Journal of Hunan University Natural Sciences

Deindustrialization undermines economic performance in both advanced and emerging economies, yet few empirical studies translate expert knowledge into concrete industrial-policy priorities. This article identifies and ranks strategies for increasing the Brazilian industrial sector’s share of gross domestic product (GDP) and reversing the country’s deindustrialization trend. We first applied the DPSIR (Driving Forces–Pressures–State–Impact–Responses) framework to structure insights from specialists in economics, public law, scientific research, and public- and private-sector management who are directly involved in industrial development. We then used the TOPSIS multi-criteria decision method to order the recommended actions by implementation urgency. The results produce a clear hierarchy of policy measures, with the highest priority accorded to establishing a coherent medium-term industrial-planning agenda that reflects Brazil’s present structural position. To our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate DPSIR and TOPSIS for the formulation and prioritization of national reindustrialization strategies, offering a replicable approach for economies facing premature deindustrialization.

Keywords: Reindustrialization; Industrial policy; Structural change; DPSIR; TOPSIS; Brazil.

https://doi.org/10.55463/issn.1674-2974.52.5.14

Despite policy mandates to embed “Four Cs” competencies—communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative thinking—throughout teacher education, empirical evidence on how community-engagement initiatives foster these skills remains limited, particularly in Gulf contexts. Guided by sociocultural learning theory and Kolb’s experiential-learning model, this sequential explanatory mixed-methods study evaluates the extent to which structured community-engagement projects cultivate 21st-century skills among pre-service and in-service science teachers in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). In the quantitative phase, 160 pre-service and 85 in-service teachers completed an adapted 21st-century-skills inventory (Cronbach’s α = 0.85). Descriptive statistics and independent-samples t-tests revealed that in-service teachers scored significantly higher on all four competencies, with the largest differences observed for critical thinking (t(243) = 4.72, p < .001, d = 0.60) and collaboration (t(243) = 3.41, p = .001, d = 0.43), suggesting a cumulative advantage of field experience. To elucidate these patterns, the qualitative phase employed semi-structured interviews with 20 purposively selected participants representing high and low survey quartiles. Thematic analysis indicated that authentic problem-solving with community stakeholders, iterative feedback cycles, and cross-disciplinary project teams were the principal mechanisms through which engagement activities enhanced the Four Cs. Participants also identified structural constraints—restricted instructional time, insufficient funding, and limited school–community partnerships—that moderated these gains. Taken together, the findings demonstrate that well-scaffolded community-engagement modules can accelerate the acquisition of transferable 21st-century competencies, particularly for novice teachers. The study recommends embedding sustained, resource-supported community collaborations into both initial teacher education and continuing professional development frameworks across the UAE and comparable settings.

Keywords: 21st-century skills; community engagement; pre-service teachers; in-service teachers; mixed-methods research; UAE.

https://doi.org/10.55463/issn.1674-2974.52.5.13

Although empirical family research recognises motherhood, marital roles, and daughterhood as analytically distinct, the scholarly literature still lacks a formally engineered, machine-readable model that links these constructs to primary textual evidence. We address this gap by developing a domain ontology from a curated corpus of 64 canonical texts (≈ 30 000 words). Following the NeOn methodology, we (i) elicited 64 competency questions, (ii) applied semantic-field analysis to derive a controlled vocabulary, and (iii) formalised the resulting concepts and relations in OWL. The finished ontology contains 150 classes, 18 object properties, and 11 annotation properties, all verified for logical consistency with the HermiT reasoner. A two-stage evaluation combined automated metrics with expert review. On a stratified sample of 120 queries, the ontology-driven retrieval pipeline achieved a mean average precision of 0.87—an 89 % improvement over a keyword baseline (0.46). Domain specialists further confirmed that the model supplies the contextual information needed for nuanced interpretation of each role. The ontology is released under an open licence and can be consumed directly by SPARQL endpoints or embedded in digital-humanities workflows. By offering a rigorously validated, extensible representation of women’s family roles, the resource lowers barriers to reproducible research and paves the way for comparative studies across languages and cultures.

Keywords: ontology engineering; women’s family roles; knowledge representation; semantic retrieval; digital humanities.

https://doi.org/10.55463/issn.1674-2974.52.5.12

This paper evaluates the impact of Indonesia’s 2021 curriculum overhaul on secondary-school learning outcomes within the country’s long-running decentralization agenda. Although greater fiscal and administrative autonomy for provinces and districts is expected to raise school quality and efficiency, robust evidence on student achievement remains scarce. Drawing on nationally representative data and employing propensity-score matching to mitigate selection bias, we find no statistically significant gains in mathematics or reading scores attributable to the new curriculum. The analysis nevertheless uncovers two robust patterns: students who attended education programmes consistently outperform their peers, and pronounced inter-regional achievement gaps persist almost two decades after decentralization commenced. Taken together, the results suggest that curriculum change alone is insufficient to boost learning and that early-childhood provision and territorially-targeted policies should be integral to Indonesia’s future education strategy.

Keywords: curriculum reform; educational decentralization; learning outcomes; propensity-score matching; Indonesia.

https://doi.org/10.55463/issn.1674-2974.52.5.11

Although many empirical studies have explored how plugged (technology-based) and unplugged (non-digital) activities foster students’ computational-thinking (CT) skills in mathematics classrooms, their qualitative findings have never been brought together in a systematic synthesis. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review coupled with a qualitative meta-synthesis. A comprehensive search of the Scopus database retrieved 14 peer-reviewed articles and conference papers published between 2004 and 2023 that reported qualitative evidence on the topic. Guided by grounded-theory procedures—open, axial and selective coding—implemented in NVivo 14, we analysed the data. The synthesis shows that mathematics lessons enriched with plugged activities—particularly educational robotics, augmented-reality applications and virtual mathematics laboratories—enabled learners to demonstrate the full spectrum of CT components: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, algorithm design and evaluation. By contrast, lessons relying solely on unplugged activities fostered only limited aspects of CT. These results indicate that technology-enhanced (plugged) learning experiences are more effective than unplugged tasks for cultivating computational thinking in mathematics. We therefore recommend that mathematics educators systematically integrate suitable educational technologies to strengthen students’ CT skills and suggest that future research examine how specific design features of plugged activities contribute to different CT components.

Keywords: Computational thinking; Mathematics learning; Plugged activities; Qualitative meta-synthesis; Systematic review; Unplugged activities.

https://doi.org/10.55463/issn.1674-2974.52.5.10