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This study aims to comprehend vocational preservice teachers' recalled experiences with the Cooperative Problem-based Learning (CPBL) pedagogical approach in an entrepreneurship course and to reveal how these experiences will impact their future teaching practice. The course under study intends to improve preservice teachers' entrepreneurial attitudes while equipping them with the skills necessary to create a comparable teaching strategy at school after graduation.

This study used the semi-structured interview data to triangulate the qualitative data collected from the students' reflection journals. The data were thematically analyzed whereas the codes with comparable elements were combined, resulting in themes that describe the relevance of scaffolding used with each component of the MUSIC motivational model.

The results revealed that the student teachers who took part in the research stated in their comments how the scaffolds used in the CPBL sessions impacted their learning. Additionally, they could articulate the experiences that strengthened their perceptions regarding entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship education.

By implementing scaffolded CPBL in entrepreneurship course during the teacher preparation program, the preservice teachers would be able to put a similar approach into the practice of their future teaching profession in guiding students to accomplish instructional outcomes.

This study highlights the importance of providing more innovative practices for entrepreneurship education across teacher preparation curricula to help develop the skills necessary for entering the future profession. The findings also emphasize the value of scaffolding in PBL, including expert, peer and activity design scaffolding. It also completes the body of research indicating that PBL-based entrepreneur education instruction can help students develop their entrepreneurial skills and attitudes while also providing a great chance to improve their teaching abilities.

The construction industry is one of the major contributors of greenhouse gas emissions (UNEP, 2022), but it provides numerous valuable opportunities to contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (IPPC, 2023). Innovation within the industry and the adoption of sustainable practices are key to achieve this. This is possible with the contribution of highly knowledgeable professionals and skilled workers. However, different countries, including Malta are facing skill gaps and resource shortages. The purpose of this paper is to define the existing skill gaps and mismatches in climate change adaptation in the built environment in Malta. The research focuses on the positionality of the professionals working in the sector as they operate within a legal framework guided through various policies, and through their role and responsibility, they are in contact with the other stakeholders in the sector.

The data generation strategy used in this study involved a pragmatic approach through a mixed method research methodology, namely, interviews, a questionnaire and a focus group discussion. The three tier scaffolding approach in the data generation strategy allowed for a progressive validation of the data generated.

The research indicates that the professionals in the sector are aware of their roles and responsibilities to address climate change in their practices, and they have the disposition to acknowledge the need of continuous professional training. Moreover, this study points out that the professionals in the built environment sector are concerned about other gaps within the industry and not solely by skill gaps. Their responsibility to address climate change through greener solutions is often hindered by fragmentation in the system including bureaucratic procedures, clients’ demands, lack of enforcement and general education of the need to address and adapt climate change among the general public. The professionals appeal for an overhaul in the “culture” of the construction industry through a comprehensive rather than a piecemeal approach. This research puts in the limelight the need of a comprehensive strategy to address skill gaps and mismatches in accordance with the need for climate change adaptation as the ultimate challenge rather than addressing different issues separately within the sector.

The paper is to define the existing skill gaps and mismatches in climate change adaptation in the built environment in Malta. By identifying these skill gaps and mismatches, it would be possible to devise an action plan to iron-out such hindrances as part of a broader climate action adaptation strategy.

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

Prior research suggests that collaboration is key to sustainable community development and environmental management, and peer-to-peer learning (P2PL) may facilitate community building and collaborative learning skills. This study aims to examine the effect of P2PL on the enhancement of environmental management and sustainable development skills, community building and social capital (i.e. connectedness) and understanding of course learning objectives.

Quantitative and qualitative longitudinal survey data was collected in a sustainable development focused course offered at a large American public university that uses P2PL to explicitly facilitate community building and collaborative skills. Safety precautions and changing locational course offerings due to the COVID-19 pandemic in years 2020, 2021 and 2022 provided an opportunity to evaluate the impact of P2PL on these skills during both virtual and in-person formats. Additionally, this study compared in-course student evaluations with students taking other sustainable development-related courses with collaborative learning aspects to understand the wider effectiveness of this course structure.

This study finds that course format (virtual vs in-person) overall made no difference in either connectedness or conceptual understandings, and that students in both formats felt more connected to others than students taking other courses with P2PL. Scaffolding P2PL and supplemental peer support can yield improved connectedness and learning among students taking environmental coursework.

Sustainable development requires group collaboration and partnership building skills. Issues are consistently raised about the challenges to teaching these skills in higher education. The students and instructors in this research study identify P2PL strategies to address these challenges for in-person and virtual classroom settings.

Cushioning is a useful material property applicable for a range of applications from medical devices to personal protective equipment. The current ability to apply cushioning in a product context is limited by the appropriateness of available materials, with polyurethane foams being the current gold standard material. The purpose of this study is to investigate additively manufactured flexible printing of scaffold structures as an alternative.

In this study, this study investigates triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) structures, including Gyroid, Diamond and Schwarz P formed in thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU), as a possible alternative. Each TPMS structure was fabricated using material extrusion additive manufacturing and evaluated to ASTM mechanical testing standard for polymers. This study focuses attention to TPMS structures fabricated for a fixed unit cell size of 10 mm and examine the compressive properties for changes in the scaffold porosity for samples fabricated in TPU with a shore hardness of 63A and 90A.

It was discovered that for increased porosity there was a measured reduction in the load required to deform the scaffold. Additionally, a complex relationship between the shore hardness and the stiffness of a structure. It was highlighted that through the adjustment of porosity, the compressive strength required to deform the scaffolds to a point of densification could be controlled and predicted with high repeatability.

The results indicate the ability to tailor the scaffold design parameters using both 63A and 90A TPU material, to mimic the loading properties of common polyurethane foams. The use of these structures indicates a next generation of tailored cushioning using additive manufacturing techniques by tailoring both geometry and porosity to loading and compressive strengths.

This research addresses a need in early childhood education for evidence-based teaching strategies that build emotional self-regulation skills in young children. The intervention assessed in this study focused on increasing the emotion vocabulary of preschool-aged students.

This mixed-methods, quasi-experimental study evaluated the impact a dialogic reading approach combined with direct instruction of emotion words during a shared book-reading activity had on students' emotion vocabulary knowledge. The study was conducted in a licensed daycare center in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, with ten four- and five-year-old students. Pre- and post-session surveys assessed the intervention's impact on the students' receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge, and observation notes captured the students' responses to the intervention activities.

The results showed significant increases with small to medium effect sizes between the students’ pre- and post-session survey scores for both receptive and expressive emotion vocabulary knowledge, a strong positive correlation between the level of student engagement during the intervention and their emotion vocabulary assessment scores, and the impact other variables had on the intervention’s effectiveness.

This research provides information on a culturally adaptable and quickly learned teaching strategy that could be used to build emotional self-regulation skills in the early childhood classroom.

This research uniquely applies this intervention as a universal strategy with preschool-aged children.

This article describes an onboarding program created for liaison librarians at an academic library and details a replicable framework for effective implementation at other institutions.

This article outlines a month-long onboarding program that provides new-to-the-field and experienced librarians with support and structure as they learn the core competencies of liaison work, adjust to a new professional setting and grow in their practice as liaison librarians.

Information about onboarding practices across academic libraries, liaison librarianship within the library and information science (LIS) curriculum and the need for onboarding programs that provide a comprehensive overview of core liaison librarianship competencies is provided.

Onboarding programs specific to liaison librarians is an underexplored topic. This article emphasizes fostering community and skill development throughout the onboarding process to bolster confidence, engagement and retention.

Translanguaging is a language-related pedagogy drawing upon all resources within a learner’s linguistic repertoire, in contrast to conventional monolingual pedagogy. Most research about translanguaging concerns English-language learning in primary schools and secondary schools and overlooks psychology subject matter, higher education and countries in southeast Asia. This article reports a small-scale practitioner enquiry into translanguaging on an English-medium undergraduate research methods course for psychology students in Vietnam and into the usefulness of the Multimodalities-Entextualization Cycle as a conceptual framework for integrating translanguaging into the course.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with students and reflective journaling by the teacher, and the data were analysed in a hybrid deductive-inductive thematic analysis.

The first theme about teaching and translanguaging consists of the following subthemes: (a) enhanced communication, (b) increased awareness of language use, (c) supported interaction in class and (d) time and workload issues. The second theme about learning and translanguaging is subdivided into the following subthemes: (a) a new approach to learning, (b) beneficial for learning, (c) developing confidence in learning in English and (d) enjoyment of translanguaging. The conceptual framework underpinning the study was useful for designing and implementing translanguaging activities for the course.

The study is limited to one course and a small group of students in Vietnam learning English as a second language. It addresses limited research on translanguaging in psychology courses, higher education, and southeast Asia.

The study makes a valuable contribution to the teaching profession by offering practical insights into the application, benefits, and drawbacks of translanguaging for psychology and research methods subject matter.

Moreover, the findings lay the groundwork for potential influences on education policy, aligning with broader societal impacts.

The study makes a valuable contribution to the literature by delving into a relatively unexplored domain.

Examine how social studies preservice teachers conceptualize and enact critical historical inquiry.

Critical qualitative case study.

Differing conceptual understandings and had trouble infusing their practice with the critical theory learned in the university.

Examine how a core practice is bolstering the practice-theory connection in teacher education.

We applied a true-experimental randomized control posttest design to collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to compare the effects of the AR and traditional board games on students’ SDG learning achievements.

We applied a true-experimental randomized control posttest design to collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data to compare the effects of AR and traditional board games on students' SDG learning achievements.

Our analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that the effects of AR and traditional board games on the students' cognitive outcomes differed significantly, indicating the importance of providing a situated learning environment in SDG education. Moreover, the students perceived that the incorporation of the AR game into SDG learning improved their learning effectiveness – including both cognitive and affective dimensions – thus confirming its educational value and potential in SDG learning.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the effectiveness of different learning tools (AR and traditional board games) and to evaluate the importance of providing a situated learning environment through a true-experimental randomized control posttest design.