Preface

Learning, Well-Being and Change: Research in Education Sciences, Psychology and Sport Science. 
Preface

This volume brings together a selection of papers presented at the 84th International Scientific Conference of the University of Latvia, gathering the work of researchers from education sciences, psychology and sport science. Read together, the contributions collected here trace a single underlying question from many directions: how do people learn, adapt and flourish as the technologies, institutions and societies around them change. The chapters that follow move from the classroom to the clinic, from historical policy to present-day practice, and from the printed page to artificial intelligence, but they are held together by a shared commitment to evidence-based understanding of human development across the lifespan.

A first cluster of papers examines how literacy, understanding and classroom practice are built and supported. Olga Lezina, Julija Svitaja and Antons Kutuzovs open the youngest end of this continuum with their corpus-based analysis of the frequency of consonant combinations in the Latvian language, proposing a linguistically informed route to speeding up early reading instruction. Anita Āriņa and Elita Stikute move to upper-secondary education, showing how an interdisciplinary reading of Anshlav Eglitis’ (Anšlavs Eglītis) novel The Shameless Old Men, combining time-perspective theory, existentialist philosophy and personality development, can deepen literary literacy and students’ reflection on their own lives. Vitnija Kokoreviča and Dita Nīmante turn from text to classroom interaction, offering a systematic literature review of how novice teachers manage their classrooms and how these practices relate to student behaviour. Fatma Yaşlı Şen, joining the volume from Eskişehir Technical University in Türkiye, contributes a methodological advance for the field, proposing an integrated DEA–fuzzy logic framework for evaluating curriculum performance under the uncertainty that characterises real curricular decisions.

A second cluster looks at access, inclusion and the historical and institutional conditions of education. Agnese Gromova-Ķūrena and Ieva Margeviča-Grinberga revisit the years 1991–2004 to show how part-time studies functioned as an early instrument of equal educational access during Latvia’s post-socialist transformation, offering a historical perspective that informs current distance and blended learning policy. Toma Naumčiuk complements this historical thread from the Lithuanian side, using oral testimony to reconstruct how adults learned English after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence and what the Soviet-era legacy meant for language education in the Baltic states. Turning to the present, Ireta Čekse and Aija Nīlendere ask whether teachers are prepared for the multicultural classroom, examining intercultural competence and pedagogical collaboration through the lens of the Iceberg Model of Culture, while Antra Roskoša and Diāna Rūpniece study the integration of international students at Riga Technical University, bringing Maria Montessori’s pedagogical principles to bear on a distinctly contemporary, multicultural, higher-education setting.

A third cluster shifts the focus inward, to well-being, psychology and the human response to change and uncertainty. Liene Vītola proposes the integration of the PERMA model of positive psychology with coaching methodologies as a framework for protecting the well-being of both teachers and students in demanding twenty-first-century classrooms. Elīza Šenberga and Elīna Zelčāne bring a clinical health-psychology perspective, examining the association between mindfulness and pain catastrophizing among 324 migraine patients. Marta L. Ziņģe and Sanita Šaitere look at the intersection of neurodiversity and technology, studying how ADHD traits and attitudes toward artificial intelligence relate to job crafting among working adults, and Juris Dzelme closes this cluster with a wide-angled reflection on the transformation of society under advancing artificial intelligence, arguing that the formation of attitudes and cooperative relations between people and AI must become a central task of education.

Finally, Sandra Krūma and Rihards Parandjuks extend the volume’s concern with human development into the domain of the body, evaluating the compatibility of the World Athletics Kids’ Athletics programme with Latvia’s Skola2030 curriculum and tracking its effects on children’s physical fitness between 2022 and 2025, a reminder that the well-being this collection is concerned with is physical as much as cognitive and emotional.

This volume reflects the breadth and the coherence of research now being conducted at the intersection of education, psychology and sport science: attentive to the individual learner and patient, yet alert to the historical, institutional and technological forces that shape what learning, teaching and well-being mean today. We thank all the authors for their contributions and their patience through the review process, and we hope readers will find in these pages both specific findings to build on and a broader sense of the questions our field is now asking.

Prof. Linda Daniela

In: Human, Technologies and Quality of Education, 2026. Proceedings of Scientific Papers = Cilvēks, tehnoloģijas un izglītības kvalitāte, 2026. Rakstu krājums.  Ed. L. Daniela. Riga: University of Latvia, 2026. 236 p.
ISBN 978-9934-36-685-7 
https://doi.org/10.22364/htqe.2026