From the article: "Abstract Maintenance processes of Dutch housing associations are often still organized in a traditional manner. Contracts are based on lowest price instead of ‘best quality for lowest price’ considering users’ demands. Dutch housing associations acknowledge the need to improve their maintenance processes in order to lower maintenance cost, but are not sure how. In this research, this problem is addressed by investigating different supply chain partnering principles and the role of information management. The main question is “How can the organisation of maintenance processes of Dutch housing associations, in different supply chain partnering principles and the related information management, be improved?” The answer is sought through case study research."
The aim of this study is to determine the contribution of student interventions to urban greening processes. In two Dutch cities action research was conducted, including reflexive interviews a year after the first intervention, to assess factors causing change in the socio-ecological system. Results show that students and network actors were mutually learning, causing the empowerment of actors in that network by adding contextualized knowledge, enlarging the social network, expanding the amount of interactions in the socio-ecological system and speeding up the process. Students brought unique qualities to the process: time, access to stakeholders who tend to distrust the municipality and a certain open-mindedness. Their mere presence made a difference and started a process of change. However, university staff needed to keep the focus on long-term effects and empowerment, because students did not oversee that. After a year, many new green elements had been developed or were in the planning phase. In Enschede, the municipality districtmanagers were part of the learning network, which made it easier to cause changes in the main ecological network. In Haarlem however, no change took place in the main ecological network managed by the municipality, because no political empowerment of the civil society group had developed yet.
MULTIFILE
The aim of the study is to investigate the influence of gender and gender pairing on students’ learning performances and knowledge elaboration processes in Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL). A sample of ninety-six secondary school students, participated in a two-week experiment.Students were randomly paired and asked to solve several moderately structured problems concerning Newtonian mechanics. Students’ pretest and posttest performances were analyzed to see whether students’ gender and the gender pairing (mixed or single-gender) were significant factors in their problem solving learning in CSCL. Students’ online interactions were also analyzed to unravel the dynamic process of individual knowledge elaboration. The multilevel analyses revealed that a divergent pattern of knowledge elaboration was a significant predictor for students’ learning achievement, and in mixed-gender dyads students’ knowledge elaboration processes were more inclined to diverge from each other. Moreover, females in single-gender dyads significantly outperformed females in mixed-gender dyads. But this was not the case for male students.
