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Challenges associated with ensuring the accuracy and reliability of cost estimation of highway construction bid items are of significant interest to state highway transportation agencies. Even with the existing research undertaken on the subject, the problem of inaccurate estimation of highway bid items still exists. This paper aims to assess the accuracy of the cost estimation methods employed in the selected studies to provide insights into how well they perform empirically. Additionally, this research seeks to identify, synthesize and assess the impact of the factors affecting highway unit prices because they affect the total cost of highway construction costs.

This paper systematically searched, selected and reviewed 105 papers from Scopus, Google Scholar, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Transportation Research Board (TRB) and Science Direct (SD) on conceptual cost estimation of highway bid items. This study used content and nonparametric statistical analyses to determine research trends, identify, categorize the factors influencing highway unit prices and assess the combined performance of conceptual cost prediction models.

Findings from the trend analysis showed that between 1983 and 2019 North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East contributed the most to improving highway cost estimation research. Aggregating the quantitative results and weighting the findings using each study's sample size revealed that the average error between the actual and the estimated project costs of Monte-Carlo simulation models (5.49%) performed better compared to the Bayesian model (5.95%), support vector machines (6.03%), case-based reasoning (11.69%), artificial neural networks (12.62%) and regression models (13.96%). This paper identified 41 factors and was grouped into three categories, namely: (1) factors relating to project characteristics; (2) organizational factors and (3) estimate factors based on the common classification used in the selected papers. The mean ranking analysis showed that most of the selected papers used project-specific factors more when estimating highway construction bid items than the other factors.

This paper contributes to the body of knowledge by analyzing and comparing the performance of highway cost estimation models, identifying and categorizing a comprehensive list of cost drivers to stimulate future studies in improving highway construction cost estimates.

This conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.

Because of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.

Authors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.

This study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

In the realm of education, there has been an increasing emphasis on developing analytical thinking (AT) in the past few years. This systematic review focuses on an analysis of journal publications that have explored AT within the context of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. This analysis investigated four primary issues: (1) the operational definition that was used; (2) the types of theories that were used; (3) the interventions that were implemented to enhance AT skills; and (4) the research designs that were used.

To ensure a comprehensive and thorough review, we used the guidelines of preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis.

A comprehensive review of 28 pertinent scholarly articles reveals that scholars frequently rely on the concepts proposed by Anderson (2002), Marzano and Kendall (2008), Rodrangsee and Tuntiwongwanich (2021) and Suyatman et al. (2021) to establish a framework for delineating the competencies associated with analytical thinking (AT). Quasi-experimental designs were the most frequently used research designs in the studies analysed, followed by research and development approaches and then correlational designs. Most researchers have focused on investigating the effectiveness of problem-based learning as an intervention for improving AT skills. However, most research indicates that the theories or theoretical frameworks used to guide the research must be evident.

To the extent the authors know, this study represents the initial comprehensive examination of analytical thinking in STEM education. It presents a consolidated summary of the available evidence, assessing its quality and bringing it together in a single resource.

Growing environmental challenge awareness among consumers is today's business reality that pushes for sustainable product development. Governments, industries, and consumers' attention are significantly moved from traditional products to eco-friendly product development. Green product development is the future for manufacturing businesses' survival in most markets. Green product development is an emerging phenomenon and, unfortunately, lacks theoretical and empirical research regarding effective organizational policies and practices for green product development. This study aims at filling research gaps towards green product development by highlighting green employee aspects influenced by leadership for sustainable business growth. The study hypothesized relations between the green effect of transformational leadership on green product development as an outcome through green behaviour, green climate, and green innovative creativity. Data was collected from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) of Karachi through a self-administered survey questionnaire. Results revealed significant support for hypothesized relations through the partial least square statistical tool. This study contributes theoretical and empirical advancement in past literature wherein leadership style influences employee behaviour that leads to predict product development from an environmental perspective. Study inferences suggest for visionary green leadership style for sustainable business growth. Limitations of this study regarding other variable inclusiveness, sampling, and geography are potential extensions for further scholarly investigation.

Background: The annual average daily traffic (AADT) data from road segments are critical for roadway projects, especially with the decision-making processes about operations, travel demand, safety-performance evaluation, and maintenance. Regular updates help to determine traffic patterns for decision-making. Unfortunately, the luxury of having permanent recorders on all road segments, especially low-volume roads, is virtually impossible. Consequently, insufficient AADT information is acquired for planning and new developments. A growing number of statistical, mathematical, and machine-learning algorithms have helped estimate AADT data values accurately, to some extent, at both sampled and unsampled locations on low-volume roadways. In some cases, roads with no representative AADT data are resolved with information from roadways with similar traffic patterns.

Methods: This study adopted an integrative approach with a combined systematic literature review (SLR) and meta-analysis (MA) to identify and to evaluate the performance, the sources of error, and possible advantages and disadvantages of the techniques utilized most for estimating AADT data. As a result, an SLR of various peer-reviewed articles and reports was completed to answer four research questions.

Results: The study showed that the most frequent techniques utilized to estimate AADT data on low-volume roadways were regression, artificial neural-network techniques, travel-demand models, the traditional factor approach, and spatial interpolation techniques. These AADT data-estimating methods' performance was subjected to meta-analysis. Three studies were completed: R squared, root means square error, and mean absolute percentage error. The meta-analysis results indicated a mixed summary effect: 1. all studies were equal; 2. all studies were not comparable. However, the integrated qualitative and quantitative approach indicated that spatial-interpolation (Kriging) methods outperformed the others.

Conclusions: Spatial-interpolation methods may be selected over others to generate accurate AADT data by practitioners at all levels for decision making. Besides, the resulting cross-validation statistics give statistics like the other methods' performance measures.

This chapter explores the writings of Pakistani sociologist Hamza Alavi, especially on the post-colonial state, ethnicity, peasantry and kinship relations. In contradistinction to most (partial) uptakes of Alavi, I evaluate his work as a whole in order to shed light on its continuities and discontinuities. I demonstrate both the strengths and pitfalls of Alavi's theorisation of the post-colonial state, mode of production and ethnicity by placing him in context of wider Marxist debates at the time. I then suggest that Alavi's other work (e.g. on the peasantry and kinship relations) may serve to complement the weaknesses of the former. Thus, by reading Alavi contra Alavi, I advocate for an ‘integral’ perspective on the relations between civil and political society, arguing for a conjunctural awareness of mediations between the same, and their imbrications with differentiated relations of class, ethnicity and kinship.

We investigate the joint impacts of three trust cues – content, sentiment and helpfulness votes – of online product reviews on the trust of reviews and attitude toward the product/service reviewed.

We performed three studies to test our research model, presenting participants with scenarios involving product reviews and prior users' helpful and unhelpful votes across experimental settings.

A high helpfulness ratio boosts users’ trust and influences behaviors in both positive and negative reviews. This effect is more pronounced in attribute-based reviews than emotion-based ones. Unlike the ratio effect, helpfulness magnitude significantly impacts only negative attribute-based reviews.

Future research should investigate voting systems in various online contexts, such as Facebook post likes, Twitter microblog thumb-ups and up-votes for article comments on platforms like The New York Times.

Our findings have significant implications for voting system-providers implementing information techniques on third-party review platforms, participatory sites emphasizing user-generated content and online retailers prioritizing product awareness and reputation.

This study addresses an identified need; that is, the helpfulness votes as an additional trust cue and the joint effects of three trust cues – content, sentiment and helpfulness votes – of online product reviews on the trust of customers in reviews and their consequential attitude toward the product/service reviewed.

This chapter focuses on two aspects of the achievement gap – underachievement and low achievement among Black males in urban school contexts. More specifically, the authors explain several problems/issues confronting Black male students in P-12 gifted and talented, advanced placement, and special education programs, along with the school-to-prison pipeline – inequitable discipline in the form of suspensions and expulsions. We parse underrepresentation and overrepresentation for this student group. A central part of this discussion is grounded in the achievement gap literature on Black students in general with implications for Black males in particular. Another fundamental aspect of this discussion is the need for educators to adopt an anti-racist (social justice or civil rights) and cultural competence approach to their work, which means being equity-based and culturally responsive in philosophy and action. Suggestions for closing the achievement gap and otherwise improving the achievement of Black males are provided for educators. We also compel educators to go beyond talking about equity by setting quantifiable equity goals for minimum and maximum percentages (and numbers).