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The purpose of this paper is to identify and describe the long-term impacts of hurricanes on schools and discuss approaches to improving recovery efforts.

Interviews with 20 school districts in Texas and North Carolina after Hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Matthew (2016). In total, 115 interviews were conducted with teachers, principals, district superintendents and representatives from state education agencies. Interview questions focused on the impact of storms and strategies for recovery.

The authors uncovered three long-term impacts of hurricanes on schools: (1) constrained instructional time, (2) increased social-emotional needs and (3) the need to support educators.

This paper focuses on two storms, in two states, in two successive years. Data collection occurred in Texas, one academic year after the storm. As compared to the North Carolina, data collection occurred almost two academic years after the storm.

This paper illuminates strategies for stakeholders to implement and expedite hurricane recovery through; (1) updating curricula plans, (2) providing long-term counselors and (3) supporting educators in and out of school.

To date, very few studies have explored the ways in which schools face long-term impacts following a disaster. This paper provides insight to the challenges that prolong the impacts of disasters and impede recovery in schools. With hurricanes and related disasters continuing to affect schooling communities, more research is needed to identify the best ways to support schools, months to years after an event.

This study aims to describe and illuminate the ways in which Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) – an urban, undergraduate institution with a strong focus on teaching, learning and related research and scholarship, and a substantial international student population – adapted to pandemic conditions in 2020 in an effort to meet community and pedagogical priorities, institutional/legal responsibilities and strategic goals.

Three institutional leaders at KPU draw together their respective insights and experiences, reflecting on how governance, pedagogy and operations were impacted by COVID-19.

After two years of continuous operation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the strong support of its learners and the faculty, KPU has undergone significant pedagogical and technological shifts to become a multi-modal university for study, teaching and administration.

This is a “practitioner paper” with a practical focus on institutional leadership and adaptation in a period of rapid adjustment. It is more of an accounting and reflection piece than a critical analysis.

It offers post-secondary leaders’ insights into ways in which institutional values and community needs inform policy-making, operations and innovation in education.

KPU’s domestic and international student constituencies are complex and required unconventional post-secondary strategies regarding faculty autonomy and growth, de-colonization and inclusion.

KPU has a distinctive mandate in British Columbia and its commitment to experiential learning – typically associated with hands-on education – presented unusual challenges for delivery. While research-and-teaching universities were tested by COVID-19, their tests were largely alike. KPU’s experience illustrates what practical- and teaching-focused institutions confronted.

This paper presents NASA’s experience using a Center of Excellence (CoE) to scale and sustain an open innovation program as an effective problem-solving tool and includes strategic management recommendations for other organizations based on lessons learned.

This paper defines four phases of implementing an open innovation program: Learn, Pilot, Scale and Sustain. It provides guidance on the time required for each phase and recommendations for how to utilize a CoE to succeed. Recommendations are based upon the experience of NASA’s Human Health and Performance Directorate, and experience at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard running hundreds of challenges with research and development organizations.

Lessons learned include the importance of grounding innovation initiatives in the business strategy, assessing the portfolio of work to select problems most amenable to solving via crowdsourcing methodology, framing problems that external parties can solve, thinking strategically about early wins, selecting the right platforms, developing criteria for evaluation, and advancing a culture of innovation. Establishing a CoE provides an effective infrastructure to address both technical and cultural issues.

The NASA experience spanned more than seven years from initial learnings about open innovation concepts to the successful scaling and sustaining of an open innovation program; this paper provides recommendations on how to decrease this timeline to three years.

The propose of this study is to focus on the mediating role of compliance with procurement regulatory frameworks in implementing public road construction projects.

A cross-sectional research design was adopted. Structured questionnaires were developed in a three-step process including generating items, purifying measurement items and validating measurement items. Variables were anchored on a five-point Likert scale because it is an efficient unidimensional scale that ensures all items measure the same thing and widely applicable in construction research.

The findings show that compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework significantly mediates the relationship between familiarity with a public procurement regulatory framework, monitoring activities, sanction on staff and contractors’ resistance to non-compliance and public road construction project success. However, compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework does not mediate the relationship between the professionalism of staff and perceived inefficiency with public road construction projects’ success.

Limited mediation studies and examples in the public road construction subsector affected this study to comprehensively investigate and compare study findings. Furthermore, the study adopted a cross-sectional research design that limits responses to one point in time. Finally, the study missed out other participants in different organizations and departments that could have had relevant information.

The study contributes to public procurement and construction management research fields by uncovering this strong mediating role of compliance with a public procurement regulatory framework that collectively would help the government to implement public road construction projects successfully. Because no single factor can reliably attain objectives, blending these factors through a hybrid governance system would enable the government to achieve value for money, increase the quality and quantity of paved roads and save funds that can be channeled to other priority sectors for economic development.

Despite scholarly efforts to establish project success factors, studies have been limited to factors directly impacting the project success without considering a mediating effect among the factors that affect the success of these projects.

Despite an ever-diversifying student population, it is still commonplace for US public schools to present Christmas concerts. These concerts can force minority students to choose between their own religious convictions and school participation. For some students, participation in public-school Christmas concerts can damage their personal identity and assimilate them into ways of being that are not their own. This study aims to test a method for teaching preservice teachers to empathize with minority students.

Using the framework of action research, the study followed a one-group pretest-posttest design. Participants (N = 19), all of whom identified as some kind of Christian, were asked to perform a concert featuring Satanic Worship prayers and a children’s Christmas song. This intervention was meant to induce empathy for religious minority students who feel uncomfortable performing Christmas songs because they are antithetical to their own faiths. Participants’ perceptions of public-school Christmas music performance was measured before and after the intervention.

The intervention effectively increased empathy for minority students. As a result, participants expressed altered teaching philosophies that were inclusive of religious minority perspectives.

This study demonstrates the effectiveness of empathy-fostering interventions as tools for teaching teachers to work with diverse student populations. The intervention tested in this study is of the researcher’s original design.

This study examines the relationship between age, physical violence and non‐physical abuse within the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). It tests the hypothesis that while the prevalence of physical violence is lower among older women, other forms of intimate partner violence are not related to age. The study uses data from the Michigan Violence Against Women Survey to measure physical violence and two forms of non‐physical abuse: psychological vulnerability and autonomy‐limiting behavior. Findings support the hypothesis that the rate of physical abuse is negatively related to age but the rate of nonphysical abuse is not. By expanding the definition of IPV to include other forms of abusive behavior, the study finds that older women have IPV prevalence rates similar to younger women. This raises the question of whether batterers alter their means of power and control by emphasizing non‐physical abuse rather than continuing to use physical violence that exposes them to formal and informal social controls and sanctions.

THE article which we publish from the pen of Mr. L. Stanley Jast is the first of many which we hope will come from his pen, now that he has release from regular library duties. Anything that Mr. Jast has to say is said with originality even if the subject is not original; his quality has always been to give an independent and novel twist to almost everything he touches. We think our readers will find this to be so when he touches the important question of “The Library and Leisure.”

This paper aims to expand the literature on financial and operational performance by analyzing the effects of undergoing through Six Sigma training.

The effects of implementing Six Sigma trainings is analyzed for 108 Fortune 500 companies. The authors estimate long-term stock returns and 14 financial ratios of Six Sigma companies, both pre- and post-adoption periods. Furthermore, The authors match the 108 companies by size and industry to 108 non-Six Sigma companies also within the Fortune 500.

Looking at long-term stock returns, the evidence shows that Six Sigma firms need at least four years before they start to outperform the controlling sample. Furthermore, looking at operational performance, unlike prior reported results, the authors find supporting, and more importantly, persisting statistical evidence that Six Sigma firms are less liquid and have a negative growth in staff levels in comparison to the matching firms.

The findings of this suggest that if Six Sigma provides any value to the company, it comes at the expense of overloaded staff levels, as evidenced by the fact that Six Sigma firms have less growth in staff levels than the matching firms.

It is one of the first paper to thoroughly investigate the effects on both financial performance and operational performance of spending, sometimes billions of dollars, in Six Sigma training.

The purpose of this paper is to review the issues and challenges associated with examining PhD theses in the modern, rapidly changing academic world. The PhD degree has been described as the “pinnacle of academic qualifications”, but it is under threat in terms of the quality of supervision and the outcome of examinations. By bringing the issues into the open and discussing them, more can be done to safeguard the health of the modern doctorate.

This paper reviews the mainstream academic literature on doctoral degrees from the point of view of the origin and development of the contemporary PhD. Then it offers some reflections on supervision, examination, standards of judgement, benchmarking of results and different routes to the doctorate. The pressures upon the modern university are related to issues encountered in examining doctoral theses.

In modern neo-liberal environments, the PhD degree is under pressure in terms of its quality and rigour. This paper offers a simple conceptual model of the challenges involved in ensuring the quality of PhD examinations and their outcomes. Priorities for the various stakeholders are suggested to ensure that PhD research continues to set the “gold standard” for excellence.

Recognising and confronting the problems with the modern PhD and how it is examined will help guarantee the quality of the degree. A more open debate on the pressures under which supervision and examinations are conducted will help establish rules or guidelines for conduct.

There are remarkably few evaluations of the PhD examination process, which in recent years has become increasingly problematic. The authors adopt a comprehensive approach to the issues and relate them to the societal context in which universities are developing.