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This chapter explains a group assignment implemented for the United States and Irish students where the goal was to reflect real-world teams and communication addressing a global tax ethics issue. Students first completed a case on a corporation’s tax avoidance strategy and submitted individual write-ups. Then they were assigned to groups with the United States and Irish members and exchanged write-ups, planned and executed an international meeting using technology, and submitted a group written assignment about the case and their experience. Post-assignment survey data show that several learning objectives were met. The authors encourage faculty to carry out similar assignments, and the chapter includes recommendations for doing so. This chapter highlights the group work, cooperative learning, and ethics underpinnings of this initial project. The conclusion explains future plans for theoretically grounded research to investigate the team process and what members can learn from team experiences.

The job market for communication majors increasingly expects those graduating in these specializations to not only know how to create strategic plans for using social media in both one-way and two-way communication environments, but also maintain proper social media etiquette and virtual culture norms for their clients. To better prepare students for this expectation, two faculty members at separate universities designed and implemented a course assignment intended to promote cross-university collaboration, foster discussion, and bring students to use microblogging via Twitter. This assignment was designed so that it would not only have the students construct the meaning and best practices in a social setting using social media, but also encourage them to experience Twitter from a user perspective while building relationships in a manner that their future employers may have to work with their publics or customers. Overall, the educators involved in this project did feel that it was a beneficial assignment for students in both classes. While the students may not appreciate the assignment while it is being conducted, many of them have expressed the value in it now that the assignment is completed.

This article presents lessons from social experiments in the US over 30 years testing employment and training, welfare reform and social service programmes and systems. It discusses the challenges in implementing a random assignment study and strategies to overcome them, and also sets out lessons for ensuring that an experiment informs and affects policy. In laying out the ingredients for success, the article argues that creative and flexible research design skills are essential, but that just as important in a complex, real‐world context are operational and political skills, applied both to marketing the experiment in the first place and to helping interpret and promote its findings down the line.

The purpose of this study was to explore local and international business students' perceptions of their intercultural group work experience as a mechanism for developing intercultural competence and group work skills.

Using qualitative interviews, the group work experiences of 11 final-year undergraduate local and international students in a business program in a large Australian university were analysed.

The findings suggest that international and local students working together on group assignments create social and academic situations that result in “at best” limited positive intercultural learning and relationships. Differences in expectations, motivations, language fluency, trust and relationship issues were evident when students collaborated on group assignments. Thus, it appears that group assignments are potentially flawed mechanisms for delivering the goals of intercultural competence and group work skills in business students.

Although this exploratory study is limited in scope, the research has implications for pedagogical strategies, in particular, the use and design of group assignments and the preparation of students for working on group tasks in intercultural groups. It also has implications for developing effective learning mechanisms that lead to improved student intercultural competence, greater socio-cultural engagement and the academic success of international and local business students, as well as positive learning experiences for all.

The findings of this study are likely to be a useful resource for university staff considering the use of group work assignments for the development of intercultural understanding and competence and collaborative skills.

This paper reports a study conducted longitudinally to investigate group communication media choice and the use of a web‐based learning tool, as well as other types of communication media, such as e‐mail, telephone, and face‐to‐face, for communication and collaboration to complete given tasks.

This study was designed following the case study research methodology and design of Yin. Longitudinal observation was made on groups in their naturalistic research setting. Twenty‐three groups of four or five students working on five similar tasks were selected as the unit of analysis.

The findings showed that groups' choice‐making process of communication media evolved over a period of time. A pattern of group communication emerged, namely face‐to‐face, virtual, and mixed (the use of both face‐to‐face and virtual communication). The three group communication categories were significantly different in performance, with the mixed category performing the highest in terms of grade.

The limitations of this study are related to the case study methodology and the subjectivity of some interpretations.

The findings should assist in the design of both on‐campus and distance learning course modules to facilitate learning through group project or assignment. The findings should also assist the design and implementation of the e‐learning systems and tools that are acceptable to users.

The study provides insight into how such ICT applications can be made useful and effective, and why, when given the freedom to choose, the use of a web‐based tool is the least attempted for communication.

When presented with technical topics, undergraduate accounting students can be overwhelmed by information transmitted in a pure lecture format. Further, a lecture format does not allow for much student interaction or enable learning of higher-level skills that could be useful if the underlying content is changed by future regulations. Position paper instructional tools could be a beneficial alternative. A position paper can bring out students' soft skills of communication and critical thinking by making them take a stand, which is key for tax professionals and accountants generally. Since class meeting time is limited and face-to-face interactions are not always possible, a written position paper provides an alternative that can benefit students' understanding of technical information.

This paper aims to introduce matching in propensity score analysis (PSA) as an alternative statistical approach for researchers looking to make causal inferences using intact groups.

An illustrative example demonstrated the varying results of analysis of variance, analysis of covariance and PSA on a heuristic data set. The three approaches were compared by results and violations of statistical assumptions.

Through the illustrative example, it is demonstrated how different statistical approaches can produce varied results. Only PSA mitigated pre-existing group differences without violating the assumption of independence.

This paper attempts to answer calls in the literature for more robust statistical methodologies to better inform human resource development practice and theory.

As US business organizations continue to use more expatriates in international locations, the reasons for high failure rates of these assignments need to be examined. Selection and training may be the key inadequacies. Intercultural anxiety plays an important role in productive expatriate assignments. By determining personnel with lower intercultural anxiety levels, successful assignment completions should increase. Examines attributional complexity, stereotyping, ethnocentrism and acquaintance with host‐country nationals to determine the relationship of these variables to reduced intercultural anxiety. A group considering assignments to Japan, consisting of business and education executives and their families, were surveyed before and after an intensive study visit. Findings indicate that stereotyping and ethnocentrism have a negative association with decreased intercultural anxiety. Attributional complexity and acquaintances have a positive effect on reduced anxiety levels. Suggestions for organizations making expatriate selection decisions include screening potential candidates for these traits. Also provides areas for further research.

This chapter explores how cloud-based office productivity suite(s) such as Google Workspace have been used to engage students in their learning while also preparing them for the workplace. Using these types of tools can make group-based in-class activities, assignments and projects highly engaging for a diverse student body while also developing skills valued in the workplace. Practical examples are shared regarding how the tools have been used with accounting and business students in courses such as communications and computing, introduction to business, sustainability and leadership. Some examples include how students can use the tools to collaboratively: provide feedback to a post-secondary institution regarding its orientation activities; complete a PESTLE and SWOT analysis of a business; use Google Forms with mobile phones to record observations of the emotional state of individuals and discuss in relation to emotionally intelligent leadership; and create a sustainability report for a post-secondary institution. The examples provided can be adapted as is or modified to engage learners in nearly any discipline at any education level in a face-to-face classroom or via remote delivery.

This paper aims to present recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy, providing an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts.

This paper introduces and annotates English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, reports and other materials on library instruction and information literacy published in 2019.

The paper provides a brief description of all 370 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.