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Combining empirical insights from two lesson studies (LSs), this research aims to investigate EnEFL (English as a foreign language) teachers’ development in understanding and practical skills regarding the recent national English curriculum reform in China. It also strives to incorporate students’ performance and perceptions in the evaluation of the effectiveness of these LSs and teachers’ development.

Two LSs were conducted in the same school with 3 years in between. Standardized procedures were followed in the two LSs, including pre-LS interviews, talk-lesson session, rehearsal lessons, and one public lesson. Triangulated data were collected from lesson plans, reflective journals, discussion notes, and interviews to probe into teachers’ learning and development. Students’ task performance and perceptions were analyzed to help reexamine the influence of teachers’ development on student learning.

The teachers in the two LSs encountered similar problems in both understanding and implementing the curriculum reform. The LSs helped them reach a contextualized understanding of the key concepts. Besides, developments were also seen in their instructional skills to adopt innovative methods and activities. The students’ task performance and perceptions endorsed the teachers’ efforts.

First, this research combines data from two standardized LSs at different periods of curriculum implementation in the Chinese EFL context, which provides insights into teachers’ difficulties and development regarding curriculum reforms on a longer timeline. Second, students’ performance and perceptions are included as important data sources to assess the effectiveness of the LSs and teachers’ development.

Prediction models for the unsaturated permeability proposed in the literature are numerous. However, a model may give a good result for a sample of a given soil when it may give a bad result for another sample belonging to the same type of soil. This showed that the choice of a model to complete the permeability curve in the unsaturated state is complex. To facilitate such studies, this paper aims to present a help system capable of defining the mathematical model to the user that best represents the permeability of the soil.

The authors have detailed the difficulties in determining the correct value of kuns from a thorough bibliographic study. To develop this idea, the authors took real examples, to which they applied mathematical models and then compared their results with those of the bibliographic study. Knowledge structuring in the form of classes, rules and functions. Implementation of the data in generator of help system Kappa-pc. validation of results.

An aid tool was developed for the evaluation of unsaturated soils permeability using Brooks and Corey (1964) and Leong and Rahardjo (1997) models, which are known for their effectiveness and ease of application. This system will also evaluate these two methods using estimation models of saturated permeability [Dane and Pocket (1992), Terzaghi (1981) and laboratory data]. This system allows the evaluation of unsaturated permeability by the aforementioned two models, makes comparison between these two models, classifies them and proposes the model presenting the best result.

This aid system is able to compare results of different models of prediction of the hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated soils according to several criteria (suction, degree of saturation, plasticity index, models of estimation of the permeability to the soil, saturated state, particle size, etc.). It can also deduce the model that best adapts to a given soil. This aid system will be of great use for geotechnical engineers and researchers in the field.

On the basis that the platform for user equipment for the 1990s is reasonably predictable, the creation of a new generation of user interface facilities can be started. The Esprit project TOOTSI (Telematic Object Oriented Tools for Services Interfaces) has as its objective the creation of a toolkit for building user interfaces to business information services using the GUI paradigm. The project brings together a unique combination of companies, active in the provision of actual services to the information community. This paper will describe the results of the initial two years of work on TOOTSI covering the decision making on the application platform and the design of the elements which will make up the toolkit. A prediction of the actual services to be developed is also included.

The aim of this paper is to investigate relationships between strategic planning practice, management participation and strategic planning effectiveness.

A total of 87 questionnaires were collected from privately owned firms working in Egypt. Regression analysis was used to test the hypotheses.

Strategic planning practice, but not management participation, is significantly associated with strategic planning effectiveness. Further, both strategic planning practice and management participation jointly enhance the effectiveness of strategic planning.

Longitudinal data would be needed in order to prove that causal relationships exist. The common method bias restricts the inferences that can be drawn from this study. It would be useful to explore whether the results hold when other integrative variables are taken into consideration.

A wide use of strategic planning tools is one important element in organizational success.

Little research has so far examined the use and worth of strategic planning tools in organizations. One function of this paper is to re‐visit this area of research. It does so in one of the areas that have largely been neglected in past research in Arab countries.

This experimental study aimed to examine the effects of annotating a historical text as a reading comprehension strategy on student academic achievement in an eighth-grade social studies class.

A mixed-method design was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data sequentially. First, the authors collected quantitative data with a series of pre- and post-tests from all student participants during a six-week instructional time frame. Next, the authors collected quantitative and qualitative data with a survey from teacher and intervention group student participants. Quantitative data were analyzed to evaluate the mean differences in participants' test scores and survey responses. Finally, qualitative data from open-ended survey questions were transcribed and analyzed using an inductive approach to supplement the quantitative findings and develop a holistic picture of the participants' learning experiences.

The results showed that the annotating strategy increased student engagement, reading comprehension and thus academic achievement in social studies. Annotating helped students visualize key points, break down complex texts and slow down when reading complex historical texts. As a result, it helped students focus, think critically and discourse to understand complex content.

The study was conducted with eighth-grade students in one middle school in South Georgia.

The findings of this study provide evidence that the reading comprehension strategy of annotating is a valuable teaching and learning tool for daily use in social studies classrooms.

Educators must prepare students to use reading comprehension strategies such as annotating in all content areas and not only in a traditional academic setting.

This study adds to the current body of research and undergirds reading comprehension strategies used to improve the learning outcomes in content other than reading.

The chapter explores an overlooked theme across the literature: capturing the experience of childhood family disruption and transitional flux between foster family homes and the independent sensemaking into the present of young care-experienced parents. The chapter draws upon research that constructed 20 biographical life story accounts of a diverse sample of foster care-experienced young people. The chapter aims to reflect upon the findings garnered from six of these accounts through extracting the narratives of a selection of participants who were to become or had become parents. This chapter makes sociological connections between past family disruption, demarcating present families of choice, and reconciliation of the past through experiencing parenting into the future within constructed ‘family displays’ (Finch, 2007). The chapter illustrates this phenomenon through narrative accounts offering a family history of parents who have experienced a variance of transitions between family units and who were negotiating, or had negotiated, their post-care independence through the role of becoming a parent themselves. The chapter highlights the symbolic value of parenting to the lives of young people who have experienced care in recalibrating their past familial experiences, as demonstrated through their family displays. Through the family displays of care-experienced parents, the importance of the relational context to youth transition ultimately reveals itself, as does the development of relational agency, and ultimately the role of parenting in developing a young person’s independent ‘post-care’ identity.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of master narratives related to age, gender and entrepreneurship in the context of entrepreneurship education (EE) in Finnish higher education (HE). This is important as master narratives create and limit our understanding of entrepreneurship.

The data comprises 30 student interviews generated in one multidisciplinary Finnish university. The data were analyzed using narrative positioning analysis to examine what kinds of master narratives are (re)constructed in relation to age and entrepreneurship by Finnish university students and how gender intertwines with age in the construction of entrepreneurship.

Three aged and gendered master narratives were identified: (1) youthful, masculine, startup/growth entrepreneurship; (2) middle-aged feminine, expert entrepreneurship and (3) modest, feminine, senior entrepreneurship. The paper makes visible aged and gendered master narratives and cultural norms related to entrepreneurship in the context of EE and HE. Authors argue that the youthful, masculine startup/growth entrepreneurship is the hegemonic master narrative in the context of EE in Finnish HE. Femininity is mostly excluded from this master narrative.

The paper contributes to critical literature on entrepreneurship as an aged as well as gendered phenomenon in the context of EE and HE. So far research on entrepreneurship as an aged and gendered phenomenon in EE and in the context of HE has been virtually non-existent. Moreover, the theoretical and methodological focus on master narratives in entrepreneurship and EE literature is novel. The master narratives identified in the study show that HE students are not addressed equally in relation to entrepreneurship, but aged and gendered hierarchies are sustained.

The Edible Campus project was begun in spring 2007 in Montréal. An action-research project launched by volunteers and researchers from two leading local NGOs and university-based researchers (Alternatives, [online]; Santropol Roulant, [online]; McGill University's Minimum Cost Housing Group, [online]), it sought creative solutions to turn underutilised urban spaces into productive places. It involved citizens in the creation of green community spaces by incorporating productive growing in containers on a prominent but concrete-covered part of McGill University's downtown campus. Not only is it an investigation into making cities more food-secure by increasing urban food production, it is also a live demonstration of how ‘edible landscapes’ can be woven into urban spaces without diminishing their utility or functionality.