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The study is positioned at the crossroads of transformative social marketing and social innovation literature through the lens of participatory design (PD). This exploratory study aims to explore how social enterprises in India engage economically marginalized people in transformative social marketing and innovation for sustainable development through PD.

The study includes a case study with a matched pairs analysis approach. The data analysis reports three themes depicting the role of PD in different stages of the social innovation process (codiscovery, codesign and scaling-up), the challenges faced in the process and the outcomes of the PD process.

The authors propose that social enterprises can act as sustainable development catalysts for more inclusive sustainable development through their proactive and creative uses of PD. Still, PD also has limitations for addressing the challenges stemming from marginalized contexts, which requires effective social marketing strategies to overcome.

The study contributes to the emerging dialogue on PD with marginalized users and widens the scope of studies on transformative social marketing and innovation. The findings also provide practical insights for PD practitioners on how designers can learn from diverse PD practices in the context of economically marginalized people.

Students with disabilities consistently underperform on academic achievement tests. In part, this is due to teachers being underprepared to provide the evidence-based instruction needed to help students with disabilities succeed. Historically, professional development (PD) has been provided to educators yielding disappointing results. In this chapter, what is known about the components of effective PD and how to evaluate a PD program will be discussed. In particular, the role of coaching and the use of technology in PD models will be explored. The next steps in improving PD will be discussed.

As part of a larger grant-funded project, a professional development (PD) series was conducted within the framework of a school–university partnership to improve teachers’ capacity to meaningfully include fathers and father figures in the school environment, with a particular focus on fathers of children with disabilities. The authors sought to understand the extent to which a school-wide PD framed through the lens of a father of a child with a disability might inform practice with sustainable implementation. Due to the pandemic, the original format of the PD was redesigned for virtual delivery.

A three-phase data collection and analysis approach included a pre-PD survey, a post-PD survey and a one-year follow-up survey. All surveys included both quantitative and qualitative self-report data components.

Results suggest school personnel found the virtual PD valuable, gleaning several useful strategies for reflecting on their own practices, working to improve communication with families of children with disabilities and more meaningfully including fathers and father figures in future school-related activities and programing.

First, the sample size of the present study was small, and participation was variable across PD sessions. In addition, participants self-selected into the series, and therefore, they may be more likely to value father-figure involvement with or without participation in the PD series. The small sample size may minimize the generalizability of these results across other replicable settings and participants. Second, the results of the pre-PD survey could be positively skewed since the university partner’s initial delivery of PD related to this topic began in 2018. In the pre-PD survey, the majority of respondents indicated, as an example, that they believed father involvement was correlated with higher academic achievement. It is not clear if respondents held these beliefs independently at the inception of the partnership or if they perhaps learned of these connections during an earlier PD offered by the authors.

The current study offers a small glimpse into the world of a school–university partnership and its ability to actualize meaningful reflection on family engagement practices. Results also indicate a greater awareness of significant male figures/fathers and their needs. Content delivered during each PD supports capacity building in terms of teachers’ ability to see fathers and father figures as meaningful contributors within the context of the school environment. Participants mentioned that the PD taught them ways to recognize and remediate some of the insidious communication barriers that exist.

Participants stated that they grew in their understanding of intentional connections with significant male figures, noting a concerted effort to ensure communication of information pertaining to school events, conferences and, in some cases, individualized educational programs (IEPs). Staff members also felt as though the pandemic fostered greater connections with fathers who were working at home and who were simultaneously helping their children access online learning platforms. However, it is noteworthy that the latter benefit was likely a positive side effect of mandatory home-based learning as opposed to a direct result of the present study. Socially, the authors all find ourselves embarking on a bit of social uncertainty, where perhaps it is no longer appropriate or significant to mention one's gender. Nonetheless, the research highlights the unique contributions that fathers and father figures can make to children's positive trajectory, and the authors espouse that the current study suggests that virtual PD sessions can help train school personnel to recognize and foster such relationships.

The past few decades have ushered in an awareness of significant male involvement and its importance in the development of young children. Despite this surge of interest, the research on father/significant male involvement in the school context remains limited. Additionally, the implementation of virtual PD and its potential positive impacts remain largely unexplored, especially when the intersection with father engagement practices is considered. As such, the authors espouse that the present study reflects a unique combination of content and pedagogy.

Professional development (PD), including coaching and mentoring, for early childhood education and care providers has received increasing attention over the past decade. PD, particularly coaching/mentoring, has been shown to improve classroom quality. We recognize the importance of content and format of PD, but argue that dosage (overall amount) and density (spacing) are important aspects of PD that are worthy of careful consideration. We hypothesize that when PD conveys new information and complex new skills, a dense initial period is likely to produce better results than a less dense delivery. In this chapter, we review the program of research that has led us to a focus on both dosage and density of coaching. We conclude with the results from an ECEPD project in which we systematically varied the density of coaching while maintaining the same overall dosage. Classrooms all received 120h of in-classroom coaching and were randomly assigned to a dense “immersion” condition (20 full days of coaching spread over 5 weeks) or to a low density condition (one full day per week of coaching over 20 weeks). Classrooms in the immersion condition showed gains in quality, albeit modest, over the course of the school year, whereas those in the low-density condition either remained the same or decreased in quality over the school year.

Professional Doctorates (PDs) have been added to the curriculum of many universities worldwide, as an alternative to the traditional Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). PDs are more focused on practice-based knowledge that advances professional practice and contributes to society, industry and the economy. The dominance of the PhD as the typical higher degree by research has led universities to develop frameworks for their PDs which are very similar to the PhD framework. This includes the assessment of the PD, which in many cases follows the same process and is based on the same criteria as for the PhD. This similarity in the assessment of the two types of doctorates creates challenges for external examiners (EEs), who are invited to evaluate the contribution of the PD within frameworks which are tailored around the PhD. Here, the authors focus the investigation on the Doctorate in Business Administration and conduct a review and analysis of institutional documents from universities in England in an attempt to understand the similarities and differences between the examination process of the PD and the PhD and the extent to which the examination process of the PD supports the evaluation of the practice-based contribution that is at its heart. Through this review and analysis, the authors identify the challenges that exist for EEs who are called to assess PDs, and make recommendations which will support EEs to evaluate the contribution of the PD.

This chapter shows how to construct and test case-based macro models. The chapter makes use of national data to examine influences on quality-of-life of national cultures as complex wholes and entrepreneurship activities in Brazil, Russia, India, China, Germany, and the United States (the six focal nations) plus Denmark (a small-size, economically developed, nation). The study tests McClelland’s (1961) and more recent scholars’ proposition that some cultural configurations nurture entrepreneur startups, while other cultures are biased toward thwarting startups. The study applies complexity theory to develop and empirically test a general theory of cultures’, entrepreneurship’s, and innovation’s impact on quality-of-life across nations. Because culture represents a complex whole of attitudes, beliefs, values, and behavior, the study applies a set-theoretic approach to theory development and testing of alternative cultural configurations. Each of 28 economical developed and developing nations is scored for the level of the national cultures for each of six focal countries. The study selected for the study enables multi-way comparisons of culture-entrepreneurship-innovation-QOL among large- and small-sized developing and developed nations. The findings graphically present the complex national cultural configuration (x-axis) with entrepreneur nurture/thwart (y-axis) of the 28 nations compared to the six focal nations. The findings also include recognizing national cultures (e.g., Switzerland, the United States) nurturing entrepreneurial behavior versus other national cultures (e.g., Brazil and India) thwarting entrepreneurial behavior. The study concludes with a call to recognize the implicit shift in culturally implicit thinking and behavior necessary for advancing national platforms designed to successfully nurture entrepreneurship. Entrepreneur strategy implications include the observation that actions nurturing firm start-ups by nations low in entrepreneurship will unlikely to be successful without reducing such nations’ high levels of corruption.

Incorporating flipped learning (FL) into teaching English as a foreign language may improve student learning outcomes. This study gathered information on Saudi EFL teachers' readiness and willingness to apply FL. So, it aims to describe Saudi EFL teachers' readiness and willingness to apply FL in language classrooms and to find suitable guidelines for Saudi EFL professional development (PD) designers to follow.

This descriptive study involved 153 male and female Saudi EFL teachers as participants, investigating the perspectives and perceptions of these teachers within the context of foreign language teaching in Saudi Arabia. Surveys in Qualtrics were employed as the primary data collection tool for the study.

Results showed that teachers' self-efficacy of their current teaching was high. Most participants had positive attitudes and abilities related to FL, although they also identified potential challenges related to its engagement and assessment. Teachers expressed a strong willingness to participate in PD in this area, with a preference for online videos and group workshops.

The study emphasizes the importance of PD for Saudi EFL teachers. In addition, it offers guidelines for planning effective PD.

In this article, the authors, a university elementary social studies methods faculty member and a district social studies supervisor, discuss the creation of sustained professional development (PD) for elementary teachers on integrated social studies instruction.

The authors detail the development of a PD sequence that included two 45-minute whole-group PD sessions and two days of individual and small-group school-day coaching for each school in the district. The ultimate goal of this PD was to provide the classroom teachers with the pedagogical content knowledge to meaningfully integrate social studies and English language arts (ELA) in their classrooms.

The collaboration between the university faculty member and the district administrator allowed for the development of meaningful, sustained PD for the classroom teachers.

This work has implications related to the development of PD to integrate social studies and ELA for university faculty working with teachers in school-based settings and for school administrators seeking to provide more PD for their teachers.

This paper aims to derive and estimate a theory-based empirical specification that models a firm’s choices of its international diversification (ID) and product diversification (PD) and how they evolve over time in response to shocks that alter the relative cost and relative profitability of ID and PD.

We use longitudinal data on U.S. manufacturing firms from 1984 to 1999, a period of intense shocks associated with rapid globalization, to estimate a dynamic panel data Tobit model that permits lags in a firm’s adjustment to its optimal mix of ID and PD over time.

We find strong support for the theoretical framework underlying our empirical specifications and posited dynamics, with full adjustment estimated to require, on average, 1.5 years, a finding with implications for the time spacing of observations in empirical studies of ID and PD to avoid biased inferences. Among the globalization shocks during the time period studied, our results indicate that global competitive pressures and efficiency gains from global supply integration to be the more important factors driving U.S. firms toward greater ID relative to PD. Augmentation of firms’ organizational (managerial) and physical capital resources is also found to be important for supporting an expansion of ID relative to PD. Technological resource augmentation is instead found to favor expansion of PD relative to ID.

Our empirical specification is novel. It readily incorporates an often ignored but necessary theoretical condition that defines a firm’s optimal choices of its ID and PD, and it allows observed choices at a point in time to deviate from their optimal values.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating effect of cyber-victimization (CV) and the moderating effect of academic stress (AS) in the link between smartphone addiction (SPA) and psychological distress (PD) among a sample of Vietnamese college students.

A total of 423 college students participated in this study. Measures of SPA, CV, AS and PD were used for data collection. Using PROCESS macro software (Model 4 and Model 1) and the bootstrapping method, the author performed a mediation analysis and a moderation analysis.

Results indicated a significant mediating effect of CV in the link between SPA and PD. Moreover, this relationship was moderated by AS.

The findings could serve as a guide for future research and mental health professionals.