How do doctoral students experience supervision?

Supervision has been shown to have a high impact on doctoral students' development. However, little is known about how students perceive not only negative but also positive doctoral experiences, as well as their strategies for dealing with perceived problematic situations. The aim of this study is to analyse and relate doctoral students' significant supervision experiences to the strategies they use to cope with these experiences when they perceive them as challenging or negative. A total of 1173 doctoral students from different research-intensive Spanish universities responded to four open-ended questions about their most significant experiences in their doctoral journey, associated feelings and strategies to deal with them. We identified a total of 223 experiences related to supervision that were distributed into five categories: 1) central prerequisites for supervision, 2) supervisor choice, 3) supervision of the research process, 4) coaching and 5) project management. The results showed three distinct ways, as reported by the students, of handling the perceived negative supervision experiences: 1) no strategy, 2) local strategy and 3) regulatory strategy. The results suggest that analysing both positive and negative experiences may better capture variability in students' supervision experiences. A relation between experiences with supervision and students' satisfaction was also detected.     

How do students misunderstand number representations?

We used both student interviews and diagnostic testing to reveal students’ misconceptions about number representations in computing systems. This article reveals that students who have passed an undergraduate level computer organization course still possess surprising misconceptions about positional notations, two's complement representation, and overflow. Contrary to common opinion, these misconceptions are widespread and reveal the need for instruction that specifically targets these misconceptions. In addition, these misconceptions will serve as the basis for the creation of a standard assessment tool called the digital logic concept inventory. This concept inventory will provide a rigorous and quantitative metric to assess the effectiveness of new teaching methods.     

How do you make students learn more?

This article deals with the system of professional and vocational education and training in secondary schools in the Republic of Slovenia. It presents a research project, conducted on a sample of Slovene businesses. The purpose of the research was to establish whether companies that employ secondary school graduates are satisfied with their knowledge. It also shows one way to increase the knowledge of students in schools.     

What do students consider useful about student ratings?

Although measures of student ratings of instruction have been developed and examined empirically, students' attitudes about the utility of these ratings have yet to be meaningfully quantified. Using survey responses from 1229 students at a major Canadian university, we developed a psychometrically sound measure of the usefulness of student ratings. A principal components analysis with oblique rotation was conducted and three factors (Instructor characteristics, Course characteristics and Instructor's relative ranking) were obtained that explained 64% of the variance in six iterations. The usefulness of these three types of ratings information differs according to several student and course characteristics. The present results provide evidence for both reliability and validity of the instrument as an indicator of the utility of teaching evaluation for students.     

How well do you know about your hands?

想想看,好像我们做每件事情都少不了手,那么,你对自己的手了解多少呢?一只手有五个手指,每个手指都有自己的名字!你都知道这些名字吗?快快抢答啰!如果你不知道,也没关系,让我来给你讲一讲吧!我们的大拇指就叫thum b,竖大拇指就是thum bsup,表示“好,赞成”的意思。注意是thum bs,可不要把s丢了!我们食指叫做forefinger,还有个别名是index finger。中指叫做m iddle finger,顾名思义,中指就是居中的嘛!无名指的英文名字是ring finger。戴戒指的手指?没错,结婚戒指就是戴在左手的无名指上的,所以它才会被叫做ring finger。大家可以去看看爸爸妈…     

How prepared do newly-qualified teachers feel? Differences between routes and settings

Does it matter whether teachers are trained in schools or universities? In England, there is an ongoing change in the balance of routes to becoming a newly qualified teacher (NQT). Given this, and widely-reported problems with teacher supply, it is important to consider whether there are discernible differences between the routes in terms of their outcomes. This paper is based on a re-analysis of the 2015 Department for Education survey of 7,770 NQTs. The outcomes considered are the levels of reported NQT satisfaction with their overall training, preparedness to help improve pupil reading, whether satisfaction varies between routes, phases, and types of provision, how much of any difference is attributable to the prior characteristics of the students or to the routes alone. Using logistic regression, it was possible to explain around 18% of the variation in NQT responses. Most of the variation remains unexplained – perhaps because key but unknown variables are missing, and certainly because the level of satisfaction is generally so high. The average levels of satisfaction for NQTs are largely un-stratified by sex, disability, age and ethnicity. Within the two main routes of school- and university-led there is almost as much variability as there is between them. Once other factors are taken into account, the differences in reported satisfaction between routes and providers are small. There is, therefore, no particular reason to promote or support one route at the expense of the other – at least in terms of NQT satisfaction.     

What do final year engineering students know about sustainable development?

This paper presents data from a project that aims to determine the level of knowledge and understanding of engineering students about sustainable development (SD). The data derive from a survey completed by final year engineering students in three Irish Higher Education Institutions. This paper is part of a larger study that examines the relationship between students’ and teachers’ understanding of SD. The results from the survey show that final year engineering students’ knowledge is deficient. The majority of the participants fail to acknowledge the complexity of the concept and focus on environmental protection. Their knowledge of legislation relevant to SD and the social aspect of sustainability is particularly deficient.     

What do primary students say about school-based social work programmes?

This article focuses on primary school children’s experiences of school-based social work programmes. These students, aged between 6 and 11, and drawn from a student population comprising 28 different cultural backgrounds and from low socio-economic backgrounds, participated in a case study that researched a school-based social work programme, the St Paul’s Model. The importance of this research lies in the fact that in the area of Australian school social work there is no documented information on how primary school children experience school-based social work programmes. Findings indicate that the school-based social work programmes enhanced the social, emotional, and personal well-being of primary school-aged children and provided enhanced social inclusion programmes and access to resources otherwise denied to primary school-aged children located in economically, socially and politically disadvantaged circumstances.     

How do teachers perceive cheating students? Beliefs about cues to deception and detection accuracy in the educational field

The present study explores how well teacher trainees can detect liars. Moreover, a new method was applied to investigate beliefs that teacher trainees hold about liars. The results indicate that, overall, teacher trainees were not better than chance in detecting true and invented stories. Generally, participants reported to have used only a few cues for their credibility judgment, where most of these self-reported cues are stereotypical and invalid deception cues (e.g., gaze aversion). Further analyses with a Brunswikian lens model showed that the self-reported cues were good predictors of their credibility judgment but only poorly predictive for the objective truth/lie status of the statement. Practical implications of the results are discussed.     

How do students integrate multiple texts? An investigation of top-down processing

European Journal of Psychology of Education - This study describes an in-depth investigation of students’ integration or connection formation across multiple texts. Students were asked to...     

What do second-order judgments tell us about low-performing students’ metacognitive awareness?

According to the unskilled and unaware effect (Kruger and Dunning 1999), low-performing students tend to overestimate their performance. Differentiating the assessment of metacognitive judgments into performance judgments (PJs) and second-order judgments (SOJs), PJs of low-performing students tend to be inflated, while their SOJs are usually lower than those of high-performing students (Händel and Fritzsche 2016; Miller and Geraci 2011). This suggests some level of awareness. The present study investigated whether low-performers’ lower SOJs actually indicate metacognitive awareness. We studied SOJs after adequate and inadequate PJs, and investigated whether low-performers’ lower SOJs are made by default or whether their lower SOJs differ in a similar magnitude compared to those of high-performers (indicating metacognitive awareness). We address this issue by disentangling student and item effects via generalized linear mixed models. Reanalyzing the data of Händel and Fritzsche (2016) from N?=?116 students, we found that SOJs depended on the students who provided the SOJ and on the items on which the SOJ was made. Overall, SOJs depended on the PJs and on the interaction of performance and PJs, but not on the performance itself. Separate analyses for students of different performance levels revealed that low-performing students showed less awareness, indicated by a non-significant interaction effect of performance and PJs. Thus, it takes mixed models to tell the whole story of low-performing students’ lower SOJs.     

“How do you feel about math?”: relationships between competence and value appraisals,achievement emotions and academic achievement

This study analyzes the relationships between cognitive appraisals, classroom and test emotions, and math achievement in a sample of 1219 Portuguese students from the 6th and 8th grades. Participants completed measures of perceived value, perceived competence, and seven math achievement emotions (boredom, hopelessness, anger, anxiety, enjoyment, pride, and relief) experienced in two different settings: classroom and tests. Math achievement was obtained from school records. Results showed significant associations between student competence and value appraisals, their emotional experiences in test and classroom situations, and their math achievement. However, when emotions were considered simultaneously in structural equation modeling, only anger in test situations and hopelessness were significant negative predictors of students’ math achievement. Hopelessness appears to play a particular role in the interplay between cognitive appraisals, emotions, and academic achievement as it is the only emotion that relates to math achievement both in test and classroom situations. Furthermore, findings also support the existence of differences in the relationships between cognitive appraisals and the achievement emotions students experience in these two settings.     

How and why do students of higher education participate in online seminars?

Online education is continuing to gain popularity in educational institutions and organizations. Hitherto, most research has occurred at aggregated levels, while few researchers have studied how and why individuals participate in online education. It is essential to examine individual perceptions and relationships in order to understand how students behave in relation to others. This paper investigates how students of higher education participate in online seminars and why they participate in certain ways. An online class that attended asynchronous and synchronous online seminars was studied. Electronic logs were used to examine how students participated and interviews were used to illustrate why they participated. It was revealed that the participation of students varied between aspects such as exchanging information, managing tasks and providing social support and the emphasis of these aspects were related to the tool they communicated through. A number of participation inhibitors were identified and it was also suggested how these inhibitors can be addressed.     

How do Dutch secondary teachers and students conceive the purpose of assessment?

How teachers and students deal with assessment practices is largely influenced by the conceptions they hold about the purpose of assessment. This means that, given the current plea for a paradigm shift from Assessment of Learning to Assessment for Leaning with a balance between the formative and summative purposes of assessment, the study of teachers’ and students’ conceptions of the purpose of assessment is of the utmost relevance. In this study Dutch secondary school teachers’ (n = 351) and students’ (n = 712) conceptions of the purpose of assessment were measured using a translation of the teachers’ conceptions of assessment questionnaire and a translated and shortened version of the students’ conceptions of assessment questionnaire. Maximum Likelihood factor analyses resulted in four teacher and five student conceptions of the purpose of assessment. The results indicate that the teachers in our sample did not distinguish between formative and summative purposes of assessment. They did discern classroom assessment (formative as well as summative) from school accountability. In addition, they conceive assessment as being of bad (in terms of measurement errors) or good quality. In contrast with the teachers, students do make a distinction between the formative and summative purpose of assessment. They also refer to school accountability and the affects that assessment triggers in them as further purposes of assessment.     

How do students prepare an application for a place in higher education?

Sources of help used by students when preparing an application for a place in higher education using the UCAS procedure were investigated, including how they may use Records of Achievement (RoAs). 178 sixth‐form students at three mixed comprehensives and one independent girls’ school were surveyed. In general, students consulted a good range of sources of help in preparing their application. Where a specialist careers adviser was available, this service was viewed very favourably. However, regard for the usefulness of RoAs was mixed. The major implications for those involved in student guidance with sixth‐formers are discussed.