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Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

Experiencing academic difficulty can deter students’ academic momentum, decreasing the speed with which they complete coursework and increasing the odds that they will not persist to a credential. The purpose of this paper is to expand upon an existing framework that investigates students’ academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses by adding additional co-enrollment variables that may influence academic performance in introductory gateway courses.

This study uses quantile regression to better understand academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses and the impact that students’ co-enrollment patterns may have on their success in focal introductory gateway courses.

This study revealed significant relationships between student success and co-enrollment patterns, including: the disciplinary alignment of the course with a student’s major, the student’s co-enrollment in other difficult courses and experiencing below average academic performance in a co-enrolled course. Further, impact of these relationships often differed by students’ performance quantile in the focal course.

The results point to factors related to the student and their co-enrolled courses that faculty, academic advisors and curriculum committees can consider as they design general education requirements within and across disciplinary majors.

This approach advances the understanding of how a prescribed curriculum produces interdependent pathways that can promote or deter students’ success through the organization of curricular requirements and student course taking. The paper provides a generalizable methodology that can be used by other universities to investigate curricular pathways that have the potential to reduce student success.

This paper presents the analysis of information collected from numerous patent searches on lead‐free alloys. The significance of claim structure and content is discussed in view of the growing number of lead‐free patents. Patent analysis software was developed to effectively compare over 350 lead‐free alloy patents. A case study was conducted to assess Sn‐Ag‐Cu and special purpose lead‐free candidate alloy intellectual property. The results show that there are a number of patents and patent applications that may affect the use of “popular” Sn‐Ag‐Cu formulations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of the effective rate as a useful metric. Facilities management operations who function as re‐charge organizations (public or private, non‐profit or profit) are able to track performance and do comparisons for expense recovery while taking into account the organization's unique environment.

After providing a definition of the effective rate, some of the influences and the importance of measuring performance for facilities management operations are discussed. The remainder of the paper focuses on the findings based on a qualitative single case study that not only clarifies the use of the metric, but also confirms the usefulness for a service‐oriented organization to measure and track performance.

Taking into account the unique environment of each organization along with the differences for time not billed back to the customer (un‐billable), the effective rate is offered as a quantitative means to measure performance as it influences the organization's billing labor rates.

The single case study raises the issue of generalizability, but points out that much can be gained from the research. In the spirit of true qualitative research, the intent is to provide the findings allowing the reader to determine possible transferability where logic and reality is justifiable.

The effective rate, once normalized for the particular environment, can be used as a benchmark for both internal and external evaluations of performance for facilities management organizations.

The effective rate, whether actually calculated or not, influences the organization's finances through the billing labor rate in its attempt to recover costs and can serve as a performance tracking metric.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the potential of the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to break the stagnation in the field of comparative and international education, detected on many fronts of the field by various scholars in the field. The chapter commences with a survey of the historical evolution of the field of comparative and international education, showing how the field has historically come to be defined by contextually induced discourse. At the same time, the historically trodden furrows have resulted in the field becoming trapped by historical forces, resulting in some stagnation in the field. It is argued that impediments to progress in the field of comparative and international education are the severance from practice, the “black box” syndrome of paying more attention to the societal context than to education, the tenacious attachment to the nation-state as the sole geographic level of analysis, the lack of an autochthonous theory, persistent Northern hegemony, and the regression of space and infrastructure at universities. Thereafter, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact thereof on education are discussed. In conclusion, the potential of the disruption brought about by the pandemic for the revisitation of comparative and international education is assessed.