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The aim of this paper is to explore the importance of individual learner differences and the effect differentiated instruction (DI) has on learners' levels of engagement.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to explore the importance of individual learner differences and the effect differentiated instruction (DI) has on learners' levels of engagement.
Design/methodology/approach
The author carried out this research using a small-scale action research (AR) study.
Findings
The findings suggest that in acknowledging and responding to individual learner differences, especially interests, levels of learner engagement are positively affected.
Research limitations/implications
This study’s key limitations were sample size, short-term study and potential teacher as researcher bias.
Practical implications
Recommendations were made for a further longitudinal study into the relationship between DI and language learner levels of engagement at University. An additional study into DI that looksbeyond language learning at HE, could add value to pedagogic approaches, which could make courses of greater intrinsic value to its students.
Originality/value
This research study aims to help fill a gap in the literature on the application of DI, as well as a unique perspective into its effect on learner engagement within a university context.
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Mohamed Mohiya and Francesco Caputo
HR Blog is one of the social technologies systems to allow employees to voice the issues they experience. However, employees’ trust becomes an emerging issue to use HR Blog. This…
Abstract
Purpose
HR Blog is one of the social technologies systems to allow employees to voice the issues they experience. However, employees’ trust becomes an emerging issue to use HR Blog. This paper aims to investigate the impact level of employees’ trust in using HR Blog and identifying the causes affecting employees’ trust in using HR Blog. Social exchange theory (SET) was adopted as a vehicle to assist in identifying the employees’ trust causes. SET found serves the aim of research because it posits that the relationship between employees and HR Blog is built based on reciprocity, two-way of exchange.
Design/methodology/approach
The research adopts a qualitative method, namely, semi-structured interviews. The total number of conducted semi-structured interviews is 46, 38 interviews with HR Blog users and eight interviews with the management of HR Blog.
Findings
The present research found that HR Blog is distrusted by the vast majority of employees. The causes of HR Blog distrust were: functionality (mainly the placing the filtration process); lack of feedback and attention to employees in HR Blog; lack of providing tangible outcomes of HR Blog; and absence of HR Blog informative materials and clear guidelines.
Originality/value
This research lies in the fact that it is one of the first studies that focus on employees’ perspectives to empirically identify and investigate their trust factors affecting the use of HR Blog. The study achieved its aim in terms of gaining a better understanding of how to gain and restore employees’ trust to make HR Blog a trusted and effective system in the workplace.
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Paraskevi El Skarpa and Emmanouel Garoufallou
In the digital era individuals are overwhelmed by huge amount of readily available information. The information provided at the time of COVID-19 crisis is increasingly available…
Abstract
Purpose
In the digital era individuals are overwhelmed by huge amount of readily available information. The information provided at the time of COVID-19 crisis is increasingly available. The purpose of this paper was to investigate individuals’ perceived feelings due to the plethora of information during COVID-19 pandemic in Greece in Spring 2020.
Design/methodology/approach
This study was conducted through a Web-based questionnaire survey posted on the Google Forms platform. The questionnaire consisted of closed-ended, seven-point Likert-scale questions. The data collected were subjected to a principal component analysis. The retained principal components (PCs) were subjected to statistical analysis between genders and among age groups and professional status with the nonparametric criteria Mann–Whitney U and Kruskal–Wallis.
Findings
Responses by 776 individuals were obtained. Seventeen original variables from the questionnaire were summarized into three PCs that explained the 71.7% of total variance: “affective disorders,” “uncertainty issues and inaccurate information worries” and “satisfaction and optimism.” Participants partly agree that the received amount of information on the disease caused them feelings of uncertainty about the future and worries about relatives’ lives, but also satisfaction with developments in the country. Females seem to experience stronger perceived feelings of “affective disorders” (p < 0.001) and reported higher degree of agreement about “uncertainty issues and inaccurate information worries.”
Originality/value
The recorded feelings caused by the volume of available information may have forced people accept the necessary precautionary behavioral changes that had contributed to the Greek success in preventing spread of the disease in Spring 2020.
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Kevin M. Esterling and Cesunica E. Ivey
In this chapter, the authors envision a new framework for technology-enabled local engagement. This framework would exploit web-based collaboration technology in order to create…
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors envision a new framework for technology-enabled local engagement. This framework would exploit web-based collaboration technology in order to create local engagement panels that represent a cross section of ordinary residents. For concreteness, the authors illustrate the framework in a proposed study called “Clearing the Air” would enable residents in the areas of Southern California that are most impacted by the logistics industry to have substantive and constructive opportunities to engage local officials on the complex economic and environmental matters related to logistics and emissions in the Southern California region. The authors propose methods to evaluate best practices in the use of collaboration technology, in particular, to learn whether the technology enables and empowers the engagement panels to participate in air quality governance at a high level and helps local officials better understand the considered opinions of residents on these important matters. If successful, this framework would integrate the policy views of individual residents alongside those of organized stakeholders, experts, and agency officials in the policy process.
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Julie Stubbs, Sophie Russell, Eileen Baldry, David Brown, Chris Cunneen and Melanie Schwartz
Damien Wilson, Maxwell Winchester and Michael S. Visser
This study aims to understand the degree of predictability and value in analyzing consumer purchase patterns in the US wine retail market. The study considers whether brands in US…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to understand the degree of predictability and value in analyzing consumer purchase patterns in the US wine retail market. The study considers whether brands in US wine retailing follow the well-established Duplication of Purchase Law and Double Jeopardy Law.
Design/methodology/approach
Over 20,000 customer panel wine purchases were analyzed from a number of locations within a supermarket chain based on the West Coast of the USA. Cross-purchasing behavior for the top 20 wine brands by market penetration was analyzed to assess whether the well-established Duplication of Purchase Law and Double Jeopardy Law hold up in this wine retail setting in the USA. The degree of predictability and the existence of anomalies in expected cross-purchasing behavior were identified in the analysis.
Findings
Results confirmed a Double Jeopardy pattern and that wine cross-purchasing patterns for the most part followed the Duplication of Purchase Law. However, exceptions to these patterns were found, which indicated areas in need of managerial attention due to the potential to remedy, develop or monitor the most prominent variations between predicted and realized cross-purchasing behavior. Repeated identification of variations has been identified in other product categories, known as market partitions.
Originality/value
Although it is commonly believed that wine is a unique product category, the results of this study demonstrate that consumer behavior toward wine is similar to other fast-moving consumer goods. The exceptions suggest that while similar consumer purchase patterns are evident, consumers are more likely to cross purchase wine brands and grape types more than would be expected given Duplication of Purchase Law benchmarks.
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This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.
Findings
The paper describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central to management and its research.
Research limitations/implications
The paper proposes that adopting an arts-based approach that challenges control can create a research instrument sensitive to similar tendencies in case studies, thus highlighting what is different and alternative about them. This responds to concerns about the diminishing centrality of SE’s democratizing ethic expressed in its scholarship, about creativity in its research and about its socially transformative potential.
Practical implications
The practice, by SEs of an approach welcoming chance, encounter, meandering paths and place-making with porous boundaries, proliferates transformative possibilities and is linked to democratization and participation.
Originality/value
Though dangerously challenging to accepted notions of academic rigour, this paper proposes an unusual thought experiment tied in with lived experiences, in themselves experimental in practice.
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