The effect of curricular reform on gross anatomy laboratory examination performance: An institutional analysis

Many medical schools have undergone curricular reform recently. With these reforms, time spent teaching anatomy has been reduced, and there has been a general shift to a pass/fail grading system. At Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM), a new curriculum was implemented in fall 2016. The year-long human gross anatomy course taught in 2015 was condensed into an integrated, semester-long course starting in 2016. Additionally, the grading scale shifted to pass/fail. This study examined first-year medical student performance on anatomy practical laboratory examinations—specifically, among lower-order (pure identification) questions and higher-order (function, innervation) questions. Participants included medical students from a pre-curricular reform cohort (year 2015, 34 students) and two post-curricular reform cohorts (years 2016, 30 students and 2017, 33 students). A Kruskal–Wallis ANOVA test was used to determine differences of these questions among the three cohorts. Additionally, 40 of the same lower-order questions that were asked on gross anatomy laboratory examinations from medical student cohort year 2015 and year 2016 were further analyzed using an independent samples t-test. Results demonstrated that the pre-curricular reform cohort scored significantly higher on both lower-order (median = 81, p < 0.001) and higher-order questions (median = 82.5, p < 0.05) than both post-curricular reform cohorts. Additionally, when reviewing the selected 40 similar questions, it was found that the pre-curricular reform cohort averaged significantly higher (82.1 ± 16.1) than the post-curricular reform cohort from 2016 (69.3 ± 21.8, p = 0.004). This study provides evidence about the impact of curricular reform on medical student anatomical knowledge.     

The nineteen eightees: Prelude to curricular reform

Abstract

The massification of higher education in Australia since the early 1990s has foregrounded issues of access and participation for a range of ‘non‐traditional’ students. Such issues can unsettle academics’ normative assumptions of the learning behaviours of the traditional, ‘ideal’, university student and highlight normative beliefs and practices about teaching and learning. This can be seen most acutely in regard to the increasing numbers of students with disabilities, especially students with ‘hidden’ disabilities such as psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities. The impacts of these disabilities go to the very core of the business of the academy: cognition, intellectual ability and academic success. Using Smith's (1999) notion of ‘cultural cartography’, this article takes a sociocultural approach to investigate and give voice to the responses of a small number of students with a ‘learning difficulty’ at a regional university about problematic aspects of their teaching and learning experiences. This demonstrated that the after‐effects of access and equity admission polices can play out in deeply personal ways for individual students when normative, behaviourist notions of ability and achievement continue to prevail within higher education environments. Although non‐traditional students are now permitted to enter the academy, this occurs at some personal cost to their feelings of belonging and self‐esteem, and can result in students taking on deficit or helpless positions within the academy.     

Teacher educators mediating curricular reform: anticipating the Australian curriculum

Many education systems are experiencing a re-scaling and consolidation of governance through rolling national agendas of standardisation and centralisation. The present article considers the case of Australia as it moves towards implementing its first national curriculum, to explore how teacher educators plan to retain pedagogical space for debate, diversity and contestation of such systemic curricular reform. The present article reports on an interview study conducted with nine teacher educators across the four curriculum areas included in the first wave of the Australian curriculum: English, science, mathematics and history. The analysis reveals how teacher educators reported professional dilemmas around curricular design, and planned to resolve such dilemmas between the anticipated changes and their preferences for what might have been. While different curricular areas displayed different patterns of professional dilemma, the teacher educators are shown to construe their role as one of active curriculum mediators, who, in recontextualising curricular reforms, will use the opportunity to reinsert both residualised and emergent alternatives in their students’ professional value sets. The study also identifies a new set of dilemmas emerging around the politicisation and standardisation of curriculum, and its impact on the teaching profession and teacher educators.     

影响新课改的另一因素

我国新一轮课程改革极大地唤醒了人们的课程意识,拓展了课堂教学的创造空间。但是新课改也面临着不少问题,很多人士都在探讨影响新课改顺利进行的因素,如课程设置、课程内容、课程实施、课程评价、教师水平、学校管理等等,而现阶段社会上各类补习学校,无疑已影响着新课改顺利进行。这类学校教学目标单一,加重了教师的负担,束缚了学生全面发展。如果能尽快排除这一影响因素,将大大加快新课改的速度和力度。     

An essay on error

In recent years, researchers have started to take an increasing interest in errors that can frustrate teaching and training and learning. These enquiries have, however, tended to be of a special-purpose kind in the sense that they have focused on particular learning domains such as language learning, mathematics learning, and the acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. What is lacking is a more global approach to the problem of error or even, for that matter, a recognition that a global approach might be both possible and informative. This article tries to rectify this gap in the theoretical literature by indicating, in a comparatively discursive and non-rigorous way, the form that such an overall theory of error might take.     

企业绩效考核体系引入高职院校研究初探

目前,高职院校教师绩效的管理仍存在一些问题,将企业绩效考核体系引入高职院校教师绩效考核是可行的.将平衡计分卡方法应用于高职院校可以使高职院校教师的绩效考核得到改进.     

Teacher agency and identity commitment in curricular reform

This study explores how teachers enact agency to facilitate their professional development during curricular reform at a Chinese university. An analysis of data derived from life history interviews with eight language teachers complemented with field notes reveals differential agentic choices and actions. The teachers' learning, teaching and research endeavours in relation to the new curriculum are directed by various identity commitments and enacted in highly individualised ways, as mediated by their prior experiences. By situating teachers' agency in their individual professional trajectories, this study conceptualises interaction of teacher agency and identity commitment to professional development during curricular reform.     

“综合自然地理学”精品课程建设与改革

结合"综合自然地理学"省级精品课程的建设经验,讨论了该课程内容体系建设、实践教学体系建设、教学方法改革、教材体系建设、教学平台建设以及课程考核与教学水平提升等方面的途径和方法。精品课程建设提高了"综合自然地理学"的教学效果,在西南地区同类院校中有辐射示范作用。     

Complex positioning: teachers as agents of curricular and pedagogical reform

We analyse two narratives of teacher‐facilitator teams producing elementary science curricula and disseminating them to their peers. We draw on these stories to interpret how teacher‐facilitators position themselves with respect to other educators (e.g. peer teachers and development‐team members), to real and imagined students and parents, to knowing and learning science, and to pedagogical practices and texts. We read these acts of positioning relationally and responsively. Teacher‐facilitators position themselves and their work in highly complex ways to multiple political and social others. These multiple positions raise a range of anxieties and questions for the teacher‐facilitators and shape their curricular and leadership roles. Our purpose is, first, to tease out these complexities of positioning and subjectivity, and second, to consider how teachers construct their roles as pedagogical and curricular leaders among their peers. This analysis illuminates thinking about how reform is enacted in schools and how leadership roles are constructed.     

发达国家大学课程改革趋势

经过20世纪工业经济的快速发展,工业时代结束,后工业时代来临,"信息技术"、"知识经济"与"学习化社会"成为新时代的基本特征.因此,当前大学课程改革要反映高等教育和社会的变革,要体现教育、社会和人的发展需要.世界某些发达国家大学课程改革的趋势,主要体现于通才教育、学科整合、探究式学习、课程模式四个方面.     

基于网络环境下的《开放英语》课程教学改革探析

《开放英语》是滁州电大参加中央广播电视大学＂人才培养模式改革与开放教育试点＂项目的课程。作者根据学校学生的特点,选择2007春工商管理专科班做《开放英语2》课程的改革试点班级,使用多媒体学习系统进行教学,并对基于网络环境下的《开放英语》课程进行初步探析。     

基于“电法勘探”精品课程的建设与改革

"电法勘探"课程是勘查技术与工程专业最主要的课程之一,也是资源工程与地球物理学专业的重点课程。以"电法勘探"省级精品课程建设为例,从教学方式的优化、师资队伍的加强、以及教学环境的改善等环节上入手,探讨了精品课程建设的途径和方法,并取得了预期的效果。     

河北省普通高校体育课程体系改革探讨

针对河北省普通高校体育课程体系现存问题进行分析,提出相应的改革建议,以满足大学生对体育课的身心需求,再现河北省大学体育活力,丰富高校体育改革的内涵.     

Producing global citizens for the future: space,discourse and curricular reform

This article inquires into discourses of globalisation as they are put to use to accelerate higher education’s seemingly ready acquiescence to the demands of the market. We maintain that globalisation operates as a way to reason about space that produces images and narratives of universities, knowledge and students. We focus our analysis on curriculum reform as a way universities materialise the seemingly abstract economic logic of the so-called ‘knowledge society’ at the level of student-citizens, who are to be educated to become economic globalisation’s next agents. In order to locate curriculum’s productive role within university respatialisation, we offer a discourse analysis of the circulation of ideas about globalisation and higher education through intergovernmental and national documents, which take material form in a US state university system’s attempted curricular reform of its general education core. We inquire into the ways space, as a rationality, acts to create systems of reasoning about institutions, knowledges and subjects that furthers the production of a neoliberal global imaginary.