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This study aims to comprehend vocational preservice teachers' recalled experiences with the Cooperative Problem-based Learning (CPBL) pedagogical approach in an entrepreneurship course and to reveal how these experiences will impact their future teaching practice. The course under study intends to improve preservice teachers' entrepreneurial attitudes while equipping them with the skills necessary to create a comparable teaching strategy at school after graduation.

This study used the semi-structured interview data to triangulate the qualitative data collected from the students' reflection journals. The data were thematically analyzed whereas the codes with comparable elements were combined, resulting in themes that describe the relevance of scaffolding used with each component of the MUSIC motivational model.

The results revealed that the student teachers who took part in the research stated in their comments how the scaffolds used in the CPBL sessions impacted their learning. Additionally, they could articulate the experiences that strengthened their perceptions regarding entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship education.

By implementing scaffolded CPBL in entrepreneurship course during the teacher preparation program, the preservice teachers would be able to put a similar approach into the practice of their future teaching profession in guiding students to accomplish instructional outcomes.

This study highlights the importance of providing more innovative practices for entrepreneurship education across teacher preparation curricula to help develop the skills necessary for entering the future profession. The findings also emphasize the value of scaffolding in PBL, including expert, peer and activity design scaffolding. It also completes the body of research indicating that PBL-based entrepreneur education instruction can help students develop their entrepreneurial skills and attitudes while also providing a great chance to improve their teaching abilities.

The study investigates the information-related challenges as well as the practices adopted by early-career researchers during transitions between roles and institutions. Its primary goal is to delve into how information behaviors serve as scaffolding during significant life shifts. Moreover, the research aims to provide actionable insights based on this scaffolding concept for individuals navigating transitions.

This preliminary and exploratory study took a phenomenological approach to examine the role of information seeking and personal information management (PIM) behaviors during life transitions. In-depth semi-structured interviews were held with 15 early-career researchers from various disciplines, who were about to finish their PhDs or had recently graduated.

By employing information seeking and PIM practices, participants were able to address three main information challenges that arose during the transition process: the timing of information behavior, the nature of information and the social components of the transition. The use of networked and independent information seeking/validation practices enabled to establish a sustainable network of transition-related information, reducing uncertainty. PIM practices helped planning the transition, maintaining information over the long-term and gaining control over personal information.

This study underscores the significance of information behaviors, encompassing both information seeking and PIM, as scaffolding mechanisms during crucial life transitions. It offers essential insights that can guide the creation of impactful interventions and resources. Additionally, the research illuminates the pressing demand for more in-depth exploration in this domain.

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate for social studies teachers and teacher educators the ways in which students' disciplinary writing is scaffolded within the context of the inquiry design model; trends in such scaffolding are called “the learner's pathway,” since it leads students to more abstract levels of historical argumentation. The author argues that engaging historical writing genres is a necessary component of historical thinking and that understanding the ways that teachers support students' historical writing capacities can help them to make more intentional choices when building inquiries.

To study genre-related scaffolding across inquiries, this study draws on systemic functional linguistics (SFL)-based genre theory as an analytical structure and seventy-four history-focused secondary social studies inquiries to determine any patterns in the ways that teachers scaffold students' writing genres through an inquiry.

Findings suggest that there is a learner's pathway that teachers use to develop students' argumentative writing capacities; however, there is also evidence to suggest that notetaking and source synthesis are not valued instructional products, limiting the potential impact of historical thinking work within the inquiry process.

The existence of this learner's pathway has implications for the ways that teachers and preservice teachers can be professionally developed to leverage this pathway. Rather than the often-used methods of support students' generic writing capacities, professional development should focus on the ways social studies teachers can guide students to more abstract reasoning through their writing. This study's findings also have implications for the ways that social studies teachers assess students' summative arguments. Assessment practices should focus on the genre-features of “argument” rather than just the stages of the argumentative essay.

This piece is original because genre-based research is missing from much of the social studies education research. This study's findings present an additional paradigm through which social studies teachers and teacher leaders can explore the purposes of historical writing tasks and assessment.

This study aimed to investigate learning behaviors deeply in flipped classrooms. In addition, it is worth considering how to help learners through recognition technology with natural language processing (NLP) when learners have question and answer (Q&A). In addition, the Internet of Things (IoT) can be utilized to make the physical learning environment more comfortable and smarter.

The authors developed smart learning environment (SLE) with smart mechanisms supported by recognition technology, NLP and IoT to help learners and employed scaffolding to facilitate their group discussions. This study is an explanatory research to investigate graduate learners' learning behavior when they are collaborating with group members and interacting with the environment in flipped classroom using the proposed SLE.

The results revealed that learners who collaborated more while coediting had significant learning achievement, and NLP sufficiently addressed their questions. Physical conditions of the SLE were comfortable for learners. They perceived that SLE could facilitate group discussions with scaffolding.

This study suggests to utilize flipped classrooms with technologies, e.g. Google Slides integration, to help learners to do more collaboration and use smart mechanisms, e.g. Q&A with NLP, to make learners more interacting during the discussion process.

The proposed SLE can record and analyze smartly their collaboration meaningfully with group members and interact with the environment. Accordingly, researchers found that collaboration in flipped classrooms can help their learning achievement, and it is worth being widely promoted.

A makerspace has recently been identified as an essential learning field for cultivating students’ creative and thinking abilities. Creating a makerspace service within a university library is vital, as it fosters innovation, interdisciplinary learning, practical skills, entrepreneurship and career readiness while transforming the library into a dynamic centre for hands-on education and collaboration. Nevertheless, the wide-ranging functions and uses of makerspace equipment can potentially lead to a situation where librarians are overwhelmed by their duties due to manpower constraints. Therefore, this study aims to develop a novel game-based augmented reality navigation system (GARNS) based on the Octalysis gamification framework and scaffolding theory to support makerspace user education, hoping to promote learners’ learning motivation and their immersive experience and to enhance the learning performance of makerspace user education.

With a true experimental research method, 24 grade 11 students from a high school in Keelung City, Taiwan, were recruited to participate in the experiment on makerspace user education. Among them, ten students were randomly assigned to the experimental group using the GARNS and the other seven students were randomly assigned to a control group using the Web navigation system. The remaining seven students were assigned to a second control group using the narrative guided tour with a librarian to conduct makerspace user education.

Analytical results show that learners can achieve significant learning effectiveness using the GARNS, Web navigation system or traditional narrative guided tour with a librarian for makerspace user education. There were no significant differences in learning effectiveness and motivation neither between the GARNS group and the narrative guided tour with a librarian group nor between the Web navigation system group and the narrative guided tour with a librarian group. However, there were significant differences in learning effectiveness and motivation in terms of the value and expectation dimensions of learning motivation between the GARNS group and the Web navigation system group, and the GARNS group was significantly better than the Web navigation system group.

The study’s practical implication on makerspace user education is to reduce the manpower of a university library with makerspace services by the proposed GARNS that can offer a practical solution to enhance the learning effectiveness and motivation of makerspace through immersive game-based autonomous learning. Additionally, the study’s theoretical contribution lies in its innovative combination of game-based learning and scaffolding theory, while its practical significance stems from its potential to revolutionize makerspace user education, enhance motivation and performance and influence the broader landscape of educational technology.

This study combines game-based learning with augmented reality tools to develop a novel GARNS, which provides an innovative and effective learning tool suitable for the characteristics of makerspace and contributes to promoting makerspace user education and diversified learning modes. Additionally, most interviewees believed that using GARNS for educating makerspace users could assist them in consistently evaluating, choosing and discovering educational tasks in a library makerspace. This study contributes to promoting the popularization of makerspace user education.

Scholarly studies on mentoring have mostly focused on traditional mentor–mentee relationships, with little or no emphasis on how institutionalized mentoring activities that include different pedagogical approaches could be used to enhance the professional development of academics. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how an institutionalized multilevel mentoring program could be used to enhance the professional development of early-career academics and academics in designated groups in a South African university.

The data for the study were gathered from 18 mentees and 2 program administrators using semi-structured interviews. The data gathered were assessed by way of thematic analysis that involved a detailed process of identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing and reporting the themes that were developed from the data set.

The findings revealed that when mentees participate in different mentoring and professional development activities that are structured based on different pedagogies, they can engage in higher-order thinking processes and develop multidisciplinary experiences within an expanded professional learning community. Enabled by the situated learning setting, mentees can negotiate the meaning of their professional practice within a professional community and comprehend the nuanced pedagogical approaches including scaffolding learning used by mentors to shape their career trajectory and guide them to secure promotions.

The current study contributes to the scholarly discourse on situated learning by showing that mentoring could be planned and implemented as a pedagogical endeavor with diverse learning activities and structured as a form of professional development program within a professional community.

Large class sizes are becoming the norm in higher education against concerns of dropping learning qualities. To maintain the standard of learning and add value, one of the common strategies is for the course convenor to proactively monitor student engagement with learning activities against their assessment outcomes and intervene timely. Learning analytics has been increasingly adopted to provide these insights into student engagement and their performance. This case study explores how learning analytics can be used to meet the convenor’s requirements and help reduce administrative workload in a large health science class at the University of New South Wales.

This case-based study adopts an “action learning research approach” in assessing ways of using learning analytics for reducing workload in the educator’s own context and critically reflecting on experiences for improvements. This approach emphasises reflexive methodology, where the educator constantly assesses the context, implements an intervention and reflects on the process for in-time adjustments, improvements and future development.

The results highlighted ease for the teacher towards the early “flagging” of students who may not be active within the learning management system or who have performed poorly on assessment tasks. Coupled with the ability to send emails to the “flagged” students, this has led to a more personal approach while reducing the number of steps normally required. An unanticipated outcome was the potential for additional time saving through improving the scaffolding mechanisms if the learning analytics were customisable for individual courses.

The results provide further benefits for learning analytics to assist the educator in a growing blended learning environment. They also reveal the potential for learning analytics to be an effective adjunct towards promoting personal learning design.

Preservice teachers (PSTs) typically have few opportunities to observe social studies instruction in PSTs' elementary field placements. To practice effective integration as a pathway to include more social studies instruction, PSTs developed a unit plan based on inquiry during an undergraduate methods course. The purpose of this study was to explore what scaffolds were effective in PSTs' development of social studies inquiry projects.

The author used a multiple case study approach, examining initial submissions, feedback and resubmissions as PSTs developed PSTs' inquiry projects. The data were analyzed with an eye on PSTs' ability to plan a unit according to the four dimensions of the C3 Framework's inquiry arc (National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS], 2013).

The author analyzed data related to PSTs’ area of highest need from PSTs' initial submissions: staging the task, formative tasks and resources. PSTs were able to develop inquiry projects after being supported in their (1) organization, (2) clarity, (3) alignment and (4) developmental appropriateness.

This study shows that novice teachers can create high-quality social studies learning experiences in elementary school when provided appropriate supports (in this case, feedback about organization, clarity, alignment and developmental appropriateness). With the tools to develop such projects, new teachers may be able to increase the amount of social studies taught in elementary classrooms.

Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children’s literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children’s books featuring fat protagonists.

This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext.

This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children’s literature with fat protagonists.

The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters.

The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists.

These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures.

There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children’s picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists.

Entrepreneurs prioritise and act on purposeful endeavours instigated to actions by the visions of profits and benefits in the perceived opportunities. In the state of maximum entropy, with disorderliness and disequilibrium, entrepreneurs select the preferred pathway, through the profit-sensing mechanism, with the best probability of success to bet on. Therefore, this paper unpacks the forces at work in the mechanism to explain how entrepreneurs respond to opportunity and interpret the signals to coalesce into organised actions.

This research is primarily a conceptual paper on entrepreneurial action and the mechanism leading to that action. It refers to thermodynamic principles and biological cases to explain the forces at work using mostly analogical comparisons and similarities.

This paper aims to present an alternative theoretical scaffolding for entrepreneurship researchers to explore non-rational entrepreneurial behaviours and actions in uncertain, unstable and non-equilibrium environments, thereby creating new and competing hypotheses under the backdrop of adaptive evolution and thermodynamics phenomena.

The discussion featuring instinctively and naturally forming responses cannot fully explain the real entrepreneurial action as there is an element of free will and choices that are not discussed. While strategic choice and free-will shape decisions, they are preceded first by the attraction of the gradients and the biased motion in the direction of profit-attractant.

There remain essential links and issues not addressed in this “natural science”, constituting life science and physical science, oriented entrepreneurship research and exploration. Conceptualising opportunity-as-artefact and entrepreneurship as design, significant incidences of entrepreneurial actions can be explained by the presence of gradients stimulating entrepreneurial actions.

This viewpoint of information causality in opportunity-as-artefact casts a new look at the venerable question of what causes entrepreneurial actions. Shane and Venkataraman brought into focus this conversation, initiating the conceptual definition of opportunity. To have entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial opportunities must come first. Figuring the signals arising from these opportunities and cueing entrepreneurs to action is the main focus of this study.

Considering the “mechanism” at work and the thermodynamical forces at play, the entrepreneurial design process appears to hold considerable promise for future research development.