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Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to transform the organisation of all the activities carried out by firms. The growing diffusion of these technologies is increasingly challenging multinational enterprises to reinvent their businesses. Accordingly, many scholars argue that AM may reduce countries’ participation in global value chains (GVCs) or, at least, affect GVCs’ geography, length and further developments. However, so far, the lack of available data on the real worldwide diffusion of these technologies has precluded the possibility to study this phenomenon from an empirical standpoint.

This study investigates AM technologies, with a particular focus on their possible impact on GVCs, in the framework of the current debate in international business. In order to examine this relationship and overcome the lack of adoption data, the authors identify a potential proxy of AM diffusion – that is, patenting activity. Coherently, the authors employ this proxy and a country-level measure of GVC participation (i.e., the Share of Re-Exported Inputs on Total Imported Inputs) to empirically investigate the role of AM in influencing countries’ participation to GVCs. This country-level analysis is focussed on three specific industries and the aggregate economy in 58 countries for the period 2000–2014.

The results show that AM decreases a country’s participation in GVCs, both at the country level and, in particular, in the sectors which are more likely to be affected by AM technologies. This evidence suggests that this phenomenon might be induced by a decreasing reliance on intermediates processed abroad, hence an increasing importance of domestic goods, manufactured via AM.

In grades K-3, the primary focus of instruction is learning to read. In grades 4 and beyond, however, the focus shifts to reading to learn. Whereas teachers may use a variety of instructional approaches, research has clearly documented that learning from text is the primary instructional model found in most classrooms. This means that efforts to close the achievement gap must focus on ensuring that all students can access text-based learning materials, engage with the content in meaningful ways, and ultimately demonstrate success in the form of measurable gains in learning outcomes. Whereas the philosophy of UDL is relatively easy to understand, it has proven problematic to design, implement, evaluate, and scale. The purpose of this chapter is to describe a universal design engineering approach known as Design for More Types that can be applied to the design of text-based learning materials, this chapter will describe the conceptual and practical issues involved in the development of text-based learning materials for diverse learners. We begin by providing some foundational concepts for this multidisciplinary work. Next, we provide a series of case studies to illustrate how universal usability can be applied to various instructional designs. Finally, we describe how the Design for More Types framework can be used in both research and practice.

This chapter describes how conversational computer agents have been used in collaborative problem-solving environments. These agent-based systems are designed to (a) assess the students’ knowledge, skills, actions, and various other psychological states on the basis of the students’ actions and the conversational interactions, (b) generate discourse moves that are sensitive to the psychological states and the problem states, and (c) advance a solution to the problem. We describe how this was accomplished in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) for Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) in 2015. In the PISA CPS 2015 assessment, a single human test taker (15-year-old student) interacts with one, two, or three agents that stage a series of assessment episodes. This chapter proposes that this PISA framework could be extended to accommodate more open-ended natural language interaction for those languages that have developed technologies for automated computational linguistics and discourse. Two examples support this suggestion, with associated relevant empirical support. First, there is AutoTutor, an agent that collaboratively helps the student answer difficult questions and solve problems. Second, there is CPS in the context of a multi-party simulation called Land Science in which the system tracks progress and knowledge states of small groups of 3–4 students. Human mentors or computer agents prompt them to perform actions and exchange open-ended chat in a collaborative learning and problem-solving environment.

Chapter 7 synthesizes the perception research into plausible design and configuration strategies for the learning experience dimension of a psychophysical learning system. The processes used in all five senses to reduce information into a perception are again used to create learning activities and processes, which facilitate the learning and discriminate meaning from the learning objects and activities. This process attends to the interactions across the categories of content to determine the critical components of the discipline to include in the learning experience. Once again, the focus of the psychophysical learning experience is placed on the structure of the (external) discipline, which is used to configure the learning experiences.

This chapter describes a project used in an entity tax class to engage students in developing several competencies that are valued by academics and the professional accounting community. Instructors provide students with a single set of data from which to prepare tax returns based on three separate assumptions about the entity: it is (1) a partnership, (2) a C corporation, or (3) an S corporation. Instructors play the role of a tax supervisor in a professional firm and students play the role of junior tax professionals. The student must communicate with the instructor to obtain necessary information (beyond the facts listed in the project description) to complete the tax engagement. Completed manually at first, the project reinforces material learned in class, encourages professional communication, and deepens the students’ understanding of how the choice of entity affects business taxation. Once the manual preparation is completed, students prepare the same returns using a computerized tax preparation tool to enhance their learning with technology.

There are several ways to define words. One is to ascertain the formal definition by looking it up in the dictionary. Another is to identify what it is that you want the word-label to differentiate.