interdisciplinary collaboration, was more conductive to enhancing the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality. According to these findings, it is reasonable to believe that, in the process of the sustainable development of educational empirical research, fine-guidance-style teacher–student collaboration and small-scale, cross-unit colleague collaboration should be promoted; meanwhile, strengthening the collaboration between normal universities, optimizing the quality of international collaboration, and promoting pedagogy intersection with other disciplines are also critical to promote the sustainable improvement of educational empirical research outcome quality.