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This paper proposes a model for detecting unexpected examination scores based on past scores, current daily efforts and trend in the current score of individual students. The detection is performed soon after the current examination is completed, which helps take immediate action to improve the ability of students before the commencement of daily assessments during the next semester.

The scores of past examinations and current daily assessments are analyzed using a combination of an ANOVA, a principal component analysis and a multiple regression analysis. A case study is conducted using the assessment scores of secondary-level students of an international school in Japan.

The score for the current examination is predicted based on past scores, current daily efforts and trend in the current score. A lower control limit for detecting unexpected scores is derived based on the predicted score. The actual score, which is below the lower control limit, is recognized as an unexpected score. This case study verifies the effectiveness of the combinatorial usage of data in detecting unexpected scores.

Unlike previous studies that utilize attribute and background data to predict student scores, this study utilizes a combination of past examination scores, current daily efforts for related subjects and trend in the current score.

Interest in narrative pedagogies is growing. However, few studies have been conducted outside Western contexts. There remains a paucity of narrative research published by Japanese scholars, despite a pervasive culture of “teacher to teacher conversations,” storytelling, reflection, and action research by teachers in Japan. Thus, this research fills an important gap in the literature. It provides exemplars from preservice teacher education, higher education, and high school, as these educational milieus reflect the notion of “traveling stories” (Olson & Craig, 2009). We describe how this narrative pedagogy is interpreted from an insider’s point of view, through the voices of teacher education students, teachers, and teacher educators. In this process, students and teachers become curriculum-makers (Clandinin & Connelly, 1988; Craig & Ross, 2008), co-constructing knowledge, and reshaping teacher knowledge and identity. Narrative teacher education pedagogies resonate with Japanese teachers and play an important role in curriculum, teaching, and learning in Japan within our increasingly interconnected world. Furthermore, narrative relates favorably to many Japanese cultural practices, including kankei (interrelationships), kizuna (bonds), and kizuki (with-it-ness). These are important, integral, and tacit elements of Japanese teachers’ practices because they embody the “mind and heart” of their personal practical sense of knowing. Furthermore, these practices involve placing other people’s needs ahead of our own – an essential skill for global citizens of the 21st century.

This study assessed the heterogeneous impact of the Anchor Borrower Program (ABP) on the welfare distribution of rice farming households in Nigeria.

Self-selection bias and treatment endogeneity were accounted for by employing the Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression (IVQR) model. The estimates obtained from the IVQR model were further compared with those from the conventional quantile regression, and quantile regression using Propensity Score Matching. This was to highlight the extent to which endogeneity bias has been purged from the treatment, in order to establish a consistent causal link between participation in the ABP and the welfare of a cross-section of rice farming households.

ABP farmers had significantly higher rice yields across all quantiles of the yield distribution under treatment exogeneity assumption, and in only two quantiles upon controlling for observable confounders. However, this yield gain did not translate to higher Per capita Consumption Expenditure (PCE). The estimates of the more robust IVQR model provided further evidence that the rice yield and PCE of ABP farmers are not statistically different from that of non-ABP farmers across all quantiles of the welfare distribution.

The negligible impact of ABP was relatively higher for lower-yielding households. Thus, implying that, although the ABP is a pro-poor development intervention, the program has not been sufficiently implemented to significantly improve the welfare of the dominant resource-poor farming households in Nigeria.

This study assessed the impact of ABP beyond the conventional potential mean outcome framework by accounting for heterogeneity in treatment effect.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-02-2023-0083

This paper gives a review of the finite element techniques (FE) applied in the analysis and design of machine elements; bolts and screws, belts and chains, springs and dampers, brakes, gears, bearings, gaskets and seals are handled. The range of applications of finite elements on these subjects is extremely wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore the aim of this paper is to give FE researchers/users only an encyclopaedic view of the different possibilities that exist today in the various fields mentioned above. An Appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on finite element applications in the analysis/design of machine elements for 1977‐1997.