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The Center for Academic Success (CAS) at Louisiana State University (LSU), certified as a Center of Excellence by the National College Learning Center Association, has utilized Supplemental Instruction^© (SI) for the past 20 years to provide student support for historically difficult courses – those courses with D, F, or withdrawal rates of greater than 30%. In this model, peers called “SI leaders” facilitate study sessions outside of class time to help the enrolled students develop effective learning strategies and better understand and master course concepts. SI relies upon collaboration with faculty and is supported by cognitivism and social constructivism learning theories.

Benefits of the successful model include supporting students to become self-directed independent learners, reducing the stigma associated with using academic support and reducing the demands for tutoring. Outcomes observed at LSU include positive correlations between the course-passing rates and six-year graduation rates of women, underrepresented minorities and first-generation college students who participated in SI compared to the peers who participate less frequently and those who do not participate.

Louisiana State University (LSU)’s Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) is an award-winning office devoted to developing effective, educational approaches that incorporate guidance and exploration, increase students’ academic standing, and support measures to improve the institution’s diversity, predominantly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments. Through the incorporation of three main factors, Mentoring, Education, and Research, OSI has developed a holistic development model that offers students strategies to overcome those factors that affect their persistence in STEM. OSI houses several programs with a diverse population of students ranging from the high school to doctoral levels. Although varied in student population, these programs unite under the holistic development model to provide support and opportunities to students at each critical educational juncture. OSI’s holistic approach has successfully supported over 135 high school, 560 undergraduate, and 100 graduate students. Of the 560 undergraduate students served, 51% were underrepresented minorities and 55% were women. The undergraduate initiatives have garnered 445 bachelor’s degrees, with 395 degrees from STEM disciplines, and an impressive overall graduation rate ranging from 64% to 84%. Through all of the remarkable work performed in OSI, the greatest accomplishment has been the capacity to offer students from mixed backgrounds tools and strategies to thrive at any point in their academic career.

This paper aims to present an interpretation of freehand drawings produced by a sample of final year degree level learners in response to the question: “What is civic engagement”? The aim in using this approach, with final year degree learners from different countries, but pursuing the same degree, was to compare and contrast their understanding of civic engagement.

Learners completed their drawings and then discussed their drawings in small groups. All of their drawings were initially examined quantitatively before a sample of six drawings were selected for in-depth qualitative examination.

Using learner-generated drawings enables learners convey visually what can be challenging to verbalise. After the exercise, some learners discovered that they had a good basic appreciation of civic engagement.

Describing civic engagement pictorially forced participants to think about what the essence of civic engagement was for them.

This study shows how a collaborative learning experience, rather than a competitive comparison of performance, facilitates learners readily demonstrating their level of understanding and appreciation for civic engagement.

Business strategy and its quest for sustainable competitive advantage and success is challenged by external and internal change, which increasingly takes the form of radical discontinuity. However, emergent strategy models are rising as concepts and constructs, possibly impacting on the advancement of strategic management theory and practices: these tools are the business model (BM), the value network (VN) and resource management (RM). The purpose of this paper is to propose a revisited role for BM design, VN configuration and RM, with specific reference to strategy execution and monitoring under discontinuity.

The study builds its contribution on a theoretical framework (constituted by a literature review on discontinuity, BM, VN and RM), supplemented by two longitudinal case studies on companies which went through several discontinuities affecting their business strategy.

BM, VN and RM are the strategic tools through which a company executes its planned strategy. In addition, radical variations in: BM parameters performance; VN configuration and firms relationships; RM consistency with resources core status, resulting from an external or internal discontinuity, constitute a signalling “vector” of inputs to identify the discontinuity and activate a new strategic re-planning process.

By revisiting the role of BM, VN and RM, the study revives the theoretical debate on business strategy under discontinuity, and provides managers with a comprehensive model to concretely employ these three tools for strategy analysis.

In this chapter I employ a hybrid critical framework that draws on feminist media studies, feminist critiques of post-feminism, theories of intersectionality, and genre theory to consider a range of domestic violence stories on screen. The chapter begins with a summary of prototypical patterns of narrative and character in contemporary Hollywood films about abuse and subsequently explores two recent media representations that, while conforming to certain of these patterns, also introduce alternative perspectives: the 2017/2019 Home Box Office miniseries Big Little Lies and French director Xavier Legrand's 2018 film Custody (Jusqu’à la garde). I argue that both of these media texts draw on familiar genres that engage audiences not simply to generate sympathy for the abused woman-turned-heroine, but to challenge persistent myths about domestic violence such as that abusers are monsters who never show love towards their partners; that abused women are weak, passive, and the victims of their own bad judgment; that the effects and repercussions of abuse end with the departure of the abuser; that, ultimately, the problem of abuse must be “solved” by the individual; that the “solution” is as simple as leaving; and that there is little as a community or a society that we can do. I conclude that, in different ways and to different degrees, each of these media texts succeeds in making small but significant interventions into the predictable formulas of mainstream Hollywood domestic violence films through narratives that foreground the complexities, contradictions, and dilemmas of abuse.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a career success model for academics at the Malaysian research universities.

Self-administered and online surveys were used for data collection among 325 academics from Malaysian research universities.

Based on the analysis of structural equation modeling, the proposed model explained 48 per cent of the variance of academics’ career success. Specifically, the result shows that there are positive significant effects between organizational support, extraversion personality, person-job fit and academics’ career success. A full mediation effect of proactive behavior was established on the relationship between organizational support and career success. Overall, the results confirmed that the proposed model succinctly explains career success among academics in Malaysian research universities.

The authors present a career success model for academics at Malaysian research universities. The study represents an important extension of previous research of which it tested the applicability of the career success theories and identified the key factors related to career success of academics based on the context of Malaysian research universities. Most current career success studies were conducted in the context of the Western culture or developed countries; therefore, the results based on the Malaysian sample provide strong evidence of cross-cultural comparability of the career success construct and model.

The findings provide implications to both individuals and human resource development practitioners on career success among academics. Practical interventions are suggested to assist individuals and organizations toward achieving career success. This study sheds some light on the effective management of the academics.

The authors propose a model of academics’ career success based on the context of Malaysian research universities.

This is the third in a series of articles about case research, writing, teaching, and reviewing. In this article, the protagonist, Prof. Moore, receives mixed reviews on his case submission and learns how to respond to them in a positive way. The article is written as if it were a case; it is fictitious.