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This chapter presents empirical evidence on the effects of attributional retraining (AR), a motivation-enhancing treatment that can offset maladaptive explanatory mind-sets arising from adverse learning experiences. The evidence shows that AR is effective for assisting college students to adapt to competitive and challenging achievement settings.

This chapter describes the characteristics of AR protocols and details three primary advances in studying AR efficacy in terms of achievement performance, psychosocial outcomes, and processes that mediate AR-performance linkages. The psychological mechanisms that underpin AR effects on motivation and performance are outlined from the perspective of Weiner’s (1974, 1986, 2012) attribution theory.

Laboratory and field studies show that AR treatments are potent interventions that have short-term and long-lasting psychosocial, motivation, and performance benefits in achievement settings. Students who participate in AR programs are better off than their no-AR counterparts not just in their cognitive and affective prospects, but they also outperform their no-AR peers in class tests, course grades, and grade-point-averages, and are more persistent in terms of course credits and graduation rates.

This paper contributes to the emerging literature on treatment interventions in achievement settings by documenting key advances in the development of AR protocols and by identifying the next steps critical to moving the literature forward. Further progress in understanding AR efficacy will rest on examining the analysis of complex attributional thinking, the mediation of AR treatment effects, and the boundary conditions that moderate AR treatment efficacy.

While still early in the 21st century, nations are experiencing an unprecedented rise in people living into their 80s, 90s, and even longer. Many national leaders view with alarm a possible tidal wave of chronic age‐related disease and disability. Competing scenarios predict insurmountable social and economic stress; or alternatively, a future in which older people continue to function and contribute during extended healthy years of life made possible by scientific and medical advances. The latter vision, termed the 'longevity dividend', is discussed in terms of strategies for achieving this goal.

This paper aims to illustrate an application of Taguchi method of experimental design (TMED) for the development of a new ignition coil for an automotive vehicle.

The application of TMED for optimisation of manufacturing processes has been widely published in the existing literature. However, the applications of TMED in the design and development of new products are not yet widely reported. This case study presents the results of a designed experiment which utilises a 16‐trial experiment to study 14 design parameters and one interaction. The case study strictly follows a systematic and disciplined methodology outlined in the paper.

The optimal settings of the critical design parameters are determined. The optimal settings have resulted in increased customer satisfaction, improved market share and low defect rate in the hands of customers.

Although the optimal levels are determined from one large experiment, it was unable to determine the true optimal values of each design parameter.

Manufacturers may use TMED to optimise processes (either design or manufacturing) without expensive and time‐consuming experimentation. This case study demonstrates the true power of a well planned and designed experiment over the traditional varying one‐factor‐at‐a‐time approach to experimentation which is rather unreliable, not cost‐effective and may lead to false optimal conditions.

The paper provides an excellent resource for those people who are involved in the design optimisation of a new product.

A successful supply chain should ensure that all participating members benefit from the marketplace. To achieve this goal, the supply chain members need to improve their competences all the time, which requires a continuous learning process. Thus, mutual learning, through knowledge sharing between the different members, is a necessary approach to increase the competence of supply chain partners. To realise efficient and effective knowledge sharing in a supply chain, this paper aims to explore and formulate a model that supports an enterprise with its management of the supply chain members' knowledge resource sharing (herein referred to as “advanced practice” and includes two levels of knowledge – strategic and operational). The model is based on the theories of supply chain management (SCM) and case‐based reasoning (CBR).

This research follows a conductive and inductive cycle. Firstly, based on the learning expounded through an extensive literature survey regarding SCM and CBR, as well as available empirical applications, the conceptual model is designed. Then the primary stage evaluation will be discussed regarding the feasibility and refinement of the model towards its maturity.

To share knowledge along the supply chain is theoretically sound, but a difficult task to realise in practice, due to the complexity of knowledge sharing between the different organizations.

This research explores one of the important topics in SCM – knowledge sharing within a supply chain, and the model also extends and explores a new tool for this knowledge‐sharing process by applying CBR methodology.

The designed model in this research will provide a practice‐oriented vehicle allowing the supply chain members to share and apply their knowledge.

This research applies CBR in the domain of SCM, it both enriches the available approaches to supply chain performance enhancement and enlarges the application domains of CBR methodology.

Achievement motivation is not a fixed quantity. Rather, it depends, in part, on one’s subjective construal of the learning environment and their place within it – their narrative. In this paper, we describe how brief interventions can maximize student motivation by changing the students’ narratives.

We review the recent field experiments testing the efficacy of social-psychological interventions in classroom settings. We focus our review on four types of interventions: ones that change students’ interpretations of setbacks, that reframe the learning environment as fair and nonthreatening, that remind students of their personal adequacy, or that clarify students’ purpose for learning.

Such interventions can have long-lasting benefits if changes in students’ narratives lead to initial achievement gains, which further propagate positive narratives, in a positive feedback loop. Yet social-psychological interventions are not magical panaceas for poor achievement. Rather, they must be targeted to specific populations, timed appropriately, and given in a context in which students have opportunities to act upon the messages they contain.

Social-psychological interventions can help many students realize their achievement potential if they are integrated within a supportive learning context.

Lean Six Sigma (LSS) is a continuous improvement methodology used to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of processes. Although there are several articles published, only two have analyzed the literature from a bibliometrics perspective. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the LSS literature by bibliometrics, identifying its state of the art, scientific gaps and research trends.

Articles published up to 2016 in the database Scopus were investigated to identify the most significant articles, authors, journals, institutions and countries based on citation counting as well as the most frequent keywords and subject areas on LSS. Articles published in 2014, 2015 and 2016 were analyzed to point out scientific gaps and to identify eight main research trends on LSS.

The research trends are: “LSS implementation”, “Healthcare”, “LSS tools”, “Human factors”, “Expansion of results”, “SME”, “LSS combined with other methodologies” and “Education”. The research outcomes also point out the most significant articles, authors, journals, institutions and countries in LSS literature.

This research contributes to develop the state of the art of LSS and helps professionals as well as researchers to identify which issues new studies should address.

The performance of the literature is measured based on the number of citations and not on the number of published papers, and the bibliometric analysis covers the highest number of articles so far (319 articles). Besides, the identification of the main research trends on LSS is exclusively based on the most recent studies.

The goal of this review is to conduct an exploratory literature review on trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand how librarians are discussing trauma-informed approaches and their integration into professional practice.

The author reviewed materials indexed in selected EBSCOHost databases. Included materials from selected EBSCOHost databases were available to the author in full text, in the English language and about trauma-informed approaches in libraries. Items were excluded from this review if they were a review of another work, a thesis or dissertation, or letters to or from the editor.

Twenty-five publications were included in this analysis. Publications included described approaches in school libraries, academic libraries and public libraries. Key topics are racial trauma-informed practices, trauma-informed teaching, resisting re-traumatization, social work and the effects of workplace trauma on the library workforce.

Trauma-informed approaches are gaining popularity in a variety of disciplines as the world copes with the turbulent events of recent years. The practical implications of this review are to explore the emergence of trauma-informed approaches in libraries to understand the current publishing landscape on this topic.

While librarians are writing about this approach and some are incorporating it into their practice, an analysis in the form of an exploratory literature review to summarize this work has not been done. Understanding how libraries are incorporating this trauma-awareness and trauma-informed principles into the work is crucial for identifying the future approach to library services.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to determine the impact of feeling bored on managers' decision-making in the digital age under conditions of increased uncertainty by examining the role of personality trait openness and empirically testing such relationships within the context of retail middle managers.

Design/methodology/approach – Feeling bored was defined within a broader Decision-Making Process Model, which included the personality trait openness. An empirical study with retail middle managers was conducted to examine the relationships between feeling bored and decision-making competence (DMC). Regression models were fit to test whether feeling bored affects DMC and whether the associations were moderated by personality trait openness.

Findings – In the relationship between feeling bored and DMC, the moderating role of the personality trait openness was established. Results showed that feeling bored has a significant negative association with middle managers' confidence levels and risk perceptions when making decisions. Results also provided evidence that the learning component of personality trait openness plays a moderating role in the relationship between feeling bored and DMC. Most notably, the learning component of personality trait openness neutralizes the negative effects of feeling bored on managers' ability to remain appropriately confident when making decisions. In addition, the learning and inquisitive components temper the positive association between mood excited and risk perceptions. Limitations to the study are outlined.

Practical implications – Since trait openness (specifically its learning component) benefits decision-making contexts, it makes trait openness a worthy criterion to include when screening aspirant retail middle managers. The benefits of trait openness (specifically its learning component) for middle managers and their teams (especially when they are feeling bored) are indicated, since learning neutralizes the negative effect feeling bored has on appropriate confidence levels in retail management decision-making contexts.

Ukraine hosts thousands of international students for educational tourism, of which more than 18,000 Indian medical students were compelled to escape Ukraine under emergency conditions of war. This paper aims to examine their intention to return to Ukraine to complete their education based on an integrated theory of planned behaviour (TPB) framework with added constructs, i.e. risk perception, career anxiety, rescue and relief memory.

The data were collected from 26 February 2022 to 30 June 2022 in two phases and two modes. It was ensured that the respondents were strictly confined to Indian medical students who had travelled to Ukraine for educational tourism. SPSS 25 and AMOS 23.0 were used to analyse the data. The hypotheses proposed were statistically tested.

The analysis reveals that the extended TPB model resulted in a strong model and the empirical findings corroborate that the students’ attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control and career anxiety significantly and positively influence the students’ revisit intention (RI) while risk perception and rescue and relief memory have a negative influence on the RI.

The study provides timely insights and implications to the Ukrainian tourism industry, particularly educational tourism business and medical institutions under the present turmoil, which can also act as blueprint research for destinations with a similar unstable political background.

The primary value of this research work is that it provides an understanding of the intention of medical students (educational tourists) towards revisiting the war-hit destination of Ukraine.