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TESTS applied to hydraulic fluids may be conveniently considered in two groups—tests on fresh, unused fluids, and tests on samples taken from a hydraulic system after a period of service. New fluid is examined to ensure that its properties meet the requirements—whether these be laid down in a manufacturing specification, contract specification, or merely evolved as the result of service experience— and also to provide reference data for comparison with subsequent results on used fluid. Samples taken from service may be tested to assess the suitability of the fluid for further use, or to try to establish the cause of failure or unsatisfactory operation of the equipment.

Students in flipped classrooms are challenged to orchestrate an increasingly heterogeneous collection of learning objects, including audiovisual materials as well as traditional learning objects, such as textbooks and syllabi. This study aims to examine students' information practices interacting with and synthesizing across learning objects, technologies and people in flipped classrooms.

This grounded theory study explores the information practices of 12 undergraduate engineering students as they learned in two flipped classrooms. An artifact walkthrough was used to elicit descriptions of how students conceptualize and work around interoperability problems between the diverse and distributed learning objects by weaving them together into information tapestries.

Students maintained a notebook as an information tapestry, weaving fragmented information snippets from the available learning objects, including, but not limited to, instructional videos and textbooks. Students also connected with peers on Facebook, a back-channel that allowed them to sidestep the academic honesty policy of the course discussion forum, when collaborating on homework assignments.

The importance of the interoperability of tools with elements of students' information space and the significance of designing for existing information practices are two outcomes of the grounded theory approach. Design implications for educational technology including the weaving of mixed media and the establishment of spaces for student-to-student interaction are also discussed.

This research work had been a double objective, to help the students achieve the learning outcomes, scientific skills and on the other hand, to develop specific scientific sub-competences, all of these related not only with the conceptual knowledge but also with the knowledge of procedurals and epistemology.

A didactic sequence has been designed and applied with students of the University Catholique of Louvain (Belgium) in collaboration with teachers from the University of Zaragoza (also researchers in the knowledge areas of Electronics, Applied Physics and the Didactics of Experimental Sciences). Several methodologies were applied thorough the teaching-learning sequence as the flipped classroom is. A varied sample of assessment instruments was used.

The results suggest this sequence produces a more significant learning than a more conventional teaching, however there is no increase in the number of students who passed. The students explaining phenomena scientifically, evaluating and designing experiments and making researchable questions and interpreting data and scientific evidence, which are a consequence of the development of scientific knowledge (content, procedural and epistemic). In addition, the students kept motivated by this methodological change and maintained the perception of having achieved the expected learning according to the objectives of the course.

Until a few years ago, research in the didactics of experimental sciences, and the application in the classroom of the results obtained, was limited to education in non-university stages. The opportunity of this work is to expand knowledge in relation to the application of didactic strategies in physics education at a higher level.

This chapter introduces electroencephalography (EEG), a measure of neurophysiological activity, as a critical method for investigating individual and team decision-making and cognition. EEG is a useful tool for expanding the theoretical and research horizons in organizational cognitive neuroscience, with a lower financial cost and higher portability than other neuroimaging methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging). This chapter briefly reviews past work that has applied cognitive neuroscience methods to investigate cognitive processes and outcomes. The focus is on describing contemporary EEG measures that reflect individual cognition and compare them to complementary measures in the field of psychology and management. The authors discuss how neurobiological measures of cognition relate to and may predict both individual cognitive performance and team cognitive performance (decision-making). This chapter aims to assist scholars in the field of managerial and organizational cognition in understanding the complementarity between psychological and neurophysiological methods, and how they may be combined to develop new hypotheses in the intersection of these research fields.

This chapter describes a neurodynamic modeling approach which may be useful for dynamically assessing teamwork in healthcare and military situations. It begins with a description of electroencephalographic (EEG) signal acquisition and the transformation of the physical units of EEG signals into quantities of information. This transformation provides quantitative, dynamic, and generalizable neurodynamic models that are directly comparable across teams, tasks, training protocols, and team experience levels using the same measurement scale, bits of information. These bits of information can be further used to dynamically guide team performance or to provide after-action feedback that is linked to task events and team actions.

These ideas are instantiated and expanded in the second section of the chapter by showing how these data abstractions, compressions, and transformations take advantage of the natural information redundancy in biologic signals to substantially reduce the number of data dimensions, making the incorporation of neurodynamic feedback into Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) achievable.

This chapter draws on the school improvement research of EducAid, a small NGO with schools in Sierra Leone. We review the challenge of school improvement in the context of a low-income country still emerging from the aftermath of civil war, historically low expenditure on education as a per cent of GDP, low levels of trust between people and the government and lack of a reliable evidence base on which to plan school improvement. As predictable consequences of these challenges, the Ministry of Education recognises weaknesses in teacher recruitment and training, resulting in low student attainments. In a critique of adaptations of Hood's (1998) social cohesion/social regulation matrix we argue that it may not provide a coherent framework for understanding the process of school improvement in a low-income country such as Sierra Leone. Specifically, high social cohesion, when focussed on educational improvement, is likely to be necessary for school improvement, but the concept of social regulation is more complex. Although the structure is hierarchical, both at national and local levels, implying high social regulation, lines of accountability seldom work effectively, resulting in low social regulation. The picture is further complicated by evidence that socioeconomic status may be less influential in predicting students' attainments in low-income countries than in those with high and middle incomes. We argue that a professional learning network for head teachers is a necessary starting point for head teachers to stimulate debate on change strategies within their own schools.

In this chapter we highlight a neurodynamic approach that is showing promise as a quantitative measure of team performance.

During teamwork the rapid electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations that emerge on the scalp were transformed into symbolic data streams which provided historical details at a second-by-second resolution of how the team perceived the evolving task and how they adjusted their dynamics to compensate for, and anticipate new task challenges. Key to this approach are the different strategies that can be used to reduce the data dimensionality, including compression, abstraction and taking advantage of the natural redundancy in biologic signals.

The framework emerging is that teams continually enter and leave organizational neurodynamic partnerships with each other, so-called metastable states, depending on the evolving task, with higher level dynamics arising from mechanisms that naturally integrate over faster microscopic dynamics.

The development of quantitative measures of the momentary dynamics of teams is anticipated to significantly influence how teams are assembled, trained, and supported. The availability of such measures will enable objective comparisons to be made across teams, training protocols, and training sites. They will lead to better understandings of how expertise is developed and how training can be modified to accelerate the path toward expertise.

The innovation of this study is the potential it raises for developing globally applicable quantitative models of team dynamics that will allow comparisons to be made across teams, tasks, and training protocols.

This chapter explores two cases of small towns as creative places in the Galloway and Borders regions of Scotland. It considers and compares their cultural development, economic contributions, resilience and sustainability. The chapter uses prior works on policy, theory, and creative rural economies as conceptual framing.

The study is an empirical exploration, which used cultural observation as an interpretive method to undertake desk and field research in the two towns presented as cases, Wigtown (Scotland’s National Book Town) and Coldstream. It offers findings related to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the creative sector; cultural identity branding; the roles of anchor attractions and events; policy; digital economy; and cultural inclusion or exclusion. The conclusion is that creative placemaking is a medium-to-long term activity involving community and joint entrepreneurship between stakeholders to demonstrate sustainability and resilience. However, creative places need to be or become distinctive in some respects for the ingredients and enabling factors of placemaking to combine and sustain effectively as a destination.

Teams focus on a common and valued goal, and effective teams are able to alter their behaviors in pursuit of this goal. When teams are viewed in the context of a dynamic environment, they must adapt to challenges in the environment in order to maintain team effectiveness. In this light, we describe various sources of team variation and how they combine with individual-level, team-level, and dynamical mechanisms for maintaining team effectiveness in a dynamic environment. The combination of these elements produces a systems view of team effectiveness. Our goals are to begin to define, both in words and in operational terms, team effectiveness from this perspective and to evaluate this definition in the context of team training using intelligent tutoring systems (team ITS). In addressing these goals, we present an example of real-time analysis of team effectiveness and some challenges for team ITS training based on a dynamical systems view of team effectiveness.