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Reports on the training and development focus of five National Training Award winners – North West Water, Reading Buses, Black & Decker, Pirelli and Dolland & Aitchison – and at how their training programmes have affected their businesses.

This chapter reviews the intervention research literature – particularly interventions deemed evidence-based – for students with intellectual disability across academic and life-skills instruction. Although the focus of this chapter is the spectrum of students covered under the term “intellectual disability,” the majority of research on evidence-based interventions for students with intellectual disability focus on students with more moderate and severe intellectual disability, rather than students with mild intellectual disability. The majority of the interventions determined to be evidence-based within the literature for students with intellectual disability – across both academic and life skills – tend to be those that fall within the purview of systematic instruction.

Children’s emerging conceptions about literacy and its functions are influenced by their experiences with a wide range of written and oral literacies, including the use of digital technology, in their homes and communities. Now that mobile technologies have become intuitive to use, relatively inexpensive, small and easy to move around and networked, they have provided an entry point for transformations in the creation and sharing of texts – they are changing the way young children ‘do’ literacy. In this chapter, the authors discuss the ways that children learn about multimodal texts; how mobile technology can facilitate the reading, creation and sharing of multimodal texts in preschool and primary classrooms; the literacy skills necessary for reading multimodal texts, and; strategies for planning instruction into which multimodal texts and mobile devices are integrated. Examples of how children may engage in multimodal reading and writing in and out of the classroom are also provided.

Emotional and interpretive responses to three short stories were noted in two study populations of similar age: Qatari students in a post-highschool foundation program preparing to attend branch campuses of western universities located in Qatar, and American students, many of Mexican-American heritage, from a small college in a rural setting in South Texas. It has long been thought that reading literature from a foreign culture confers educational value on the reader; in this investigation the nature of that ‘value’ was placed under study. Written responses to quiz questions or assignments were used as data; responses critical of or affirming of character, setting, plot, and literary tropes were particularly noted. Our data show that readings from an author whose culture was similar to the reader’s created interest and urged both intellectual and affective types of understanding, such as remembering, grieving, healing, forgiving, and feeling pride. Readings from ‘classic’ literature presented in historical context strongly enabled critical discussion among students in a multicultural setting, since the author’s absence from the scene ‘allows’ free conversation about his or her work without fear of insulting the author’s culture. Readings by contemporary writers from outside the reader’s culture, or ‘multicultural literature’, may cause some readers to shy away from the challenge of understanding another culture or to voice stereotypes instead of seeking ideas. Readings from outsider cultures, however, and the affective distancing of ‘othering’, enable the well-prepared educator and student to discuss how culture patterns our lives.

Older people are reported to be the largest group to suffer from mobility deprivation. This paper reviews the literature relating to the mobility of older people in the context of transport opportunities and provision. The findings show that older people regard car ownership as an aid to independence and mobility. Car ownership is considered the norm and a necessity in rural areas. However within Wales, older people are more likely to be on a low income and live in a rural area, and are less likely to have a car than the rest of the population. Mobility, hearing and visual problems have a higher prevalence in the older population, rendering the use of public transport problematic. Difficulties include problems with getting on and off buses, difficulties with reading passenger information, missing information and communicating with service personnel. Improved access to public transport for older and disabled people can make a major contribution to the financial and social independence of this large and growing sector of the population (TRL Project Report, 1994) and will further promote the social inclusion of older people into society.

The Borrowing Update System (BUS) is a Windows‐based interlibrary loan package designed to facilitate common tasks related to record management and reporting. As a follow‐up to the initial article (which introduced the BUS), discusses the technical aspects with a look toward expansion issues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore customer interactions with servicescapes and to explain in more depth the internal mechanisms that form the customer service experience.

The paper draws on an empirical study of customers using Swedish public transport systems. Data collection is based on a microethnographic approach, using think‐aloud protocols and video documentation.

The results from the empirical study contribute with a framework of three constellations of activities and interactions: namely, identifying, sense‐making, and using, which, depending on the empirical context, form two main customer process practices – navigating and ticketing. These constructs are theoretical and have implications for service research in the sense that they explain how customer experiences are formed.

While the conceptual framework is arguably applicable also to other servicescape processes and thus has the capacity to explain how a wide range of customer experiences are formed, the study is based on one industry. Consequently, it would be worthwhile to verify this framework in different service settings.

Managers should focus on making the servicescape design intuitive, meaningful and easy to use for their customers and, depending on the empirical context, support the customer processes of finding one's way and ticketing.

The study is novel by applying a microethnographic research approach in order to provide a systematic empirical analysis of how constellations of activities and interactions in servicescape processes create customer responses and thus form the customer's service experience.

Increasingly complex and sophisticated VLSI design, coupled with shrinking design cycles, requires shorter verification time and efficient debug method. Logic simulation provides SoC verification with full controllability and observability, but it suffers from very slow simulation speed for complex design. Using hardware emulation such as FPGA can have higher simulation speed. However, it is very hard to debug due to its poor visibility. SOC HW/SW co‐verification technique seems to draw a balance, but Design Under Test (DUT) still resides in FPGA and remains hard for debugging. The purpose of this paper is to study a run‐time RTL debugging methodology for a FPGA‐based co‐verification system.

The debugging tools are embedded in HDL simulator using Verilog VPI callback, so signals of testbench and internal nodes of DUT can be observed in a single waveform and updated as simulation runs, making debugging more efficient. The proposed debugging method connects internal nodes directly to a PCI‐extended bus, instead of inserting extra scan‐chain logic, so the overhead for area is reduced.

This method provides internal nodes probing on an event‐driven co‐verification platform and achieves full observability for DUT. The experiment shows that, compared with a similar method, the area overhead for debug logic is reduced by 30‐50 per cent and compile time is shortened by 40‐70 per cent.

The proposed debugging technique achieves 100 per cent observability and can be applied to both RTL and gate‐level verification. The debugging tool is embedded into HDL simulator using Verilog VPI callback, so DUT signals are displayed together with testbench signals in the same waveform viewer. New value of DUT signal is read from FPGA whenever it changes, which allows run‐time debug.

This paper explores the academic reading behaviors of first-year students in an attempt to understand their experiences and develop potential reading interventions to support undergraduate students.

Researchers used qualitative research methods to elicit in-depth findings regarding reading behaviors. They interviewed fifteen first-year students who had completed a required writing course regarding their reading habits and used open coding to analyze interviews.

Investigators discovered that the narrative from national media that students do not read discounts the volume and variety of texts that students regularly interact with in a variety of contexts. Several themes emerged from the interviews: (1) Students like to read in a variety of designated spaces at any time of the day or night, (2) Students prefer reading in print, but mostly read online, and (3) Students reported difficult vocabulary as the most significant challenge in reading academic texts, but also reported emotional concerns regarding reading.

While previous studies have focused on factors such as format preference and time limitations that influence reading behaviors, this study contributes to the body of research looking at the reading behaviors of college students more holistically, providing new insights informing a range of library interventions to support student success in academic reading. In its use of student interviews, this study offers a student-centered contribution to the literature on student reading behaviors and considers the implications of these behaviors on librarian practice.