Search Results (401)

This study investigates how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) can scaffold self-directed learning (SDL) in secondary classrooms. Focusing on the interaction between teacher facilitation and AI affordances, it examines and refines the Content–Response–AI&peers–Fusion–reflecT (CRAFT) framework as a practitioner-informed pedagogical scaffold for operationalizing aspects of the Process dimension of the Person–Process–Context (PPC) model. The study addresses a persistent gap between SDL theory and classroom practice by examining how learner agency can be cultivated within AI-supported learning environments. Adopting a qualitative multi-case study design, the research analyzed instructional practices, lesson artifacts, and reflective accounts from six experienced educators from a secondary school in Singapore across one academic year. Data were analyzed using a theoretically informed, hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis, enabling cross-case examination and iterative refinement of CRAFT in relation to the PPC model. Findings indicate that while generative AI supports goal setting, idea generation, and iterative feedback, the metacognitive and reflective dimensions of SDL remain underdeveloped without deliberate teacher mediation. Teachers remain critical orchestrators of AI and peer interactions, supporting disciplinary sense-making and learner autonomy rather than positioning AI as a standalone instructional aid. Overall, this study integrates a practitioner-informed and empirically refined pedagogical scaffold with an established theoretical model, offering a theoretically grounded, context-sensitive pedagogical guide for designing learning experiences that support opportunities for student agency. Full article

Organizations operating in dynamic and complex environments increasingly adopt operational excellence (OPEX) to improve performance, adaptability, and sustainability. Despite its widespread implementation, OPEX initiatives often fail. Existing research mainly identifies isolated failure factors but lacks integrative, practice-oriented frameworks that translate these findings into actionable strategies. This study addresses this gap through a systematic literature review focused on leadership and management aspects of OPEX adoption. Using structured searches across major scientific databases and defined eligibility criteria, empirical and case-based studies were analyzed. Failure factors were synthesized using grounded theory-based qualitative coding, resulting in three primary organizational dimensions: top management commitment and support (TMCS), training and education deficiencies (TED), and poor organizational culture (POC). Among these, insufficient top management commitment and support is indicated as the most frequent determinant of OPEX failure. Based on these findings, a leadership framework is proposed to mitigate identified failure factors. The framework combines practical strategic deployment through Hoshin Kanri with operational alignment via Gemba Walk practices, emphasizing organizational structure, cross-functional collaboration, and knowledge transfer. By bridging strategic intent and operational execution, the model aims to improve the effectiveness of OPEX initiatives, strengthen managerial awareness, support, and commitment toward OPEX adoption and enhance the successful adoption of sustainability initiatives. Full article

Blue-Green Infrastructure (BGI) is a systematically interconnected network of natural and semi-natural spaces. By integrating blue hydrological systems—such as rivers, wetlands, and retention ponds—with green vegetation ecosystems including urban parks, green corridors, and green roofs, BGI delivers multifunctional ecosystem services and represents a core paradigm of nature-based solutions. Leading international practices, such as Singapore’s Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters Programme and Denmark’s Copenhagen Sankt Kjelds Square climate adaptation project, have demonstrated that BGI plays a critical role in enhancing urban resilience, mitigating climate change impacts, improving human well-being, and supporting sustainable urban development. However, traditional BGI planning has long relied on a top-down, technocratic and administrative management paradigm. This approach frequently overlooks localized community needs and everyday lived experiences, giving rise to environmental injustices such as misallocated ecological resources, spatial marginalization, and green gentrification. To address these challenges, this study aims to clarify how public preferences can be effectively translated into hard planning constraints, while investigating whether and how a stakeholder-driven co-design approach can mitigate land-use conflicts and enhance spatial equity in high-density urban renewal contexts. Grounded in spatial justice and social–ecological systems (SES) theory, this study develops an institutionalized BGI co-design theoretical framework consisting of four sequential stages: stakeholder mapping, demand translation, conflict negotiation, and adaptive governance. Furthermore, a functional mapping mechanism is established to convert qualitative community demands into operational planning parameters. Based on qualitative text analysis of a high-density urban renewal case study, this research empirically validates the efficacy and applicability of the proposed framework. The findings indicate that embedding the diverse demands of non-dominant stakeholders and vulnerable groups into planning constraints significantly improves the spatial accessibility, equity, and inclusiveness of BGI, while strengthening urban governance resilience to future uncertainties. This research provides novel theoretical insights and actionable policy implications for optimizing spatial governance and advancing equitable BGI planning in high-density cities. Full article

Iran’s scientific community faces a number of institutional, economic, political, cultural, and organizational challenges. This study examines how these challenges are experienced by PhD candidates and how participants understand their causes, responses, and consequences. A qualitative Grounded Theory approach was used. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with eight PhD candidates from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Tabriz. Data collection and analysis were carried out alongside each other through open, axial, and selective coding. The analysis identified “Challenges of the Iranian Scientific Community” as the core category and linked it to causal conditions, contextual conditions, strategies, and consequences. The findings show how different problems can come together in participants’ academic lives and shape the way they respond to the conditions surrounding their scientific work. Full article

Animal-Assisted Crisis Response (AACR) is a specialized form of crisis intervention in which trained handlers and therapy dogs provide emotional support following crises and disasters. Although previous research has examined AACR, less is known about the contribution of the human–canine partnership. This study explored the human–canine partnership and its perceived role in effective crisis response and canine welfare. This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews and demographic surveys. Twenty-one crisis responders participated, and interview data were analyzed using Charmaz’s grounded theory approach. Findings suggest that participants perceived a highly trained handler, a carefully selected dog, and the quality of their partnership as important components of effective AACR practice. Canine welfare emerged as a fundamental component of the human–canine partnership, with participants emphasizing the handler’s role in recognizing canine stress cues, safeguarding welfare, and cultivating a strong partnership with the dog. Although bringing a dog to a crisis scene presents practical challenges, participants also described benefits for the team and improved engagement with trauma survivors. These findings support conceptualizing AACR as a welfare-centered human–canine partnership in which handler expertise, canine suitability, and attention to welfare are perceived as important components of effective and ethical crisis-response practice. Full article

Public participation plays a crucial role in modernizing urban renewal and advancing social sustainability; however, micro-renewal practices often navigate complex institutional coordination and varying levels of community engagement. To better understand these operational dynamics, this study adopts an institutional–behavioral analytical framework to examine how institutional mechanisms shape public participation, grounded in an empirical investigation of pocket parks in Shenyang, China. Integrating policy text analysis with 20 in-depth interviews framed within a citywide baseline of 3198 pocket parks, qualitative content analysis reveals that coercive, mimetic, and normative institutional pressures foster three distinct implementation pathways: Mandate-Driven, Exemplar-Driven, and Collaborative Co-governance. These pathways generate differentiated behavioral responses across four key stakeholder cohorts, while highlighting specific alignment opportunities regarding governance timing, feedback channels, and inter-departmental roles. To resolve these operational friction points and secure long-term social and institutional sustainability, we propose a full-lifecycle governance strategy offering group-tailored policy recommendations. This research bridges neoinstitutional theory with participatory spatial governance, providing actionable insights for advancing sustainable urban micro-renewal and stock space management. Full article

This study develops a modular framework for the diagnostic application of microfoundational theory to examine how individual-level actions aggregate into macro-level technological capabilities and operational performance in innovation intermediaries within emerging economies. Grounded in Coleman’s bathtub model and the Viable System Model, we dissect three interdependent modules to diagnose systemic issues within institutional voids. Methodologically, we conduct a qualitative critical case study of a centenary Brazilian Research and Technology Organization, utilizing semi-structured interviews across three distinct organizational levels—senior executives, unit heads, and research leads—triangulated with eleven institutional management documents (2019–2024) through categorical content analysis. Theoretically, this research aims to establish a conceptual taxonomy that synthesizes Coleman’s micro–macro link, potentially serving as an analytical baseline for future cross-context evaluations of innovation intermediaries while exploring how meso–micro actions co-evolve with ecosystem-level environments. Practically, this study seeks to offer actionable governance levers for managers and policymakers, illustrating how the strategic deployment of dedicated internationalization units to buffer external complexity and the targeted cultivation of soft competencies in senior research leads may help overcome collaborative network isolation within late-development settings. Full article

Against the backdrop of high-quality development in rural tourism, issues such as landscape homogenization and insufficient coordination among diverse stakeholders have become increasingly prominent, creating a marked disparity with the requirements for distinctive and differentiated development in rural revitalization. This paper aims to investigate how actor-networks drive the dynamic evolution of rural tourism landscapes through translation mechanisms, and to illuminate the agentic role of non-human elements in this process, thereby addressing the core question of why the same set of local resources generates distinct landscape forms across different developmental stages. To this end, this study takes the Mayangxi Ecotourism Area in Fujian as a case study and, drawing on actor-network theory, employs qualitative research methods including in-depth interviews, participant observation, and grounded theory to systematically analyze the phased evolutionary characteristics, actor-network translation logic, and underlying operational mechanisms of rural tourism landscape creation. The findings reveal that: (1) the creation of the Mayangxi rural tourism landscape has successively undergone three major developmental stages—landscape construction, landscape integration, and landscape optimization—during which human and non-human actors, through a complete translation mechanism, drive the continuous iteration of the actor-network, with non-human elements playing a significant agentic role throughout the landscape’s evolution; (2) the local landscape creation has formed a closed-loop operational mechanism of “base activation → network construction → network iteration → sustainable operation,” which effectively supports the sustainable development of rural tourism landscapes. This study addresses the analytical limitations of existing rural landscape research, which tends to focus on human-centered interactions while overlooking the value of non-human elements, expands the application boundaries of actor-network theory in the field of rural tourism, and provides practical guidance for differentiated landscape creation in China’s rural tourism development. Full article

Customer customization and high-mix, low-volume production have increased operational complexity and sustainability pressures in global apparel supply chains. Although artificial intelligence (AI) improves visibility, forecasting, and decision support, limited research explains how AI-generated intelligence is translated into coordinated organizational action in labor-intensive manufacturing. This study examines how strategic flexibility, manufacturing flexibility, AI-enabled operational intelligence, and human expertise interact in the enactment of Human-Centered Supply Chain Agility (HCSA) in customized apparel manufacturing. An exploratory qualitative design was employed using semi-structured interviews with 13 senior managers and executives from apparel manufacturing firms operating in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Reflexive thematic analysis identified seven interrelated themes: customer customization and operational uncertainty, strategic flexibility, manufacturing flexibility, AI-enabled operational intelligence, human expertise, AI–human complementarity, and coordinated organizational response. Participants reported varying levels of engagement with AI-assisted and broader digital systems. Where AI-supported tools were used, they primarily provided enhanced visibility and analytical support, while experienced managers remained responsible for contextual interpretation, priority setting, exception handling, and implementation decisions. Participants associated these digitally supported and human-centered processes with more efficient resource use, reduced operational waste, organizational resilience, and more responsible managerial decision-making. Rather than proposing a new theory, this study offers an empirically grounded, process-oriented interpretation of how established agility capabilities are enacted in AI-enabled customized apparel manufacturing. Full article

Teacher learning presents a unique cognitive challenge: educators must simultaneously develop mathematical expertise and pedagogical knowledge for teaching. This study examines how interactive worked examples function as cognitive tools to support this dual learning process. Using a qualitative, exploratory case-study design, I investigated how 30 in-service mathematics teachers engaged with interactive worked examples of non-routine problems in a professional development setting designed to reduce extraneous cognitive load while promoting germane processing. Drawing on Cognitive Load Theory, expertise development frameworks, and recent perspectives on cognitive offloading and affective engagement in multimedia learning, I analyzed the cognitive and emotional mechanisms underlying teachers’ acquisition of both mathematical content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. Results from teachers’ journals, reflective protocols, and self-assessed cognitive load measurements reveal three key findings: First, teachers experienced analyzing worked examples not as passive observation but as active problem-solving, engaging in self-explanation and schema construction. Second, the interactive format enabled them to discover new mathematical relationships and solution strategies that were previously unavailable to them. Third, and notably, teachers simultaneously developed pedagogical insights—recognizing instructional approaches and anticipating student difficulties—while working through the mathematical content. These findings extend worked example theory by demonstrating that carefully designed interactive examples can support dual-domain learning in professional contexts. By managing cognitive load through scaffolded interactivity, worked examples enable teachers to construct both mathematical and pedagogical schemas concurrently, suggesting a cognitively efficient pathway for teacher professional development. Given the study’s exploratory, single-setting design, these mechanisms are offered as a theoretically grounded account to be tested in future comparative research rather than as definitive causal claims. Full article

Environmental interpretation (EI) in protective forests remains an underexplored field, despite its demonstrated potential for fostering emotional place attachment and conservation attitudes. This study aims to design and evaluate in situ the “Magical Portal of Biodiversity and Culture” self-guided interpretive trail at the “Los Arrayanes” Protective Forest (16 ha, Montúfar Canton, Carchi Province, Ecuador), a native arrayan forest (Myrcianthes hallii) deeply rooted in the ancestral territory of the Pasto-Tuza people, and to formulate educommunicational strategies. The trail design is grounded in Tilden’s interpretive principles, Morales’s topic–theme structure, and Ham’s TORE model, and it formulates Environmental Education and Communication Strategies. A qualitative, multimethod design was employed, with in situ field observation, participatory action research (PAR) workshops with the de Monteverde community, and in-depth interviews with seven key informants (March–April 2026); data were analyzed through the hermeneutic interpretive method and validated through categories, method, and theory triangulation, member checking, and researcher reflexivity. The analysis yielded five emergent categories: (1) vital and heritage place attachment; (2) psychological restoration and sensory reconnection; (3) environmental curiosity and empathy; (4) situated conservation learning; and (5) community governance and intergenerational education. Additionally, it identified six educommunicational strategies: (1) sensory learning; (2) storytelling; (3) participatory interaction; (4) guided self-learning; (5) situated learning; and (6) the biocultural approach. These findings provide empirical evidence that biocultural interpretation promotes conservation attitudes and community participation. In practical terms, this research offers protected-area managers, community organizations, and interpretation planners a model replicable for designing self-guided interpretive trails in biodiverse territories where living biocultural heritage is at risk. Full article

Background: Polypharmacy remains a significant challenge, often leading to adverse drug events and increased healthcare costs. One effective strategy to mitigate these risks is deprescribing, the systematic and intentional discontinuation or reduction of medications. Despite growing recognition of deprescribing’s importance, limited research has examined the impact of interprofessional education interventions on developing deprescribing competencies among healthcare professional students. This study aims to examine the perspectives of healthcare students, including student pharmacists, medical students, and nurse practitioner students, regarding their roles and responsibilities in the deprescribing process. Methods: Following completion of a Deprescribing Interprofessional Education Simulation activity (DIPE-SA), participants were invited to join focus groups. The study included students from the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) Colleges of Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy. Constructivist Grounded Theory (CGT) underpinned the qualitative research approach, informing the development of the study framework. Each focus group was facilitated by two researchers and recorded. Recruitment continued until saturation was achieved. Data were transcribed verbatim and analyzed for themes using Dedoose, qualitative analysis software. Results: A total of 19 participants attended four focus groups. Three major themes emerged and guided the development of the Roles–Collaboration–Communication (RCC) interprofessional framework. The first theme, roles, focuses on the unique responsibilities and functions healthcare professionals assume within the team and throughout the deprescribing process. The second theme, collaboration, emphasizes coordinated efforts and shared decision-making among members of the interprofessional healthcare team in deprescribing. Finally, the third theme, communication, highlights the importance of effective information and intention exchange, serving as both a mediator and connector, linking roles and collaboration, and ultimately enabling successful deprescribing. Conclusions: This study’s findings, together with the RCC interprofessional framework, demonstrate the interplay of roles, collaboration, and communication in medication management. The RCC framework highlights the value of dynamic team processes for achieving safe and effective deprescribing, which in turn improves patient care and health outcomes. Full article

This article traces how nontraditional preservice teachers experience the mediation of academic research writing, and how the transition from mediation to independence unfolds in their accounts when the supporting structure is withdrawn. The case centers on the first research seminar of a teacher education program in which 13 experienced paraprofessionals, most of them the first in their families to enter higher education and carrying long histories of academic difficulty, design and write a structured self-regulation intervention study with a pupil. From a qualitative analysis of three retrospective focus groups, five themes were constructed: (1) arriving with academic apprehension; (2) holding the standard as recognition; (3) the graduated scaffold of the first seminar; (4) concentric circles of mediation and support; and (5) the abrupt fading of the scaffold in the move toward independence. The findings highlight that participants valued scaffolding not only for the support it provided but for the way responsibility for the work was gradually handed over. Despite this gradual structure, the handover toward independence was experienced by some students as an abrupt, sudden transition, which provoked ambivalent feelings. The discussion proposes two participant-grounded sensitizing concepts, the effort ladder and the concentric circles of mediation, as interpretive lenses for scaffolding theory. We discuss the unresolved tensions that participants hold between the importance of high academic standards and the need for accommodations, and the implications for teacher education. Full article

The rapid emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools has significantly transformed academic writing practices in higher education. While AI technologies offer potential support for language learners, they also raise concerns regarding academic integrity and the erosion of students’ critical thinking, particularly in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) classrooms where writing development and independent reasoning are core learning outcomes. This study explores Saudi TESOL teachers’ strategies for balancing AI use with academic integrity and critical thinking in Saudi higher education. Using a qualitative research design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 EAP instructors at four Saudi universities. Data were analysed thematically to identify and interpret patterns of AI use and academic integrity challenges across participants’ responses. A tripartite framework integrating sociotechnical systems theory, academic integrity scholarship, and critical thinking pedagogy provides a theoretical lens for understanding teacher-mediated AI integration in TESOL contexts. Thematic findings revealed that teachers hold an optimistic yet cautious view of AI highlighting the critical role of guidance and reflection in AI-mediated environments. They employ an emergent, four-dimensional Connect–Guide–Reflect–Assess (CGRA) pedagogical framework to manage the tension between AI and integrity in language classrooms. They demand a shared responsibility between teachers and institutions through clear and consistent AI policies for curriculum, assessment and faculty professional development. This study contributes empirical, practitioner-generated evidence of how TESOL teachers in the Saudi context navigate AI in EAP classrooms. Grounded in participants’ accounts, the proposed CGRA framework offers language educators, curriculum designers, and institutional policymakers a replicable approach for navigating the AI era. Full article

This paper concerns a three-cycle design research that explores the feasibility of designing a learning environment that could support preschoolers to (a) build basic ecological knowledge and (b) develop familiarity with the concept of sustainability and other socio-environmental concepts that might contribute to their socio-environmental awareness. We focus on the third research cycle, emphasizing the implementation of the learning environment and the resulting ‘design theory’ for combining biology and sustainability education at young ages. Grounded in constructivism, our design utilizes approaches like ‘problem-posing,’ ‘possible futures,’ and ‘problem seekers–problem solvers–action takers’ as design principles. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the pre-/post-interviews with the 30 participating preschoolers indicated improvements in their ecological understanding as well as in their familiarity with sustainability-related concepts. Moreover, the iterative design process led to the articulation of the ‘Concept-As-a-Tool’ (CAT) strategy, a design theory that conceptualizes sustainability as a decision-making tool connecting ecological knowledge and socio-environmental action-oriented thinking in early childhood education. The findings provide initial support for this design theory within the context of the present study. Full article