Enhancing international dimensions in apparel and merchandising curricula in the USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose For many years, the textile and apparel industry has been on the forefront of globalization. To prepare students in the global business environment, this study seeks input from the US business communities and provides suggestions for enhancing the international dimensions of the apparel and merchandising curriculum in the USA. Design/methodology/approach Two sets of data were collected and compared: the general data were collected from various business sectors via telephone interviews, and the product‐specific data were gathered from US apparel manufacturers using a modified Dillman's mail survey method. Findings Results indicated that the most important benefit of doing business internationally was expanded market, while the obstacle identified most often was cultural differences. The study also found that understanding (i.e. cultural/business practice differences, etc.) is more critical than application or competency (i.e. specific skills) for college international education and that taking general and product‐specific approaches is most efficient to enhance international dimensions in textile and apparel curricula. Practical implications Practical implications discussed were: first, international education in the textile and clothing field should be developed with a strong focus on small businesses; second, the international dimensions of apparel design, production, and merchandising curricula should be developed using a region‐specific, rather than a “one‐fits‐all” approach; third, students in the textile and clothing field should be fully prepared in “understanding”, rather than in “application” or “competency”; and fourth, educational modules that help the students better understand international markets should be incorporated into curricula. Originality/value We hope this report raises attention with regard to why and how international dimensions can be incorporated into instruction. Based on this report, we expect more practical and innovative international education dialogues to begin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".