Jie Gao

This chapter delves into the intricate relationships among engineering, technology, ethics, and morality, highlighting their interconnected nature as they shape and are shaped by individual and collective human existence. Exploring the profound philosophical and religious underpinnings that underlie ethical and moral contemplation, the chapter also introduces seven distinct ethical systems, emphasizing three non-Western paradigms: South American Buen Vivir, African Ubuntu, and Asian Confucianism. These ethical systems are examined in the context of their implications for technology and engineering. This exposition illuminates the significance of studying ethics and the philosophy of engineering or technology, particularly in using engineering to help marginalized individuals and communities empower and liberate themselves, fostering alternative social structures and existential meanings.

This paper highlights the importance of considering both researcher and participant contexts when exploring everyday educational lives. It emerges during a period of increasing and sustained social inequality in England, and against a backdrop of increasingly tight research timeframes and resources in higher education. Drawing on a project engaging low-income families in Greater London, the paper takes the everyday as its conceptual focus and questions how we can be critically attentive to everyday educational lives if we struggle to access and develop research relationships with particular social groups. We offer empirical insight into the hesitancies towards, and avoidances of, research participation that centre around knowledge, fear, and trust, and which are heightened concerns where aspects of family life, parenting, and children come to the fore. The paper considers how these can be mitigated in an academic environment where limited time and resourcing shape possibilities of research engagements and offers practical moves linked to research relationships, relevance and presence for how researchers can address these challenges to enable research to be more inclusive.

In order to investigate the competitive psychology of college students in the current context of fierce social competition, this study compiled a competition psychology scale for college students [i.e., the Competition Psychology Scale for College Students ]. The scale was administered online to 628 university students in different regions of China. After item analysis, reliability analysis, and validity analysis, a 6-item scale was finally formed. CPS-CS contains four dimensions: hypercompetitive attitude, competitive motivation, personal development, competitive attitude, and competitive interpersonal relationships. The reliability and validity of the CPS-CS developed in this research meet the requirements of psychometrics.

Through featuring a historical review of the L2 speaking assessment scales applied in related studies, this paper targets at providing responses for the following three questions (a) How are the scales assessing L2 speaking anxiety developed and adapted in related research? (b) What are the frequently adopted methods for validating speaking anxiety scales? (c) How is L2 speaking anxiety represented and interpreted with a dynamic approach? Based on analyzing the development process of frequently-used scales for assessing test anxiety, foreign language classroom anxiety, and speaking anxiety, the author classified the scales into three categories: test-based scales measuring speaking anxiety, classroom-based scales measuring speaking anxiety, and activity-based scales measuring L2 speaking anxiety. As for the scale validation methods, Classical Testing Theory (CTT) and Rasch measurement were introduced as two major statistical paradigms for guaranteeing the reliability of the scales. This paper also summarizes the emerging themes generalized from research focusing speaking anxiety assessment, where the dynamic approach is discussed as a guideline to interpret the relationship among anxiety, language performance, and other factors involved in language learning. This paper ends with highlighting possible directions for anxiety-related research in the future, where technology intervention and the “positivity ratio” might become new attempts for pedagogical design.