The key elements for being excellent teachers: a case study of Her-Herng Primary School

Quality & Quantity - This study intended to explore what the key elements of being excellent teachers are. Therefore, we engaged in two stages investigations. First, a questionnaire of analytic...     

Enhancing service quality improvement strategies of fine-dining restaurants: New insights from integrating a two-phase decision-making model of IPGA and DEMATEL analysis

The traditional IPA model has been considered to be a decision-making tool for service quality management. However, the IPA model does not meet the assumptions of the service quality gap, and also cannot explore the connection between service quality attributes, which can easily lead to decision-making errors of service quality management. The purpose of this study is to apply the IPGA model and DEMATEL to explore the service quality improvement priority of fine-dining restaurants and the causal relationship between service quality attributes, and use it as the decision-making reference of service quality strategy planning and resource reorganizing for the restaurant industry with limited resources. The study applied the customers of 8 fine-dining restaurants in Taipei City as the study object, and there are 502 effective samples. The study result shows that the dimensions of reliability, responsiveness, and assurance are concentrated here, and are the restaurant service quality dimensions that most need to be improved from the customer perceptive. In addition, the total effect of reliability is the highest among all the service quality dimensions. Reliability and responsiveness, in addition to impacting each other, will impact assurance and empathy. According to the study result, through IPGA and DEMATEL, the service quality performance of fine-dining restaurants and the resource input priority can be grasped more objectively and accurately, which can be used as a reference for manager to plan the service quality improvement strategy.     

The role of empathy between functional competence diversity and competence acquisition: a case study of interdisciplinary teams

This study was intended to verify the relationships among team functional competence diversity, empathy, and competence acquisition and placed more focus on team learning rather than on individual lecturing. Although functional competence diversity involved heterogeneous experts to brainstorm the development of innovative curricula, the teamwork process incurred conflicts. With the purpose of overcoming these difficulties, cultivating greater empathy in the participants helped them become more thoughtful and reduced conflicts during teamwork. We adopt purposive sampling in this study. Three hundred questionnaires were sent out, and 108 valid responses were obtained. Initially, we proved that the more participants with heterogeneous competencies there are in functional competence diversity teams, the easier it will be for them to acquire heterogeneous competencies. Second, we also found that the more teachers engage in functional competence diversity teams, the greater empathy they must have in order to reach an agreement efficiently. Third, the greater the empathy participants have, the easier it will be for them to acquire heterogeneous competencies. Finally, we verified that empathy has a mediating effect between functional competence diversity and competence acquisition in interdisciplinary teams. This study suggests that when team members have greater empathy competence, it reduces arguments, helps polish interpersonal skills, and facilitates tight cooperation that leads to the acquisition of heterogeneous knowledge and the development of systematic curricula.