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.     

What motivates Chinese women to study in the UK and how do they perceive their experience?

This paper addresses two crucial questions facing the UK HE sector: what motivates female Chinese globally mobile graduates to continue their education in the UK?; and, are they satisfied with their experience? First, this mixed methods study revealed that the primary motivations were: early and mid-career gains, competitive advantages derived from completing a 1-year master’s programme, favourable exchange rates, and the opportunity to travel. Alongside these, a number of challenges and concerns were also noted, including: high UK tuition fees and living costs, shifting Chinese employer perceptions of an overseas education, and punitive UK visa regulations. Second, findings indicated mid- to high levels of satisfaction with the experience. Students believed that the main strengths and benefits of a UK-based education related to the high levels of tutorial participation and interaction which facilitated increased subject-matter engagement, as well as to the development of interpretation and application skills. Nevertheless, respondents reported that there are many ways in which we need to improve, such as by: offering clearer language guidance, closing the assessment requirements expectations gap, offering more opportunities for classroom participation, cutting class sizes, reducing fees, and ironically, attracting students from geographical zones other than China to facilitate academic development and programme diversity.     

What do professional learning policies say about purposes of teacher education?

Enhancing teacher learning is acknowledged globally as a key route to improving student outcomes, thereby contributing to nation states’ economic competitiveness. This globally accepted policy “hypernarrative” is driving reform of teacher education policy internationally. This article seeks to analyse some key features of contemporary teacher professional learning policies in terms of the underpinning purposes of education, in an attempt to make more explicit the purposes and potential implications of particular policy choices. The analysis draws on literature related to the fundamental purposes of school education, highlighting three broad, but distinct categories of “purpose”: the socialisation function; the development of human capital; and “subjectification” which focuses on individual creativity. While principally conceptual in nature, the article draws on the Scottish policy context in exemplifying the analysis, concluding that there is a tendency towards socialisation and human capital functions, at the expense of subjectification purposes.     

What do secondary trainee teachers say about teaching as a profession of their “choice” in Malawi?

This interview-based qualitative study is concerned with the recruitment of secondary teachers in Malawi. This study shows a range of perspectives for pursuing a teacher training course: failure to follow a desired career, springboard to other careers, to upgrade, and teaching out of vocation. It shows that trainee teachers held a range of images about teaching: its ability to enhance knowledge; low pay with no incentives, low status profession, and lack of trust of male trainee teachers. Teacher educators and policy makers need to consider the perspectives of trainee teachers to reduce resource wastage and support trainee teachers appropriately.     

What do distance language tutors say about teacher motivation?

Research into motivation in education mainly centres on students’ learning motivation. This article reports on an interview study of teacher motivation with the aim of investigating the effects of student-related factors and tutors’ personal factors on the motivation of language tutors in the distance learning context. Findings from the study indicate that external sources of influence include students’ engagement in learning English, motivation to learn English, progress made, foundation in English and appreciation of tutors’ teaching, while tutors’ internal factors are their self-efficacy in teaching, reflection and self-initiated professional development, interest in the profession of teaching English as well as their sense of achievement. Analysis of the data also suggests that more concrete measures are needed to counteract the demotivating effects from these two dimensions. Implications and suggestions are discussed with regard to enhancing tutor motivation more effectively.     

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.     

‘What drives students’ affective commitment towards their university?’

How can universities build ongoing, committed relationships with students, able to withstand the financial and emotional challenges of studying in higher education? The research proposes that students’ ongoing attachment to their university, based on positive feelings towards the university, is an important aspect of the student experience. This ongoing attachment is conceptualised here as students’ affective commitment towards their institution. Using an online survey-method and a research sample comprising undergraduate students studying in the UK, this research identifies three factors which drive students’ affective commitment towards their institution. These factors include students’ affective commitment towards academics and students’ calculative commitment towards the institution; factors which draw from the relational literature. A third factor, commitment balance, was developed within this research. Commitment balance occurs when a student’s commitment to their university is perceived to be reciprocated by the university’s commitment to the student. The study found that commitment balance was the most important driver of students’ ongoing attachment to their institution. The paper proposes that commitment balance is a key idea to consider within relational studies generally, but has a particular relevance in the higher education context for understanding the student experience. Commitment balance reflects the pulse of reciprocity which energises relational exchanges between students and institution. The findings of this research reinforce how critically important it is for universities and academics to build relationships with students. The desired outcome is to enhance the student experience, create positive attachment between students and university and ultimately improve student retention.     

Conventional or sustainable? Chinese university students’ thinking about feedback used in their English lessons

Feedback has been increasingly conceptualised as a dialogical process where students interpret the provided information through interaction with comment providers and use it to enhance their learning. A major challenge for the development of sustainable feedback is closely related to how students think about it. This study explored how 25 Chinese university students made sense of instructor and peer feedback following their English group presentations. The findings reveal that most of the participants perceived more judging and encouraging functions of feedback than its improving functions, which reflected their conventional thinking about feedback. Variation also existed in the perceived functions of instructor and peer feedback. Imbalanced power relations, face, group harmony and instructors’ feedback practice as well as students’ past learning and assessment experiences appeared to inhibit the participants from viewing feedback in a sustainable way. This study sheds light on college students’ complex thinking about feedback in a non-Anglophone context which has been neglected in the feedback literature, and has implications for educators and researchers in facilitating sustainable feedback in the Chinese context and the non-Chinese contexts where Chinese students study.     

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 role do students’ enjoyment and perception of ability play in social disparities in subject choices at university?

Prior research has shown that students from less educated families are less likely to study both science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects and arts and humanities subjects. This article used a large representative sample of university students in England to explore the relationship between students’ enjoyment, perception of ability and socio-economic disparities in subject choices. Although these attitudes differed by students’ parents’ education level, and were associated with subject choices, disparities in choices persisted when accounting for these differences. Students with less educated parents were less likely to choose arts and humanities and more likely to study social sciences, law and business, over STEM, even when their enjoyment and perception of ability in subjects were similar. Students whose parents had higher levels of education were more likely to choose STEM over arts and humanities as their enjoyment of STEM increased, suggesting different underlying processes informing student choices by social background.     

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.     

What do Children Think about the Drawing Process?

This study presents young children’s hypotheses about the process of drawing, i.e., it deals with the construction of knowledge in drawing from the child’s perspective. Using both a longitudinal and an exploratory design, the author followed the processes of production and ‘reading’ of drawings developed by six young children, aged 2 to 6, for three years. The author relates constructive studies about children’s drawings with their ideas in each stage of drawing. The results indicate that children conceive of drawing as an object in which action and thought are related.     

Learning and using English: what experience and expectations do non-local Asian international students bring to their university studies in Hong Kong?

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of prior and current experiences with English of non-local Asian international students and of their language expectations when commencing their studies at an English-medium university in Hong Kong. In addition to grappling with new academic demands, these sojourners need to adapt to a vastly different social environment, further complicating the already challenging school-to-university transition. A mixed-methods approach was adopted to generate data with the employment of online questionnaire surveys and semi-structured individual interviews. In total, 224 completed questionnaires were returned, among which 60 were identified as responses from Asian international students. Eleven students of five different Asian nationalities participated in interviews. The results show that despite different socio-cultural backgrounds and prior learning experiences, these international students had similar expectations regarding the institutional language environment of an internationalised university, within which they expect English to be not only a medium of instruction but also a lingua franca for social interaction with their peers and local counterparts. The findings provide internationalised institutions with insights into the needs and expectations of incoming students from regions which are geographical neighbours but with varying cultural norms, educational standards, colonial heritage, degrees of elitism, and technological development.     

Traditional or non-traditional students?: incorporating UK students’ living arrangements into decisions about going to university

Since the introduction of the post-1992 university, various, and ongoing, higher education (HE) policy reforms have fuelled academic, political, media and anecdotal discussions of the trajectories of UK university students. An outcome of this has been the dualistic classification of students as being from either ‘traditional’ or ‘non-traditional’ backgrounds. An extensive corpus of literature has sought to critically discuss how students experience their transition into university, questioning specifically the notion that all students follow a linear transition through university. Moreover, there is far more complexity involved in the student experience than can be derived from just employing these monolithic terms. This research proposes incorporating students’ residential circumstances into these debates to encourage more critical discussions of this complex demographic. Drawing upon the experiences of a sample of students from a UK ‘post-1992’ university this research will develop a profile for each accommodation type to highlight the key characteristics of the ‘type’ of student most likely to belong to each group. In doing so this establishes a more detailed understanding of how a ‘student’ habitus might affect the mechanisms which are put in place to assist students in their transitions into and through university.     

What does the greek model of parallel support have to say about co-teaching?

Parallel Support (PS) is a co-teaching program designed to deliver education services in inclusive settings in Greece. In this quantitative study, 236 special education PS teachers from six major educational regions participated in a survey. The findings indicate that PS is similar to the One Teach, One Assist approach, constituting a static model, which typically provides services to one or two students with disabilities. Deeper cultural characteristics of the Greek educational system may shape the PS's peculiarities. In our transcultural hypothesis, the PS model is a compromise between a highly demanding collaborative approach and a pre-existing low collaboration school culture.     

Is the environmental literacy of university students measurable?

We report the development and piloting of an evaluative instrument and process for monitoring the environmental literacy (EL) of undergraduate students in one large research-led university in New Zealand. The instrument addresses knowledge, affect and competencies in the general area of EL in line with this institution’s adoption of EL as a graduate attribute (or in a US context, a general-education learning outcome, and something to be fostered throughout a student’s education). The instrument and associated processes were designed to fit within conventional institutional mechanisms that manage student feedback on the quality of teaching. The instrument was tested with more than 600 students from more than eight programmes over the course of a year and its use stressed that students were anonymous within the survey. We conclude that evaluating (or in a US context, assessing) the extent to which students acquire EL is an achievable objective and is a reasonable expectation for any higher education institution that claims to foster this attribute.     

What global perspective does our university foster in our students?

We used a modified circuit of culture enquiry to explore processes of production, representation and consumption of global perspective at our university, in the context of fostering this perspective as a graduate attribute. We identified four frame packages by which this perspective is understood and communicated. Global perspective is framed within our institution simultaneously as essentially cooperative and as competitive. We express concern about how such complexity is fostered in our students. We ask our colleagues and university teachers internationally to critically reflect upon the diversity of global perspectives extant within higher education and potentially to clarify their intentions as university teachers.     

Perceptions of Chinese students in an Australian university: are we meeting their needs?

This short-term longitudinal study sought to identify the issues faced by a group of international Chinese students undertaking study in an Australian university. While the focus was on educational issues, socio-cultural and personal factors were also examined in an attempt to identify the sorts of strategies students used in settling into a new socio-cultural and educational context. Interviews conducted at the beginning and end of the first semester of study indicate a range of issues that are supported by previous studies. What has not previously been highlighted, however, is the emphasis on speaking and listening skills which students reported they needed to improve. Lack of proficiency in these areas was seen by students as hampering their active participation in class, leading to lack of confidence in approaching Australian students, and resulting in their inability to benefit from the “Australian experience”. Many existing academic support structures in Australian universities tend to emphasize support with written and study skills. While this is important because of the direct impact on assessment, it is perhaps now opportune to place some emphasis on developing strategies and programmes that will support the development of students' speaking and listening skills, with a focus on intercultural communication.