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The changing environment and competitive market forces have brought many changes in the business sector that have put organisations under immense pressure. The use of psychometric assessments and behavioural profiling help organisations to determine individuals' abilities, aptitudes, personality traits, values and factors which intrinsically motivate them and assist in bringing the right people on board who fit well within the organisational culture and can contribute towards the performance goals. Although behavioural profiling and psychometric assessments are accepted worldwide, however, developing countries particularly the public sector still relies on conventional recruitment methods and the adaptation of contemporary behavioural profiling and psychometric assessments is a challenge. Therefore, this chapter evaluates how the adaptation of behavioural profiling and psychometric assessments in the civil service exams in developing countries can improve the selection process and ultimately can help to improve the quality of public services, capacity building and achieving sustainability goals.

Community centers play a socio-economic and urban role of combining different communal necessities, that serve inhabitants, at different neighborhoods in cities. Their role emerged in importance as being a hub for improving and customizing quality of life experiences of the public. This research presents a code-based risk assessment tool for evaluating fire safety measures that can be adapted in the context of community centers. It also provides an exemplary case study to demonstrate its application.

The study identified the factors that render community centers as a high-risk type of facilities in fire events. Various fire codes and standards were reviewed to describe the relevant fire safety measures. A code-based fire risk assessment tool was developed and implemented, through a case study. A set of recommendations were developed to improve the fire safety conditions of the case study facility.

Several violations to fire safety were identified in the case study building. The findings led to identifying a set of recommendations to improve its fire safety conditions.

This research introduced a systematic approach to raise awareness about fire incidences and consequences in community centers, and provides facilities managers with a tool, to assess compliance based on international fire code requirements.

In fire events, community centers are considered as high-risk facilities that may lead to significant losses of human lives and damages to assets. It is significant to study the causes of fire, for ensuring effective prevention and safe operations.

This study evaluated the impact of a faculty training program on student assessment using the Kirkpatrick model.

A self-reported survey assessed 111 Saudi and non-Saudi participants' satisfaction. Subjective and objective measures (self-reported measures, assessment literacy inventory and performance-based assessment tasks) gauged participants' learning level. Pre- and post-training data were collected from 2020 to 2022.

A highly significant effect on satisfaction (>80%) and learning levels was observed, as manifested by workplace practices of student assessment (>70%, the cut-off score). Pre- and post-training comparisons of participants' satisfaction and assessment literacy scores showed significant improvements following training. Multiple regression analyses showed no significant effects for gender and educational attainment but a substantial impact of academic cluster on participants' student assessment skills.

Long-term effects of training faculty on assessment practices and student achievement will be studied at the institutional level in future research.

The current study contributes to human capital investment via faculty training on student assessment, helping them comply with assessment best practices. This assures the quality, fairness and consistency of assessment processes across disciplines in higher education institutions, enhances assessment validity and trust in educational services and may support institutional accreditation.

This study provides opportunities for sharing best practices and helps establish a community of practice. It enhances learning outcomes achievement and empowers higher education graduates with attributes necessary to succeed in the labor market. The human capital investment may have a long-term impact on overall higher education quality.

This study contributes to the scarce literature investigating the impact of training faculty from different clusters on student assessment using subjective and objective measures. It provides developing and evaluating a long-term student assessment program following the Kirkpatrick model.

Behavioral threat assessment and intervention is a violence prevention strategy that has become widely used in US schools. Instead of relying on a zero tolerance disciplinary approach that often leads to school exclusion of students with disabilities, schools can use a multidisciplinary threat assessment team to assess the seriousness and context of a student's behavior and identify appropriate interventions and supports. This process is especially valuable for students with disabilities who are identified as threatening violence. This chapter describes an evidence-based model of threat assessment, the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG), ¹ reviews some common misunderstandings of threat assessment, and presents a case example illustrating the value of threat assessment in preventing school exclusion, and provides services for a student with a disability.

The purpose of this paper is to describe this new evaluation experience with portfolio in economics, not only from the teacher’s point of view but from the student perspective, and all the learning from its implementation; to provide ideas of evaluation practices in virtual and face-to-face modality in international business education; to motivate the rethinking of assessment practices in higher education to combine the best of each modality in the future.

The present work is a case study based on a qualitative description of the implementation of a portfolio as an assessment practice, supported by a reflection questionnaire with students’ perceptions and some elements of metacognition. The first section summarizes the literature used as a theoretical framework of this work. The second section describes the portfolio implementation by analyzing teachers and students reflections with a qualitative approach. The third section presents the findings. The fourth section is a discussion of findings, practical implications, limitations and future research directions. Finally, the conclusions of the work are shared.

Because the portfolio has had overwhelming results to assess what students have learned during the pandemic, it has become the learning and assessment tool after the pandemic, as it transforms the classes experience by shifting the focus from traditional examinations to more comprehensive, personalized and reflective ones. It also empowers students to take ownership of their learning, develop essential skills and cultivate a deeper understanding. Among other benefits, the portfolio means the creation of a safe and supportive environment for honest reflection, the development and design of strategic directions to improve learning and lead students toward metacognitive autonomy. Reflection pieces, a critical component of the portfolio, are a vital tool in the proactive learning process, as through reflection students learn to examine their own performance and discuss strategies to enhance their success in future work.

This work began as an educational experience per se, not for research purposes, which caused it to be systematized and reconstructed in a descriptive way, not to measure quantitative results. In this way, the present work describes that the portfolio helps to achieve better results on students’ learning than traditional examinations but, as another limitation, it does not measure them nor the process. One more limitation of this work is that it was written in a postpandemic context but was implemented during the pandemic; therefore, the circumstances of writing are not the same as those of implementation, and this could also entail a certain margin of decontextualization. At the same time, this is an experience that is still in process and continually being adapted to this changed and changing educational postpandemic context.

One of the main implications of the portfolio experience, transferable to all educational contexts, is that it transforms the final exam into a metacognitive one, letting students be aware of their own process of learning and results – objectives and competences – acquired. In this way, it lets teachers witness a part of the learning process that is not so evident in the traditional assessment practices – focused on some aspect of the learning – as it makes visible the way in which students receive, process and apply content, that is to say, how they make it their own.

The portfolio promotes reflective learning and metacognition, vital skills that benefit students beyond the classroom. This can have a positive impact on societal attitudes toward education and the quality of learning. Of the students, 82% felt the portfolio creation was helpful in their personal and professional lives, suggesting a broader societal impact. The paper’s findings contribute to the body of knowledge about the effectiveness of portfolio-based assessment in higher education, especially in the worldwide transition from online education to postpandemic education. This could guide future studies in similar educational contexts or with different pedagogical innovative tools.

In light of the 2020 pandemic lockdown, this work delves into the pressing need for educators to adapt and modify their teaching approaches. The relevance of this study is accentuated by the worldwide transition from online education to postpandemic education. This paper bridges the gap between theory and practice because the research can be applied to the educational practice of any international business education context, as well as lay the foundations for future research in the field that contributes to increasing evidence of the effectiveness of the use of the portfolio to achieve significant and deep learning in higher education.

We investigated the relationship between personality and managerial assessment center (AC) dimensions, emphasizing age’s moderating role within volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity (VUCA) simulations.

We analyzed 327 managers and applied the AC method, examining areas like social skills, problem-solving, management and goal striving, openness to change, employee development using the VUCA framework.

We assessed personality metatraits through a questionnaire based on the circumplex model (CPM; Strus, Cieciuch, & Rowinski, 2014), identifying four bipolar metatraits. Results highlighted passiveness and disharmony as negatively correlated with all managerial AC dimensions, with passiveness adversely affecting social skills and problem-solving.

Age’s moderating role emerged as pivotal in the relationship between personality and managerial AC dimensions, especially in specific VUCA contexts. This underscores age’s influence on the interplay between personality and managerial efficacy, suggesting varying predictive capabilities across age groups. The research illuminates the complexities of these relationships, spotlighting age’s nuanced impact.

Although universities have been decentralized for academic freedom and autonomy, resources are being increasingly centralized, and the role of central administration is growing for efficiency and excellence reasons. At the same time, a division of labor is progressing by assigning specific tasks to professionals. The professionals are also centrally managed. Educational development was introduced by central administration to cope with the massification and quality assurance of higher education. Although it played a great part in promoting educational reform, it also suffered from the rejection of academics and the lack of methodology. Unlike ITC service and student service, educational development touches the autonomy of academics and is always torn between the central administration and academics. This chapter analyzes the structural and cultural difficulty of educational development in Japan by tracing its historical development and by comparing to other countries.

Chapter 5 opens with a fictional scenario of a Professor of Digital Marketing on the US East Coast, who is making a cup of coffee in the morning and reflecting on the climate impact of the coffee journey at the same time as considering how she could incorporate this knowledge into her lectures in an impactful way. The Professor is considering designing an authentic piece of assessment which leads to behaviour change and has positive impact on society. The mentoring conversation she engages in is with a former colleague who has extensive experience of education-focused initiatives in universities and is an active mentor in great demand in the scholarly community. The conversation builds on Molthan-Hill and Blaj-Ward (2022), a point-of-departure paper about assessing climate solutions in a personally and societally meaningful way.

The synthesis of scholarly literature which follows the scenario and conversation has two points of focus. One is assessment. Relevant literature is referenced to further contextualize themes such as alignment, authenticity, well-being, sustainability, inclusivity and meaningful use of digital tools in assessment to develop identities and spark action. The other is the overlap between mentoring and coaching; a combination of the two is likely to support richer professional development for academics and, consequently, for their students. Climate-focused approaches in coaching have more recently been developed and are being used to facilitate resourceful responses to climate change. Two volumes on climate coaching are reviewed, to offer insights into the process of linking professional knowledge and life experience.

This paper examines the innovative potential of micro-credentials which, arguably, is compromised if not for a particular attribute of the digital format: evidence. Evidence allows for an artifact of learning (e.g. project, writing sample) to be included in a digital micro-credential. Micro-credentials that include evidence can support individualized learning; elucidate learners' qualifications; and make assessment and credentialing processes more inclusive.

This conceptual paper explores the subject of higher education micro-credentials which are increasingly being offered as formal (albeit smaller and digital), credit-bearing credentials, far removed from the Open Digital Badge movement from which they originated. This paper presents a case for safeguarding the qualities of micro-credentials that allow for innovative practice, before micro-credentials become entirely subsumed into conventional assessment and credentialing practices.

A review of the literature indicates that evidence, when used effectively, can support the innovative potential of micro-credentials. This subject is examined from the perspective of three categories of evidence, which are identified and illustrated through specific examples from the literature.

This paper fulfills a need to address the features of micro-credentials that, if used effectively, can challenge traditional assessment and credentialing paradigms. Evidence is rarely discussed in the literature and has not been thoroughly examined from this perspective. Additionally, faculty who develop and implement micro-credentials face numerous challenges when attempting to include evidence in micro-credentials. This paper explores those challenges and offers several recommendations for practice.