The research team, led by Jingchun Shen and Xingxing Zhang, built detailed urban energy models of three case-study districts using the City Energy Analyst framework, supplemented with geospatial data from OpenStreetMap and refined in QGIS. The Amsterdam site comprises thirty-five boathouses along the Stadhouderskade canal, hemmed in by street trees and taller neighboring buildings. The Riga district, Daugavgrīva, contains eight mid-rise apartment blocks, a kindergarten and a grocery store. The Borlänge site in Sweden consists of ten low-rise, two-storey houses in the Rymdgatan community. These contrasting morphologies, the authors argue, are precisely what determines whether solar integration can realistically push a district toward net-zero operation.

To capture the influence of climate change, the team generated future weather files for 2050 and 2080 by morphing baseline Typical Meteorological Year data within the CMIP5 framework, and validated the results against the newer CMIP6 SSP2-4.5 middle-of-the-road emissions scenario. The comparison showed nearly identical warming trends and almost complete overlap in solar radiation projections, giving confidence that the principal climatic drivers of building energy demand and photovoltaic generation are robust across both datasets. The projected changes are striking. By 2080, annual mean temperature rises by 3.4 degrees Celsius in Amsterdam, 5.4 degrees in Riga and 4.8 degrees in Borlänge, while cumulative global horizontal irradiance increases by roughly 57, 65 and 210 kilowatt-hours per square metre respectively.

These shifts translate into a fundamental rebalancing of thermal demand. Heating degree days, calculated against an 18-degree base, fall by 35 percent in Amsterdam, 39 percent in Riga and 49 percent in Borlänge by 2080. Cooling degree days, measured against a 24-degree base, surge by 545 percent in Amsterdam and a remarkable 646 percent in Riga, although they rise by only 88 percent in the cooler Swedish context. The study concludes that European districts are moving from heating-dominated to cooling-sensitive demand profiles, a transition that will reshape building design, urban planning and the value of solar-generated electricity, which becomes more consistently available year-round as global irradiance increases.

At the heart of the methodology is an irradiance threshold framework, a deliberately simple but powerful idea. Rather than covering every available surface with panels, the researchers tested five annual radiation thresholds, from zero to 800 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, placing panels only on surfaces receiving radiation above each cutoff. This allows planners to trade off total energy yield against the levelized cost of electricity, calculated with a 20-year system lifetime, a 5 percent discount rate and operation and maintenance costs set at about 1 percent of annualized capital expenditure. The team also ran sensitivity analyses using a solar learning rate of 24 percent, drawn from Berkeley Lab data on utility-scale photovoltaics, meaning each doubling of cumulative installed capacity reduces costs by roughly a quarter.

The results expose three distinct structural archetypes. Amsterdam’s boathouse district is demand-dominated: high density, heavy shading from adjacent buildings and trees, and severely limited envelope area mean that even with unrestricted panel placement, on-site photovoltaics would cover only 29 percent of current electricity demand, falling to 17 percent by 2080 as consumption climbs 48.3 percent. The recommended irradiance threshold is therefore the lowest tested range of 0 to 200 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, and the authors argue that Amsterdam’s decarbonization must rely on multi-vector strategies, including higher-efficiency technologies, rooftop integration, flexible storage and an active role for distributed solar in grid decarbonization rather than local self-sufficiency alone.

Riga presents a balanced-to-surplus profile. Mid-rise buildings with favorable façade exposure and moderate density allow photovoltaic generation to exceed annual demand across all scenarios, with demand coverage ranging from 170 to 270 percent. Here the economics favor selectivity: the levelized cost of electricity, ranging from 0.18 to 0.36 US dollars per kilowatt-hour at baseline, reaches its minimum at an irradiance threshold of 600 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, where self-consumption approaches 55 percent. Under moderate and strong technology-learning scenarios, costs fall by 30 to 50 percent, expanding the range of economically viable installation sites. The authors note that such surplus districts create opportunities for grid export, storage and sector coupling, but also warn that rising shares of variable generation reduce system inertia, requiring adapted market rules and balancing mechanisms of the kind already operating in Nordic electricity markets.

Borlänge, with its low-rise morphology, large roof and façade areas per unit of demand and minimal mutual shading, is surplus-dominated. Photovoltaic potential exceeds district demand by roughly four to five times at low irradiance thresholds and remains about three times higher even at 600 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year. The optimal threshold is 800 kilowatt-hours per square metre per year, where baseline costs of 0.13 to 0.26 dollars per kilowatt-hour reach their lowest point. Because the district is served by a low-carbon district heating network and cooling demand remains limited, total energy consumption rises only 1 percent by 2080 while solar potential grows 15 percent. The authors position Borlänge as an ideal testbed for export-oriented operations, curtailment management and grid-supportive flexibility measures under high renewable penetration.

The study also delivers a nuanced verdict on photovoltaic-thermal hybrid panels, which generate electricity and heat simultaneously. In Amsterdam, where dwellings rely on individual heating systems, the thermal output of hybrid panels directly offsets domestic hot water and space heating demand, keeping self-sufficiency ratios around 30 percent even in future scenarios. In Riga and Borlänge, however, mature district heating networks already supply most thermal demand, and projected reductions in heating needs further diminish the marginal value of additional heat, making electricity-only photovoltaics the more cost-effective choice. The technology-learning analysis adds a final insight: future cost reductions improve the absolute viability of every strategy, but the relative ranking of irradiance thresholds remains stable, confirming that solar access, installation area and demand, not economics alone, are the primary determinants of district-scale solar success.

Subject of Research: Techno-economic assessment of district-scale solar energy integration in three residential districts under future climate conditions

Article Title: Techno-economic assessment of district-scale solar energy integration in three residential districts under future climate conditions

Article References: Shen, J., & Zhang, X. (2026). Techno-economic assessment of district-scale solar energy integration in three residential districts under future climate conditions. Energy Reports, 16, Article 109698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109698

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.egyr.2026.109698

Keywords: Techno-economic, assessment, district-scale, solar, energy, integration, three, residential, districts, under, future, climate

The course project report occupies a unique place in university assessment. Unlike a conventional essay, it documents a student’s journey through practical problem-solving, demanding evidence of technical competence, academic writing skill, and logical thought. When researchers first began applying large language models to automated essay scoring, the dominant paradigm treated these reports as ordinary pieces of prose. The result was scoring systems that could reward polished sentences while remaining blind to whether the underlying argument held together, whether the student demonstrated genuine command of the subject matter, or whether the citations were appropriate and meaningful. According to the study’s authors, existing LLM-based automated essay scoring methods are built almost exclusively around writing proficiency, which inevitably overlooks cognitive engagement and practical competencies that are central to project-based coursework.

The conceptual breakthrough behind PEG-Prompt lies in an unexpected place: a decades-old framework from philosophy and education theory. The researchers integrated the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework—a widely taught model that organizes critical thought around elements of reasoning and intellectual standards—directly into the design of the prompt given to the language model. Rather than asking an AI to simply rate a report, the framework instructs it to reason through the material using explicit critical thinking criteria. This integration serves a dual purpose, the authors explain: it enhances domain-specific knowledge transfer and strengthens the analytical capabilities of generative AI models when they confront discipline-specific student work. In effect, the prompt acts as a compact training manual, encoding the evaluative wisdom of human educators into text that the model can follow.

Technically, PEG-Prompt evaluates course project reports along six carefully chosen dimensions: structure, logic, coherence, originality, citation, and knowledge proficiency. Each dimension targets a different facet of student competence. Structure and coherence capture the organization and flow of the document, while logic probes whether arguments actually follow from one another. Originality measures the student’s independent contribution rather than the mere recycling of ideas. Citation assessment examines how sources are used and acknowledged, and knowledge proficiency gauges whether the student genuinely understands the technical content of the course. Together, the six dimensions allow the framework to assess practical competencies, analytical reasoning, and writing skills simultaneously, rather than collapsing everything into a single measure of linguistic polish. This multidimensional design reflects the authors’ conviction that course project writing is fundamentally a reflective process involving knowledge inquiry and cognition through critical thinking.

The framework does not rely on the prompt alone. To push performance further, the researchers combined PEG-Prompt with two complementary techniques drawn from established practice in natural language processing. First, they extracted key content from the reports themselves, giving the model a distilled representation of the most important material rather than forcing it to process the full document without guidance. Second, they incorporated few-shot scoring examples—representative instances of reports paired with the scores human evaluators assigned them. This approach, known as few-shot learning, allows a language model to calibrate its judgments against concrete precedents without any retraining of the model’s internal parameters. The combination transforms the prompt from a static instruction set into a guided evaluation protocol anchored in real grading behavior.

The experimental results reported in the study demonstrate that this multifaceted approach meaningfully improves the correlation between scores generated by large language models and scores assigned by human evaluators. Correlation with human judgment is the gold standard in automated essay scoring research, because a machine grader is only useful if it agrees with trained educators about what constitutes good work. By embedding critical thinking criteria, key content extraction, and few-shot examples into a single coherent pipeline, the researchers showed that a general-purpose LLM can move much closer to human-level assessment of complex, discipline-specific student reports—something previous prompt designs built purely around writing quality failed to achieve.

The broader context of this work is the rapidly growing field of education intelligence, where researchers harness artificial intelligence to personalize and improve learning at scale. Automated essay scoring itself has a long history stretching back decades, but the emergence of large language models has dramatically raised expectations for what machine graders can do. Earlier deep learning approaches required task-specific models trained on large labeled datasets for each new subject area. LLM-based approaches promise strong generalization and reasoning abilities across domains, but as this study makes clear, raw capability is not enough. Without carefully designed prompts that encode pedagogical values, these models default to shallow judgments. The PEG-Prompt research joins a growing body of work on prompt engineering—the craft of designing text instructions that reliably elicit desired behaviors from generative AI systems.

The practical implications for universities could be substantial. Once calibrated with human evaluators, the enhanced framework could allow students to receive detailed feedback and summaries of their course project results through generative AI systems, delivered quickly enough to inform revisions rather than arriving as a final verdict after the fact. In large courses where a single instructor may face hundreds of lengthy project reports, such a capability could free educators to focus their limited grading time on the students who need the most help, while giving every student at least a preliminary, structured critique. The six-dimension breakdown also offers richer feedback than a single letter grade, pointing students toward specific weaknesses—whether in argumentation, sourcing, or subject mastery—that they can address before resubmission.

At the same time, the researchers are careful to frame PEG-Prompt as an aid rather than a replacement for human judgment. The framework’s performance depends on calibration against human scores, and the study’s vision positions generative AI as a partner in assessment, one whose outputs become trustworthy only after alignment with expert graders. The work was supported by the Guangdong Provincial Teaching Quality and Teaching Reform Project, the Southern University of Science and Technology Teaching Reform Project, and the Medical and Health Science Program of Zhejiang Province. As institutions worldwide grapple with how generative AI should fit into education—both as a tool students use and as a tool that evaluates them—this study offers a concrete, technically grounded example of how the same technology that complicates academic integrity can also be harnessed, through thoughtful prompt design, to deepen rather than dilute the assessment of student learning.

Subject of Research: Automated evaluation of course project reports using large language models guided by the Paul-Elder critical thinking framework.

Article Title: Evaluating the Efficacy of a Multifaceted Prompt for Use with LLMs to Evaluate Course Project Reports

Article References: Sun, Q., Zhang, J., Sheng, P., Wang, Q., Wang, T., Li, H., Zhan, H., Zhang, X., & Liu, J. (2026). Evaluating the Efficacy of a Multifaceted Prompt for Use with LLMs to Evaluate Course Project Reports. Frontiers of Digital Education, 3(2), Article 12. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44366-026-0086-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44366-026-0086-y

Keywords: large language models, automated essay scoring, critical thinking, PEG-Prompt, prompt engineering, education intelligence, generative AI, course project reports, few-shot learning, assessment, higher education, Paul-Elder framework

Researchers led by Yu Zhang and Wei Cui of the Fourth Military Medical University in Xi’an, working with colleagues at Xi’an Medical University, distributed a cross-sectional questionnaire to all 109 public institutions approved by China’s Ministry of Education to offer undergraduate dentistry programs between 2021 and 2023. The questionnaire was adapted from validated frameworks used in the United Kingdom, reviewed by five subject-matter experts and pilot-tested before deployment. Forty-nine institutions returned valid responses, a participation rate of 45 percent, but the sample carried considerable weight: it included all 28 institutions holding an official discipline ranking of C-minus or above in the most recent national evaluation, and it spanned all seven major geographic regions of China.

The structural findings show a remarkable degree of consensus on how the subject is delivered. Nearly all responding institutions, 47 of 49 or 95.92 percent, teach dentoalveolar surgery not as a standalone course but embedded within a broader oral and maxillofacial surgery curriculum. Three-quarters of schools, 75.51 percent, schedule the material in the fourth academic year, positioning it after students have completed foundational biomedical coursework and general dental training but before graduation and clinical licensure.

Beneath that structural agreement, however, lies substantial variability in time commitment. For both theoretical and practical instruction, the most commonly reported duration was 10 to 20 hours, yet the actual range was dramatic: theory teaching ranged from as little as 4 hours to as many as 36 hours, while practical teaching spanned from 4 hours to more than 36 hours. That means a student at one Chinese dental school might receive nine times the hands-on surgical instruction of a peer at another institution, a disparity with potential implications for entry-level competence in procedures that carry real risks of nerve injury, fracture and infection.

The content itself follows an internationally recognizable core. Institutions consistently reported covering tooth extraction, local anesthesia, the extraction of impacted mandibular third molars, and the management of post-extraction healing and complications. These are the bread-and-butter procedures of general dental practice, and their prominence reflects the reality that most graduates will perform them daily rather than pursue surgical specialization.

Where the survey offers its most actionable insights is in the details of practical training pathways. Thirty institutions, 61.22 percent, described a progressive training sequence that moves students from instrument familiarization, through phantom-head simulation on artificial jaw models, to supervised peer-to-peer practice of local anesthesia injections. This staged approach mirrors competency-based models advocated in dental education literature, allowing students to build psychomotor skills incrementally before touching a patient. Yet simulation for more complex procedures lagged considerably: only 53.06 percent of schools provided simulation training for the surgical removal of impacted mandibular third molars, 42.86 percent for root or fractured-root removal, and just 36.73 percent for the extraction of other impacted teeth. These are precisely the procedures where inexperienced operators face the steepest learning curves and the highest complication rates.

Digital teaching tools present a similar picture of uneven adoption. Videos were nearly universal, used by 95.92 percent of institutions, and animations were employed by 79.59 percent, reflecting how inexpensive and easily deployed these passive formats have become. Interactive virtual programs, by contrast, were reported by only 24.49 percent of schools. The distinction matters educationally: passive media support observation and conceptual understanding, while interactive simulation platforms provide deliberate practice with feedback, the mechanism most strongly associated with skill acquisition in the surgical education literature.

Pedagogical innovation shows a clear hierarchy as well. Problem-based learning was the most widely adopted active-learning method, reported by 71.43 percent of institutions, followed by case-based learning at 42.86 percent and flipped-classroom teaching at 34.69 percent. These approaches ask students to reason through clinical scenarios before or instead of receiving didactic lectures, and their growing footprint suggests Chinese dental educators are engaging with international trends in health-professions education, even if penetration remains incomplete.

Assessment practices reveal perhaps the most significant gap between theory and practice in Chinese dentoalveolar surgery education. Summative theoretical examinations were nearly universal at 95.92 percent, confirming that knowledge acquisition is rigorously tested. But practical skills assessment was implemented at only 59.18 percent of institutions, and phantom-head assessment, in which students demonstrate operative technique on simulation models, at just 48.98 percent. In other words, at roughly half of Chinese dental schools, a student could complete the surgical component of their degree without ever being formally examined on their ability to perform the procedures they studied.

The authors conclude that undergraduate dentoalveolar surgery education in China has an established framework centered on tooth extraction and local anesthesia, with broad use of practical and digital teaching methods, but that marked variation persists in teaching hours, complex-procedure simulation, interactive digital tools and practical assessment. They suggest that future curriculum development may consider competency-guided learning objectives, strengthened simulation and case-based training, and more comprehensive assessment strategies, while cautioning that the educational effectiveness of such reforms requires empirical evaluation. For a country graduating thousands of dentists annually into a health system where tooth extraction remains one of the most commonly performed surgical procedures, the findings offer a data-driven baseline for national conversations about standardization, and a reminder that what happens in the simulation laboratory may matter as much as what happens in the lecture hall.

Subject of Research: Curriculum structure, simulation training and assessment in undergraduate dentoalveolar surgery education across Chinese dental schools

Article Title: Dentoalveolar surgery education in Chinese undergraduate dental schools: a national survey of curriculum structure, simulation training and assessment

Article References: Zhang, Y., Cui, W., Hu, K., Mo, J., He, F., Wang, Y., Wang, J., Zhang, W., Zhang, Z., Wang, Y., & Xue, Y. (2026). Dentoalveolar surgery education in Chinese undergraduate dental schools: a national survey of curriculum structure, simulation training and assessment. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10374-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10374-9

Keywords: dentoalveolar surgery, dental education, undergraduate curriculum, simulation training, tooth extraction, local anesthesia, China, BMC Medical Education, problem-based learning, phantom head, assessment, oral and maxillofacial surgery

Researchers led by Rina Juel Kaptain of University College of Northern Denmark and the Parker Institute, together with colleagues from the University of Southern Denmark and Greve Municipality, surveyed occupational therapists involved in assistive technology service delivery across Danish municipal units. The target population comprised the 605 occupational therapists registered as working in this system in 2021. Using snowball sampling through professional networks and municipal department heads, the team collected questionnaire data over three weeks in April 2022. In total, 224 therapists responded and 206 completed the survey, meaning roughly one-third of the entire national workforce in assistive technology provision took part. Participants represented all five regions of Denmark and spanned wide ranges of age, professional experience and tenure in their current positions.

The findings paint a picture of an assessment practice built largely on personal judgement rather than standardised procedure. Nearly all participants, 92 percent, combined telephone interviews and home visits to gather information. Fifty-nine percent said they often used telephone interviews, while 74 percent reported conducting home visits. During those visits, 95 percent combined interviewing with direct observation of the client in their own environment, though only a quarter used questionnaires as an information-gathering method. The choice of approach often depended on the type of device requested: as one participant explained, larger cases always warranted a home visit, while smaller aids such as toilet aids, walkers or grippers were frequently handled in a single phone call.

More striking still was the near-absence of formal assessment instruments. Almost two-thirds of participants, 61.2 percent, reported not using standardised assessment tools at all. Among those who did, many relied on locally created questionnaires or checklists, or borrowed fragments of established instruments. Several therapists described drawing loosely on tools such as the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills, the ADL Taxonomy, the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, but rarely in their entirety. Only 4 percent reported using a standardised tool in full, 17 percent used parts of a single tool, and 38 percent mixed parts of different tools together. Roughly 78 percent said their workplace had made no decisions about which tools should be used, and almost 80 percent reported having no guidelines about tool selection at all.

These results matter because the assessment step forms the foundation of the entire service delivery process. The European assistive technology service delivery model, developed through the HEART study of the European Commission and later refined by the AAATE and EASTIN consortium in 2012, describes seven steps: initiative, assessment, selection of the assistive solution, selection of the equipment, authorisation, implementation, and management and follow-up. Assessment occupies the second step and, according to the model’s recommendations, should evaluate the client’s individual needs using standardised procedures while keeping the client’s perspective at the centre. The Danish guidelines under the Social Service Law similarly emphasise a comprehensive, concrete and individual assessment performed in close collaboration with the client, who is regarded as best placed to express their own needs.

Previous research underscores why this matters. Systematic reviews show that satisfaction with and usefulness of assistive technology increase when professionals understand clients’ needs, expectations and preferences, and involve them in identifying personal goals. Studies from Bangladesh and elsewhere demonstrate that user involvement in service delivery predicts better outcomes of assistive technology use. Conversely, research on occupational therapy evaluation shows that when assessment relies solely on self-report through unstructured interviews without observation, important information about a client’s actual daily activity performance goes missing. A recent scoping review of the WHO European region likewise identified inadequate assessment procedures as a barrier to accessing high-quality assistive technology services.

Paradoxically, despite the variability and lack of standardisation, the surveyed therapists were largely content with their practice. Nearly three-quarters felt they had the opportunity to perform a relevant assessment, and 89 percent reported being satisfied or very satisfied with how they conducted it. The authors suggest this contentment may reflect the fact that assistive technology service delivery, unlike rehabilitation practice, lacks a strong tradition of working according to occupational therapy process models. Comments from participants revealed an awareness of constraints: some cited insufficient time and resources, noting that quantity of applications often took priority over quality of professional work, while others attributed their assessment ability primarily to accumulated experience, with one noting that forty years of practice helped.

The researchers argue that the absence of workplace guidelines effectively leaves each individual therapist’s discretionary judgement to determine how every client is assessed. They point to occupational therapy frameworks such as the Occupational Therapy Intervention Process Model and the Canadian Practice Process Framework, both of which include structured assessment phases focused on understanding the relationship between a client’s occupations and their contexts. A related Danish study found that when therapists used theoretical frameworks and structured instruments, they felt more professionally competent in the service delivery process. Employing such models as the backbone of standardised procedures could, the authors suggest, enhance equality in service quality and reduce the impact of varying experience levels across therapists.

The study does carry methodological caveats. Snowball sampling risks bias, and while the questionnaire was pilot tested to establish face validity, additional pilots with therapists from more diverse municipalities would have strengthened it. Even so, the broad national representation lends weight to the conclusion. The authors call for a standard minimum guideline for comprehensive assessment within the Danish assistive technology service delivery system, and propose renewed international work toward a standardised, interdisciplinary framework for the full service delivery process, one that keeps the user central and addresses satisfaction and abandonment of devices. Future research, they suggest, should examine whether assessment practices differ by device type, how other professions conduct such assessments, and whether integrating occupational therapy process models improves the Danish system overall.

For the millions of people worldwide who depend on assistive technology to manage daily life after illness, injury or age-related decline, the study is a reminder that the quality of a wheelchair or hearing aid is only as good as the assessment behind it. Denmark’s experience suggests that even in well-resourced welfare systems, the pathway from need to device can rest on practices that are neither uniform nor evidence-informed, and that closing this gap may be one of the most consequential improvements available in assistive technology provision.

Subject of Research: How Danish occupational therapists perform comprehensive assessments in the assistive technology service delivery process

Article Title: Comprehensive assessment as part of the assistive technology service delivery process

Article References: Kaptain, R. J., Riisager, M., Juul, C., Olsen, M. R., & Wæhrens, E. E. (2025). Comprehensive assessment as part of the assistive technology service delivery process. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2451287. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2451287

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2451287

Keywords: assistive technology, occupational therapy, assessment, service delivery, Denmark, standardised assessment tools, home visits, client-centred practice, survey, guidelines, rehabilitation, ADL

Knowledge Building is an educational approach, pioneered within the field of computer-supported collaborative learning, in which classrooms operate as knowledge-creating communities. Rather than receiving information passively, students identify questions that matter to them, propose ideas, refine those ideas through discussion, and take collective responsibility for advancing the community’s understanding. In practice, this work is often supported by Knowledge Forum, an online platform where learners post notes, build on each other’s contributions, and connect fragments of ideas into progressively deeper explanations. Teachers design scaffolds — tools, prompts, and strategies — and gradually hand over epistemic agency to the students themselves.

Implementing Knowledge Building is not without friction. Prior studies have documented resistance among novice students, particularly those accustomed to individual, teacher-directed learning, and early confusion is a common response when learners confront unfamiliar pedagogy and complex subject matter. This is where emotions enter the picture. The study draws on control-value theory, which holds that students experience epistemic emotions — curiosity, enjoyment, surprise, confusion, frustration, anxiety, and boredom — when they confront needs or challenges tied to knowledge itself, such as detecting a misconception, weighing conflicting evidence, or coordinating competing viewpoints. Positive epistemic emotions have generally been linked to engagement, self-regulated learning, and achievement, while negative emotions tend to undermine them.

To investigate whether reflective assessment could shape these emotions and, in turn, the quality of collaborative discourse, the researchers conducted a quasi-experimental study with 113 undergraduates enrolled in an educational research course over sixteen weeks in a blended format. Students had no prior experience with Knowledge Building pedagogy or its technology. Two intact classes were compared: a control group of 61 students and an experimental group of 52. Both groups were taught by the same instructor, followed the same syllabus, used identical materials and the same Knowledge Forum environment, and attended equivalent sessions — a design that strengthens the ecological validity of the comparison.

The course unfolded through structured modules. Both groups learned the principles of Knowledge Building and the platform, identified significant questions related to action research, and cycled through phases of question decomposition, online inquiry, and pooling of findings in mini-conference-style presentations. Only the experimental group, however, completed a module of concurrent reflective assessment. In these sessions, students received a nominal report with visual analytics drawn from a prototype analytical dashboard, showing their individual and community progress against two key Knowledge Building principles: moving from egocentric contributions toward collective cognitive responsibility, and recognizing that all ideas are improvable. They then completed portfolio templates combining Likert-scale items and open self-assessment questions, asking themselves, in effect, how they were doing and how they could do better.

Emotional data came from a validated short form of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, administered at weeks 6, 11, and 16, capturing self-reported surprise, enjoyment, curiosity, confusion, frustration, anxiety, and boredom. Discourse quality was assessed from 1,174 notes written on Knowledge Forum, each coded on four dimensions — questioning, theorizing, scientific sophistication, and use of authoritative sources — with two independent analysts reaching 93.79 percent inter-rater agreement. A composite quality-of-contributions score was computed for each student by averaging the four dimension means.

The correlational and structural equation modeling results were striking. Positive epistemic emotions correlated positively with contribution quality (r = 0.674), negative emotions correlated negatively (r = −0.637), and the two emotion clusters were themselves strongly inversely related (r = −0.748). In the structural model, positive emotions showed a significant positive effect on discourse quality (β = 0.49) while negative emotions exerted a significant negative effect (β = −0.26). Notably, positive emotions were the stronger predictor, suggesting that cultivating curiosity and enjoyment may matter more than merely suppressing frustration when the goal is richer collective knowledge work.

The comparative analyses revealed the catalytic role of reflection. Both groups improved over time, but the experimental group improved earlier and more consistently, with large effect sizes across all three outcome variables (for example, 0.439 for positive emotions and 0.207 for contribution quality), and significant differences in every pairwise time comparison. The control group showed significant gains only from the third measurement point onward. Between-group comparisons confirmed that the groups started equivalent, diverged significantly at weeks 11 and 16, and then converged toward the end of the course — a pattern the authors interpret as evidence that reflective assessment accelerates students’ adaptation to Knowledge Building, rather than producing permanently superior outcomes. Once both groups internalized the collaborative and self-regulatory routines, the gap naturally closed.

For educators, the practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend that instructors implementing Knowledge Building with novices schedule reflective sessions concurrently with inquiry, using analytics-based reports to help students see how their discourse is evolving and to identify concrete improvements — seeking better sources, asking for help, or engaging experts. The findings also suggest reflection can help neutralize negative emotions such as confusion by restoring students’ sense of control. The study’s authors caution that the sample was predominantly female, that prior academic achievement was not controlled, and that self-reported emotion measures may carry response biases, and they call for replication across contexts and educational stages, including secondary education where adolescents’ still-developing self-regulation may make reflective scaffolds even more crucial. Future work, they note, could embed emotion-expression tools directly into Knowledge Forum to capture emotional dynamics in real time.

Subject of Research: The effect of reflective assessment on epistemic emotions and discourse quality in Knowledge Building classrooms

Article Title: Reflective assessment in knowledge building classrooms: fostering positive epistemic emotions and quality discourse on educational research

Article References: Gutiérrez-Braojos, C., Zhu, G., Rodríguez-Domínguez, C., & Rodríguez-Chirino, P. (2026). Reflective assessment in knowledge building classrooms: fostering positive epistemic emotions and quality discourse on educational research. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00061-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00061-4

Keywords: Knowledge Building, reflective assessment, epistemic emotions, collaborative learning, Knowledge Forum, control-value theory, computer-supported collaborative learning, quality of discourse, higher education, educational research, Reflective, assessment

The collaborative intelligence perspective that anchors the study draws on a body of theory in human-computer interaction and learning science which holds that the most productive human-AI partnerships are those in which the human retains epistemic authority while the machine supplies speed, breadth, and fluency. In writing tasks, this means the AI may suggest phrasing, generate outlines, explain grammar, or summarize sources, but the student must decide what counts as an argument, which claims are defensible, and how the text should be organized for a specific audience. When this division of labor works well, the student learns more efficiently because cognitive load is reduced on low-level mechanical tasks and redirected toward higher-order thinking. When it works poorly, the student risks accepting fluent but shallow or inaccurate output, and the writing becomes a patchwork of machine text that the author does not fully understand or endorse. The Indonesian context adds a distinctive layer to this dynamic, because most generative AI systems are trained predominantly on English-language data while Indonesian students often write in English as an additional language.

English-medium academic writing is a requirement in many Indonesian universities, particularly for students preparing journal articles, theses, and international conference papers. For these students, generative AI presents an alluring proposition: a tireless, instant, and free editor that can smooth grammar, suggest academic vocabulary, and restructure sentences. The study situates itself in this reality, recognizing that Indonesian students arrive at AI tools with genuine practical needs. At the same time, universities in Indonesia, as elsewhere, have scrambled to formulate policies on AI use, with some institutions prohibiting it outright and others encouraging disciplined experimentation. The absence of settled policy creates an environment in which students largely regulate their own AI use, guided by peer norms, instructor expectations, and their own judgments about academic integrity. Understanding what students actually do, rather than what policies assume they do, is therefore an essential empirical task, and it is precisely the gap this research sets out to fill.

Methodologically, the study adopts an assessment-oriented design, gathering evidence of how students interact with generative AI during authentic academic writing activities. Rather than relying solely on surveys about attitudes, the researchers examine the texture of the interaction itself: how students prompt the AI, how they evaluate its suggestions, when they accept, reject, or modify output, and how the final written products reflect the negotiation between human intent and machine generation. This interactional focus is what distinguishes a collaborative intelligence analysis from a simple usage study. The unit of analysis is not the tool and not the student in isolation, but the dyad, the evolving partnership through which a text comes into being. Assessment in this framework is not merely grading the final essay; it is diagnosing the quality of the collaboration, including the student’s critical engagement, revision behavior, and willingness to exercise authorship over machine-generated material.

The findings, as framed by the researchers, point toward a picture of students as active negotiators rather than passive consumers of AI text. Students in the study engaged with generative AI for a range of sub-tasks within writing, from brainstorming topics and generating thesis statements to checking grammar and rephrasing awkward passages. Crucially, the collaborative intelligence lens reveals that the value of these interactions depends heavily on the student’s own disciplinary knowledge and language confidence. Students with stronger command of their subject and of academic English were better positioned to interrogate AI output, spot errors, and reshape suggestions to fit their arguments. Students with weaker foundations were more likely to accept output uncritically, which the study treats as a pedagogical warning sign. This pattern reinforces a conclusion that is emerging across the international research literature: AI literacy cannot be separated from domain literacy, and tools that promise to compensate for weak knowledge may instead entrench it if critical evaluation is absent.

One of the most technically interesting dimensions of the study is its attention to prompting behavior, the set of instructions students type into generative AI systems to elicit output. Prompting is, in effect, a new form of academic skill, blending elements of information retrieval, task specification, and iterative dialogue. Effective prompters provide context, specify audience and register, request alternatives, and feed back corrections across multiple turns. Novice prompters issue vague commands and receive generic text. The study’s interactional data show that Indonesian students vary widely along this spectrum, and that prompting quality is itself learnable. This observation has direct implications for curriculum design. If prompting, evaluating, and integrating AI output are teachable skills, then universities can respond to generative AI not with bans but with instruction, embedding AI interaction training inside existing writing courses where students can practice under guidance and receive feedback on both their prose and their process.

The collaborative intelligence perspective also reframes the perennial anxiety about academic integrity. From this viewpoint, the central question is not whether a student used AI but whether the student can account for the text, defend its claims, and explain its reasoning. A student who uses AI to polish grammar while retaining full ownership of ideas and structure is engaged in a fundamentally different activity from one who submits generated text on a topic they have never researched. The study argues that assessment practices should be designed to make this distinction visible, through oral defenses, process portfolios, draft histories, and in-class writing components that reveal the student’s actual competence. Such approaches align assessment with the reality of professional writing in the AI era, where working academics and professionals already use these tools under norms of disclosure and accountability.

The broader significance of the research extends beyond Indonesia. The country hosts one of the largest higher education systems in Southeast Asia, with tens of millions of students, and its experience with generative AI in writing offers lessons for any education system serving multilingual learners. Generative AI models perform unevenly across languages and cultural contexts, and students writing in an additional language face both opportunities and hazards: the tool can bridge a linguistic gap, but it can also flatten the author’s voice, introduce subtle factual errors, and produce text that sounds native while lacking depth. The Indonesian case thus functions as a natural laboratory for studying how AI mediation reshapes academic literacy in the Global South, where adoption has been rapid but institutional guidance has lagged. The study’s insistence on empirical, interaction-level evidence provides a model for researchers in other national contexts who want to move beyond attitude surveys and policy commentary.

For educators, the practical takeaways are concrete. Writing instruction should explicitly teach critical evaluation of AI output, including fact-checking generated claims against real sources, recognizing hallucinated citations, and revising machine suggestions for argumentative fit. Assessment should reward visible process, not just polished product. Institutional policy should define acceptable use with clarity and nuance rather than blunt prohibition, which research consistently shows drives use underground without improving judgment. And instructors themselves need professional development, because students’ AI practices will only be as sound as the feedback culture surrounding them. The study concludes that generative AI is not an external threat to academic writing but a new participant in it, and that the task of universities is to cultivate collaborative intelligence: partnerships in which human writers remain the authors of their ideas while machines serve as capable, critically supervised assistants.

Subject of Research: Indonesian university students' interaction with generative AI in academic writing from a collaborative intelligence perspective.

Article Title: Assessing Indonesian university students’ interaction with generative AI in academic writing activities: a collaborative intelligence perspective

Article References: Mulyono, H., Suryoputro, G., Azizah, U. S. A., & Falah, Z. A. (2026). Assessing Indonesian university students’ interaction with generative AI in academic writing activities: a collaborative intelligence perspective. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 425. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01716-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01716-x

Keywords: generative AI, academic writing, collaborative intelligence, Indonesian university students, human-AI interaction, higher education, AI literacy, assessment, prompting, academic integrity, SN Social Sciences, Assessing

The study, conducted by Marie Larsen Ryberg of the University of Copenhagen and Mathilde Hjerrild Carlsen of Copenhagen Business School, draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork across a university-wide initiative to integrate research into teaching. The first author observed seven courses spanning the natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences, humanities and law, part of a larger project in which 54 courses were redesigned to connect research and teaching more closely. Through participant observation, ethnographic interviews during group work sessions, semi-structured interviews with teachers and focus group interviews with students, the researchers captured how academics and students experienced the relationship between research-based teaching processes and final assessment. What emerged was a consistent story of two incompatible ways of engaging colliding within the same course.

To interpret these experiences, the researchers turned to the sociology of regimes of engagement, a theoretical framework developed by French sociologist Laurent Thévenot. The framework distinguishes four ways humans engage with their surroundings: justification, planned action, familiarity and exploration. Each regime carries its own benefit, or good, and each requires a specific environment to support it. The regime of planned action offers the satisfaction of successfully executing a plan, projecting oneself into the future and working purposefully toward predetermined outcomes. This regime has become so pervasive in contemporary society that it can easily be mistaken for normal action, and it has been institutionalised in education through quality assurance systems and standardised assessment. The regime of exploration, by contrast, promises not certainty but the excitement of discovering the new, thriving on surprise and the pursuit of the unknown.

Across the courses studied, exams consistently emerged as a site of difficulty. Academics repeatedly identified examinations as unwelcome intrusions into processes where students were expected to engage in genuine research. Three food science professors who deliberately designed their course as an exam-free experiment explained that the main idea was for students to try collecting data, and that this would not work if students were told to act as students all the time, concerned with marks and passing. A laboratory science professor omitted standard examinations from her course design, noting in an evaluation report that preparing for exams may become the dominating goal, restricting creativity. In a social sciences course, a professor told inquiring students that exams were not what interested him most, and that the course was really about learning.

Teachers did not merely talk differently about assessment; they actively shaped their learning environments to invite exploration. In a law course, a professor opened the first seminar with an invigorating talk about the experimental status of the course itself, emphasising her hopes of creating more knowledge and perhaps changing attitudes, and encouraging an experimental and inspirational milieu. Even in a health sciences class of approximately 300 students conducting laboratory experiments, teachers cultivated excitement by emphasising that student work would contribute to a larger experiment. Students responded vividly to these atmospheres. One law student observed that in this course it felt more like people wanted to ask questions and be inspired, contrasting it with the normal programme where it is like your whole life depends on getting a high mark. Another student in a social sciences course said that unlike other courses, where considerable energy goes into deciphering learning goals and exam requirements, in this course you do not feel like you are thinking about the performance at all.

Yet these carefully composed atmospheres proved fragile. A humanities professor who had run weekly videoconference seminars with international researchers described how the sessions evolved into an ongoing conversation that students found extremely interesting, only for the atmosphere to deteriorate as the exam approached. Students started talking about the required number of words, and the professor concluded that the exam had been a tripwire and a disturbance. Students described similar dissonance. One student in a social sciences course recounted that when the exam period arrived, he had to make a plan but found it very unclear what was expected, describing a clash between the professor and the rigid system. Through the lens of engagement regimes, these moments reveal what happens when an environment built to sustain explorative engagement is confronted by institutional formats that invite planned action and strategised effort.

The analysis also exposes what is sacrificed when one regime dominates. When exploration prevails, students lose the certainty of executing a plan and the sense of fairness that standardised assessment promises. Standard exams embody established quality conventions linked to the regime of justification, guaranteeing justice through clear learning goals and institutional formats. Suspending students’ concern with evaluation therefore produces not only freedom but also confusion about assessment expectations and worry about being judged justly. Conversely, when planned action dominates, the excitement of discovery is sacrificed, and open inquiry gives way to surface strategies aimed at meeting predefined criteria. Neither arrangement is neutral; each delivers distinct goods while imposing distinct losses on the individuals navigating them.

Some teachers, however, demonstrated what Thévenot calls an art of composition: the skilful coordination between competing engagement regimes. In a biochemistry course, a professor replaced traditional exams with a comprehensive portfolio assessment in which students could pass through attendance and three presentations. Fourth-year students worked in groups on research projects in the teaching lab three days a week, presented findings to each other and to departmental colleagues in poster sessions, submitted a podcast documenting their process, and published their findings in a journal report. The professor explained that the team focused on evaluation relevant to a real research environment, where scientists present results to peers and reviewers and ideas are tested in broader settings. Students described the course as exciting and different, with one reflecting that because there was no exam, they were not thinking that they had nothing to show, even though the experiment had not gone as expected, because it had been a learning process in its own right.

Even this artful solution involved sacrifice. The portfolio format protected exploration and created sheltered moments for imagination, but it partially deprived students of the possibility of organising their work through transparent, predefined goals. Outcomes were not foreseeable, and some students threw themselves on the floor when experiments failed, while others said they had never felt so nervous. Because the environment was dominated by the expectation of discovering something new, students could reframe what would have counted as failure under planned action as genuine learning, but the underlying tension did not dissolve. The theory suggests that every compromise between engagement regimes necessarily sacrifices the good of one mode of engagement, leaving a residual strain that teachers must continually manage rather than permanently resolve.

The authors argue that these findings carry implications far beyond local assessment design. The clash between open-ended inquiry and standardised evaluation reflects the coexistence in modern universities of environments that dispose fundamentally different ways of engaging, each with distinct benefits and losses. A Humboldtian ideal of knowledge as perpetually unresolved sits alongside an equally enduring conception of learning as predictable and manageable, and research-based teaching sits precisely at this fault line. Strengthening the integration of research and teaching, the study contends, requires recognising the tensions between plural engagement regimes rather than treating assessment problems as technical alignment failures. Supporting educational quality, the researchers conclude, demands institutional environments that enable rather than constrain the delicate compositional work teachers and students undertake, treating shifts between exploration and assessment as tensions to compose around rather than perplexing surprises. The predicament of assessment in research-based teaching is therefore not a problem to be solved once and for all, but a perpetual challenge calling for continuous recognition and recomposition.

Subject of Research: Tensions between research-based teaching and standardised university assessment viewed through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article Title: Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement

Article References: Ryberg, M. L., & Carlsen, M. H. (2026). Research-based teaching and the predicament of assessment: rethinking evaluation challenges through the sociology of regimes of engagement. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01765-4

Keywords: research-based teaching, assessment, regimes of engagement, exploration, planned action, higher education, ethnography, student engagement, university pedagogy, Humboldtian ideal, portfolio assessment, sociology of education

The research team, led by Rafaela Oliva da Silva and corresponding author Bruna Ferrari Schedenffeldt, exposed the earthworm Eisenia andrei to a commercial glufosinate ammonium formulation under controlled laboratory conditions, following internationally standardized protocols. Earthworms occupy a special place in ecotoxicology for good reason. They are ecosystem engineers, aerating and enriching soils, accelerating decomposition, and driving nutrient cycling, which makes any population-level harm to them a threat to soil fertility itself. Because Eisenia andrei is sensitive to chemical pollutants, easy to culture, and internationally recognized as a model organism, it serves as a reliable bioindicator of soil quality. Yet the authors note that most ecotoxicological work on herbicides has concentrated on aquatic ecosystems and vertebrates, leaving a conspicuous gap in our understanding of what these compounds do to essential terrestrial invertebrates, particularly under tropical conditions.

The study’s design was deliberately rigorous. The experiments took place at the Laboratory of Environmental Ecotoxicology on the university’s Araras campus, using a natural oxisol, the dominant soil order in Brazil, collected from a pesticide-free forest area at a depth of zero to twenty centimeters. The soil was sieved, air-dried, and subjected to two freezing cycles alternating with room temperature periods to eliminate earthworm cocoons and other invertebrates. Adult earthworms of comparable size, between 250 and 600 milligrams, were acclimated in incubators before testing. The choice of a natural tropical soil rather than a standard artificial substrate matters: it brings the laboratory closer to the fields where glufosinate is actually applied, giving the results greater ecological relevance than tests conducted only on formulated growing media.

Three complementary bioassays formed the core of the investigation. The first was an avoidance test conducted under ISO 17512-1, in which each test vessel was divided into a treated and an untreated half, with ten adult earthworms placed at the boundary and free to migrate for 48 hours. The second was an acute toxicity test under ISO 11268-1, exposing worms for 14 days across concentrations ranging from 175 to 835 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram of dry soil. The third was a chronic reproduction test under ISO 11268-2, extending over 56 days at much lower concentrations, from 3.3 to 10 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram, with juveniles and cocoons counted at the end. All tests included untreated controls and sufficient replication to satisfy the validation criteria of the relevant ISO standards, a point the authors verified explicitly in their reporting.

The behavioral results were striking. Earthworms avoided contaminated soil in a concentration-dependent manner, and at the two highest chronic-test concentrations of 8.3 and 10 milligrams per kilogram, avoidance rates reached 68 and 72 percent respectively. The median effective concentration for avoidance within 48 hours was calculated at 3.30 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram, meaning that half of the maximum behavioral response occurred at a remarkably low exposure level. The no-observed-effect concentration for avoidance stood at 6.7 milligrams per kilogram, with the lowest-observed-effect concentration at 8.3. The authors caution that the trimmed Spearman-Karber estimate carried wide uncertainty because avoidance responses tend to be threshold-like, but the pattern itself was unambiguous: worms could sense the contaminated soil and actively fled it, an early-warning signal that comes at no cost in mortality to the test population.

Acute toxicity told a different part of the story. After 14 days of exposure, the median lethal concentration, LC50, was determined to be 611.68 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram, with a confidence interval spanning roughly 592 to 631. That figure places glufosinate ammonium in the category of moderate toxicity for this species. Biomass changes told an even more nuanced tale: even at 175 milligrams per kilogram, worms lost weight, averaging a decline of about 61.5 milligrams, and at 340 milligrams per kilogram the average loss deepened to roughly 30.25 milligrams net, while the highest concentrations produced complete mortality. Statistical comparisons against controls established the no-observed-effect and lowest-observed-effect concentrations for biomass at 175 and 340 milligrams per kilogram respectively. Loss of body mass matters ecologically because smaller, weaker earthworms burrow less effectively, reproduce less prolifically, and contribute less to soil structure.

The chronic data may prove to be the study’s most consequential finding. Over the 56-day reproduction test, juvenile counts fell at every tested concentration, including the lowest, 3.3 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram, where the average number of juveniles dropped from 35.25 in the control to 27.75. The estimated EC50 for reproductive effects was 4.49 milligrams per kilogram, derived from an exponential model with a strong fit. Reproduction is among the most ecologically meaningful endpoints in soil ecotoxicology, because a population can absorb some adult mortality but collapses if recruitment fails. Here, the herbicide significantly impaired recruitment at doses far below those causing any lethality, reinforcing a theme that has emerged repeatedly in modern ecotoxicology: sublethal endpoints are frequently the most sensitive and most ecologically relevant measures of harm.

Context matters when translating these numbers to real fields. The authors calculate that the maximum recommended field application of glufosinate ammonium corresponds to roughly 0.87 milligrams of active ingredient per kilogram of soil, assuming distribution through the top five centimeters and a typical bulk density. That is below the EC50 values for both reproduction and avoidance, which is reassuring on its face. But several caveats complicate any simple field extrapolation. The laboratory exposures were nominal rather than analytically verified, meaning soil concentrations were calculated from the amount applied rather than measured chemically. The herbicide degrades in soil with an approximate half-life of seven days, so repeated applications could produce overlapping residues. And the commercial formulation contains co-formulants, such as surfactants, whose identities are not publicly disclosed under Brazilian regulatory frameworks but which prior research shows can amplify toxicity and alter earthworm behavior. The observed effects therefore likely reflect the combined action of the active ingredient and its adjuvants, a realistic exposure scenario that pure active-ingredient studies would miss.

Comparisons with other herbicides sharpen the significance of the findings. Previous work by some of the same authors demonstrated that commercial herbicide formulations can cause both acute and chronic effects in Eisenia andrei, including reduced reproductive output. Studies on glyphosate and 2,4-D have shown that these chemicals can differentially affect survival, growth, and reproduction, with glyphosate sparing life but cutting biomass while 2,4-D proved more lethal at elevated doses. Research on glufosinate’s enantiomers adds another layer of complexity: only the L-form is herbicidally active, yet it is also more toxic to green algae than the racemic mixture, and it degrades faster than the D-enantiomer, meaning enantiomeric composition influences both toxicity and environmental persistence. The authors also situate their work within the Level I, organism-level framework of ecotoxicology, noting that survival, biomass, reproduction, and avoidance data cannot by themselves reveal the biochemical or physiological mechanisms driving the responses, and calling for studies incorporating molecular and biochemical biomarkers to close that gap.

The broader message is one that regulators and agronomists would do well to heed: the absence of acute mortality does not equal the absence of toxicity. Glufosinate ammonium is expanding across agricultural landscapes on the strength of its ability to control glyphosate-resistant weeds, and its acute profile in terrestrial invertebrates has been classified as practically non-toxic by some assessments. Yet this study demonstrates that at concentrations well below lethal thresholds, and within the range that repeated field use could plausibly produce, the herbicide erodes the reproductive capacity of one of the soil’s most important engineers and drives it to abandon contaminated ground. As the authors argue, integrated ecotoxicological assessments that span multiple endpoints and trophic levels are essential for ecologically credible risk evaluation, and incorporating behavioral and sublethal endpoints into regulatory frameworks is no longer optional. In an era when soil biodiversity is declining and transgenic herbicide-tolerant cropping systems are multiplying, the humble earthworm is once again proving to be an indispensable sentinel of what industrial agriculture leaves behind.

Beyond its herbicidal role, glufosinate ammonium has an interesting origin: it derives from bialaphos, an antibiotic produced naturally by the soil actinomycetes Streptomyces hygroscopicus and S. viridochromogenes. Within plants, bialaphos is metabolized to release L-phosphinothricin, the compound responsible for weed kill. Its mechanism differs from that of glyphosate; rather than blocking a single biosynthetic enzyme, glufosinate disrupts glutamine synthesis, which interferes with photorespiration and photosynthesis and triggers an accumulation of reactive oxygen species and lipid peroxidation. This oxidative component is one reason sublethal exposures can produce physiological stress even in organisms that survive an application.

The compound also presents an enantiomeric dimension rarely considered in routine risk assessment. Commercial glufosinate is a racemic mixture of D- and L-phosphinothricin, but only the L-enantiomer carries herbicidal activity. Comparative studies in aquatic organisms have shown that the L-form is markedly more toxic than the racemate while simultaneously degrading faster, so the balance between toxicity and persistence shifts with the enantiomeric composition of what reaches the soil. This raises unresolved questions about whether the D-enantiomer, though agronomically inert, contributes disproportionately to the residual burden that non-target soil fauna experience over time.

Finally, the fate of the herbicide in tropical soils deserves emphasis. Microbial degradation gives glufosinate an approximate half-life of about seven days, which limits chronic accumulation under a single application but permits overlapping residues under the intensified spray schedules that glufosinate-tolerant cropping systems encourage. Because oxisols dominate Brazilian farmland, the use of a natural oxisol in the bioassays grounds the findings in the very pedoclimatic conditions where usage is expanding most rapidly, underscoring the need for field-validated, multi-endpoint monitoring of soil health in these regions.

Subject of Research: Ecotoxicological assessment of the herbicide ammonium glufosinate using standardized earthworm bioassays

Article Title: Ecotoxicological assessment of ammonium glufosinate using standardized earthworm bioassays

Article References: da Silva, R. O., Schedenffeldt, B. F., Dias, A. L., Siqueira, B. B. R., & Monquero, P. A. (2026). Ecotoxicological assessment of ammonium glufosinate using standardized earthworm bioassays. Discover Toxicology, 3(1), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44339-026-00063-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44339-026-00063-z

Keywords: Ecotoxicological, assessment, ammonium, glufosinate, standardized, earthworm, bioassays, scientific research

The Western Ghats are naturally susceptible to rainfall-triggered landslides because several risk factors overlap. The region has steep, deeply dissected terrain, weathered basaltic rocks and soil-like regolith that can lose strength when saturated. Miraswadi receives approximately 1,733 millimetres of rain annually, much of it during the southwest monsoon. During prolonged or unusually intense storms, water infiltrates the slope, raises groundwater levels and increases pore-water pressure between grains. That pressure reduces the friction and effective stress holding the material together, lowering its shear strength. Surface runoff can then concentrate in channels, erode exposed soil and mobilize loose debris. The July 2021 event occurred during an extreme rainfall episode that triggered thousands of landslides across Maharashtra’s Western Ghats. The local landscape also includes agricultural terraces, settlements, drainage modifications and other human changes that can redirect runoff or alter infiltration. The researchers did not identify these activities as the primary cause of the Miraswadi failure, but they concluded that such modifications may influence local susceptibility when combined with steep slopes, weathered materials and exceptional rainfall. Seismic activity in the nearby Koyna–Varna zone may contribute to long-term fracturing, although rainfall remains the principal trigger in this setting.

To reconstruct the terrain, the team flew a DJI Phantom 4 Pro equipped with a 20-megapixel, one-inch sensor camera at roughly 200 metres above ground level. The mission collected 283 georeferenced high-resolution images, with about 80 per cent forward overlap and 30 per cent side overlap between photographs. Overlapping images allow photogrammetry software to identify the same surface points from multiple viewpoints and calculate their three-dimensional positions. The resulting dataset produced an orthomosaic, a digital elevation model, contour information and a dense point cloud containing approximately 31 million points. Its mean ground sampling distance was 5.52 centimetres, meaning that individual image-derived cells represented only a few centimetres of ground surface. Image calibration was reported as 100 per cent successful, with a mean reprojection error of approximately 0.143 pixels. Handheld GPS measurements supplied ground control points to improve positional consistency and elevation calibration. The researchers emphasize that the products were intended primarily for relative geomorphological analysis rather than survey-grade geodetic measurement. Recreational-grade GPS accuracy and the absence of a pre-failure drone survey limit the precision with which surface movement and lost volume can be interpreted. Even so, the model provided sufficient detail to identify cracks, scarps, slumps and debris pathways across a hazardous slope.

The mapped landslide began approximately 125 metres northeast of Miraswadi on 23 July 2021. Its visible failure area covered about 1.34 hectares, while the associated debris spread extended across roughly 2.95 hectares. From crown to toe, the movement reached approximately 255 metres, with widths ranging from 112 to 162 metres. The researchers estimated that between 42,050 and 46,076 cubic metres of material had been displaced, presenting the result as a range because the pre-failure surface had to be reconstructed from surrounding undisturbed terrain. Morphological evidence suggests that the event began as a debris slide, in which weathered soil and rock moved downslope as a relatively coherent mass. Once the material entered a pre-existing second-order drainage channel, it became more confined and flow-like, evolving into a channelized debris movement. The terrain model divided the slope into an initiation zone between approximately 747 and 690 metres above mean sea level, a transport zone from about 690 to 665 metres, and a deposition zone from roughly 665 to 642 metres. The upper initiation area included steep slopes exceeding 45 degrees and locally surpassing 60 degrees. Lower gradients allowed transported soil, rock fragments and uprooted vegetation to accumulate across the broader depositional area.

The most consequential discovery was not confined to the old landslide scar. Immediately upslope of the habitation, researchers identified a deformation area containing three to four major tension cracks between approximately 70 and 90 metres long and up to half a metre wide. Several cracks coincided with localized ground settlement and slumping, with vertical displacement reaching about 0.5 metres. Their roughly slope-parallel alignment and position on a hillside directly above homes indicate that the ground has continued to adjust after the 2021 failure. A second area, above the original crown, contained two or three smaller cracks approximately 10 to 15 metres long and 0.1 metres wide. These may represent instability propagating upslope, although the study does not establish a precise rate or direction of movement. Field inspections confirmed active slumping, regolith displacement, minor scarps, surface undulations and additional cracks within the weathered soil. Tilting vegetation supplied another visible sign that the ground beneath roots may be shifting. The researchers carefully distinguish these observations from pre-failure warning signs: because the survey was conducted after the landslide, the features document ongoing post-failure deformation rather than proven precursors. Their location nevertheless matters for risk assessment. A hazard map drawn only around the original scar could overlook unstable ground that threatens the settlement from above.

The team also compared land use in satellite imagery from 2011 and 2022 to examine how the surrounding landscape had changed. Settlement area increased from approximately 8,014 square metres to 15,403 square metres, an expansion of about 92 per cent. Over the same period, terrace farming declined from about 454,746 to 409,114 square metres, while barren or fallow land decreased from approximately 115,372 to 105,709 square metres. Forest cover increased from about 170,695 to 218,601 square metres, suggesting that vegetation expanded overall even as localized changes occurred near the hamlet. The researchers observed the growth of residential structures, modifications to agricultural terraces and exposed soil surfaces, particularly on slopes northeast of the settlement where active instability was detected. These changes can affect how water travels across a hillside. A building platform, track, terrace or altered drainage line may concentrate runoff in one place, increase infiltration in another or remove material that previously protected the soil. The study does not claim that settlement growth caused the landslide. Instead, it presents human landscape modification as a factor that can interact with natural controls and increase exposure. In a small rural community, even modest expansion can place more homes, fields and livestock facilities beneath an unstable slope.

The findings have immediate implications for monitoring and preparedness, but the authors caution against treating their preliminary recommendations as final engineering plans. The deformation zone above the hamlet should receive continued attention, particularly during and after periods of intense rainfall. Repeated drone surveys could compare successive digital elevation models and orthomosaics to detect crack widening, new scarps, changing vegetation tilt or accelerated ground displacement. Field observations remain essential because dense vegetation, shadows and image geometry can obscure features in aerial data. Surface drainage management may reduce water concentration and infiltration in unstable areas, while vegetation-based measures could help control erosion and reinforce shallow soil. Retaining structures might be appropriate in selected locations, but their design would require detailed geotechnical, hydrogeological and engineering investigations. The study also identifies a potential temporary refuge area chosen using topography, distance from unstable slopes, access and proximity to agricultural and livestock resources. That site is not validated as a permanent rehabilitation location; no dedicated land-suitability, geotechnical or hydrogeological assessment was performed. Because many residents depend on farming and livestock and maintain strong ties to their homes, temporary evacuation during extreme rainfall may be more realistic than immediate permanent relocation. Warning signs such as widening cracks, renewed slumping or rapidly increasing deformation could help guide such decisions.

Miraswadi illustrates both the power and the limits of high-resolution remote sensing in landslide science. Regional susceptibility maps can identify broad patterns of danger, but they cannot always show whether a particular crack runs behind a house, whether a drainage channel links a scar to a settlement or whether deformation extends beyond a mapped failure. A drone can be deployed quickly over a relatively small area and generate detailed terrain information without exposing surveyors to the most hazardous ground. Yet a single post-event flight cannot reveal how fast the slope is moving, what is happening underground or whether another failure will occur. The study therefore calls for repeated UAV acquisitions combined with rainfall records, hydrological monitoring, geotechnical testing, geophysical surveys and analysis of rainfall thresholds. Such integration could turn a detailed snapshot into an early-warning system. For communities across the Western Ghats and other tropical mountain regions, the approach offers a practical way to document landslides after extreme storms and identify danger zones that remain active after the debris has stopped moving. In Miraswadi, the central message is straightforward: the end of a landslide’s visible movement does not necessarily mean the slope has stabilized. High-resolution mapping can make that hidden continuation visible before the next monsoon tests the hillside again.

Subject of Research: UAV mapping of landslide morphology and post-failure slope instability in Miraswadi, India

Article Title: UAV based assessment of landslide morphology and slope instability in Miraswadi, Western Ghats, India

Article References: Shirke, A. V., Khandge, A., Umrikar, B. N., & Asim, M. (2026). UAV based assessment of landslide morphology and slope instability in Miraswadi, Western Ghats, India. Discover Geoscience, 4(1), Article 334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-00707-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44288-026-00707-y

Keywords: landslides, UAV mapping, Western Ghats, slope instability, debris flows, remote sensing, monsoon rainfall, hazard mitigation, based, assessment, landslide, morphology

The research team surveyed professionals working in public and private social services across Spain between June and August 2023. Participants completed an online questionnaire adapted from Spain’s Digital Competence Framework, itself aligned with the European DigComp 2.2 framework. The sample had an average age of 42.9 years and was predominantly female, with women representing 82.6% of respondents. Social Work was the main area of professional training, accounting for 76.7% of the sample, followed by Social Education and Psychology. Just over half worked in the public sector, while others were employed by third-sector organisations or private entities. The survey used 63 yes-or-no items distributed across five competence areas: information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, digital content creation, safety, and problem solving. Researchers converted the responses into standardised scores from zero to 100, then used hierarchical cluster analysis with Ward’s method and squared Euclidean distance to detect groups with similar patterns of competence.

Across the sample, average performance was approximately 70% in most areas, but the overall figures concealed pronounced differences between individuals. Communication and collaboration was the strongest dimension, indicating that routine digital messaging, media sharing, online procedures and basic interaction are widely established in professional practice. Digital content creation was the weakest area overall. The distinction matters because content creation involves more than producing ordinary documents: it can include selecting tools for a particular purpose, integrating material from different sources, managing web content, understanding licensing, using artificial intelligence and producing complex resources for others. The study also found substantial variation in problem solving, the capacity to diagnose and resolve technical difficulties without immediately relying on external support. Safety scores were generally adequate, particularly for passwords, digital certificates and secure transactions, although digital well-being and misinformation protection were less consistent. Information and data literacy showed a similar pattern: basic tasks were common, while analytical and more advanced uses of information were much less widespread.

Cluster analysis produced three groups with statistically significant differences across all five dimensions. The first, comprising 283 professionals, was described as a consolidating profile. Its average digital competence score was 72.15, close to the overall sample level, and its members had an average age of 41.8 years. About one-third held postgraduate qualifications, and employment was divided relatively evenly between the public sector and other organisations. This group was capable in routine communication and collaboration and could usually resolve basic technical problems, but its performance declined when tasks required more specialised content production, advanced analysis or creative uses of technology. Only 16.3% reported using artificial intelligence tools for content creation, while 19.8% managed website content and 17.0% could debug code. In problem solving, 91.2% could resolve basic technical issues independently, but only 47.7% reported creative uses of technology. The group’s self-assessment averaged 6.72 out of 10, lower than might be expected from its measured score, suggesting caution or awareness of the complexity of digital work.

The second group, containing 152 professionals, showed the strongest performance. This advanced profile had a mean competence score of 89.77 and was the youngest of the three groups, with an average age of 40.2 years. More than half held master’s or doctoral qualifications, and the group had a lower representation in the public sector than the other profiles. Its members performed strongly in every competence area, particularly in digital content creation and problem solving. Their mean score for content creation was 81.47, and their problem-solving score reached 93.26. Nearly all could address routine technical problems, while 97.4% reported responding proactively to their own digital needs and 99.3% to the needs of others. The group also showed the highest engagement with training or self-directed learning, reported by 90.8% of its members. Advanced capabilities were not limited to personal use: participants commonly helped colleagues search for and verify information, selected tools according to content needs, produced complex content for third parties and used digital resources for creative or civic purposes. Their self-perceived competence, 7.82 out of 10, was still below the level indicated by the broader assessment.

The third group, comprising 106 professionals, had the lowest measured competence, with a mean score of 52.62. Its members were older on average, at 49.5 years, had the longest average tenure in their current organisations, at approximately 15 years, and were predominantly employed in public administration. Only 20.6% held postgraduate qualifications. The largest gaps appeared in digital content creation and problem solving, where mean scores were 38.05 and 32.23, respectively. Fewer than half could solve a simple video-call problem or independently search online for a solution, and only 9.4% used technology creatively. Use of artificial intelligence tools for content creation was reported by 7.5%, while only 8.5% reported debugging programmes and 16.0% using smart-home technologies. Communication skills were also limited when tasks moved beyond essential functions: 16.0% co-edited documents and 21.7% could explain collaborative digital services to others. Safety was a relative strength, but weaknesses remained in app-permission management and protection against misinformation. This group rated its own competence at 5.93 out of 10, slightly higher than its measured performance, a mismatch that could reduce motivation to seek training.

Differences between the profiles were not merely statistical. The researchers calculated partial eta-squared values to estimate how much variation in each competence dimension was associated with cluster membership. The values ranged from 0.237 for safety to 0.619 for problem solving, with particularly strong separation in problem solving, content creation and communication. The results therefore point to distinct patterns of capability rather than a simple continuum in which every skill rises at the same rate. The advanced group was consistently above the sample average, while the constrained group was below it in all five dimensions. The consolidating group occupied an intermediate position, with notable competence in communication and collaboration but less confidence or experience with complex tasks. Item-level results also revealed that basic digital activity is not equivalent to digital maturity. For example, many professionals could organise files, exchange messages or use secure transactions, yet far fewer could analyse data, manage online content, apply artificial intelligence or create sophisticated solutions for colleagues and clients.

The findings have direct implications for social services, where professionals handle sensitive information about people’s finances, family circumstances, health, legal situations and use of support. Digital case-management platforms and interconnected regional systems can improve continuity and coordination, but they also raise demands for privacy, cybersecurity, ethical decision-making and careful communication. The authors argue that digital competence should therefore be treated as a professional requirement linked to service quality and the protection of users’ rights, not as an optional technical extra. They recommend strengthening foundational skills and learning networks for the constrained profile, helping the consolidating group progress toward advanced competence, and supporting advanced professionals as digital mentors or agents of organisational change. Training should also address digital well-being. The intermediate group reported particular difficulties with posture and screen-time control, illustrating how frequent technology use can coexist with occupational vulnerability and technostress. Sustainable digital transformation will require organisational investment, protected time for learning and policies that treat continuous development as a professional right rather than a one-time response to new software.

The study’s conclusions should be interpreted alongside its limitations. Because participation relied on an online questionnaire, the sample may overrepresent professionals already comfortable with digital tools. The instrument measured self-reported competence rather than performance observed in practical tasks, leaving room for self-efficacy and social-desirability bias. Spain’s decentralised social services system also varies across autonomous communities in administration, resources, infrastructure and organisational culture, but the available data did not allow those regional differences to be analysed in detail. Even so, the three-profile structure provides a useful framework for planning more precise interventions. The researchers call for regular competence assessments, longitudinal studies and evaluations conducted before and after training. Such work could show whether targeted programmes improve practical ability, reduce digital stress and strengthen service delivery without widening inequalities between organisations. As social services continue to adopt digital records, remote communication, automated processes and emerging artificial-intelligence tools, the central challenge will be ensuring that technological change expands professional capacity and client access rather than reproducing existing divisions inside the system.

Subject of Research: Digital competence profiles among social services professionals in Spain

Article Title: Assessment of digital competences: characterisation of professional profiles in Spanish social services

Article References: Gómez-Rasco, T., Fernández-Borrero, M. A., Muñoz-Moreno, R., & Ferri-Fuentevilla, E. (2026). Assessment of digital competences: characterisation of professional profiles in Spanish social services. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 390. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01666-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01666-4

Keywords: digital competence, social services, Spain, DigComp 2.2, digital skills, professional training, digital resilience, problem solving, digital well-being, Assessment, digital, competences