Future Orientation in Education: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective

Future orientation refers to how people imagine, value, and prepare for what lies ahead. In educational contexts, it supports motivation, self-regulation, engagement, and choice-making, shaping pathways from early learning to adult upskilling. The capacity to think ahead develops across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood alongside cognitive, emotional, and social growth, and is continually influenced by family resources, school climates, peer cultures, and socio-economic opportunity. In times of rapid technological change, uncertain labor markets, and widening inequalities, helping learners build realistic yet hopeful future visions is both an educational and societal priority. Understanding when and how education fosters future-oriented thinking can inform practices that promote well-being, persistence, and equitable participation across the life span.This Research Topic seeks to integrate and advance research on future orientation in education through a life-span developmental perspective. While maintaining an interdisciplinary outlook, the primary theoretical and methodological home of this Research Topic is developmental and educational psychology. We aim to attract contributions that explain how future-oriented thinking emerges and changes across development, how it is shaped by educational contexts, and which psychological mechanisms link it to learning, motivation, self-regulation, engagement, achievement, persistence, and well-being.Despite a growing literature, findings are often siloed by age group, setting, or construct (e.g., time perspective, future thinking, possible selves, hope, agency, career adaptability), limiting cumulative knowledge and translation into practice. We therefore invite manuscripts that connect these constructs within developmental frameworks and clarify their educational relevance across ages and cultural contexts. Contributions should also address robust measurement across developmental stages and settings, and identify actionable levers for educators, guidance services, and interventions to strengthen learners’ goal-setting, planning, persistence, and adaptive functioning in the face of uncertainty.We invite manuscripts addressing future orientation in formal, non-formal, and informal education from early childhood through older adulthood, with a clear focus on developmental and educational psychological processes. Topics of interest include:• Developmental trajectories and key transitions (school entry, track choice, higher education, vocational pathways, workforce entry, career change, lifelong learning);• Measurement development/validation and cross-cultural comparisons;• Person-centered profiles and heterogeneity;• Links with motivation, self-regulation, achievement, persistence, identity processes, and mental health in educational populations;• The role of teachers, families, peers, and institutional climates; • Digital and AI-related contexts shaping future imaginaries;• Evaluation of guidance, curriculum, or intervention programs within educational settings.We welcome quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, longitudinal, and intervention studies, as well as systematic reviews/meta-analyses, methodological papers, and theory or perspective articles with clear implications for educational practice and policy. Out of scope are studies that are specifically clinical (e.g., treatment-focused psychotherapy outcomes, clinical samples recruited primarily in mental health services) or manuscripts whose main focus falls outside education and developmental/educational psychology (e.g., purely medical, neurobiological, or macroeconomic-political analyses without a clear educational and developmental psychological framing). Topic editors: Paolo Bozzato, Valentina Lucia La Rosa, Arooj Arshad Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78068/future-orientation-in-education-a-life-span-developmental-perspective