Improving engagement: the use of ‘Authentic self-and peer-assessment for learning’ to enhance the student learning experience

Innovative assessment practices have the potential to shift the way universities function. By focusing on well-designed assessment tasks, where students are expected to work collegially and are actively involved in self- and peer-assessment, the opportunity to engage students in the assessment process is realised. This article contends that students are significantly and detrimentally disengaged from the assessment process as a result of traditional assessments that do not address key issues of learning. Notable issues that arose from observations and questioning of students indicated that vast proportions of students were not proofreading their own work were not collaborating on tasks; had not been involved in the development of assessment tasks; and that students had insufficient skills in relation to their ability to evaluate their own efforts. These facts led the author to conceptualise new models of assessment focusing on authentic learning and the authentic assessment of that learning through self- and peer-assessment. Authentic assessment for sustainable learning (AASL) and Authentic self-and peer-assessment for learning (ASPAL) were trialled with approximately 300 undergraduate education students at the University of Notre Dame Australia. This article explains the conceptual development of the models and provides justification for their implementation.     

Does teaching to the test improve student learning?

A central concern surrounding test-based accountability is that teachers may narrow teaching practices to improve test performance on a curriculum-based specific knowledge test rather than student learning more broadly. Two of the most common teaching practices that “teach to the test” are providing test-specific classwork and increasing the frequency with which students take practice tests. Whether such teaching practices improve student learning—both in terms of learning the content associated with a specific knowledge test as well as more general learning—is a largely unanswered question. To approach this question, this paper uses a student fixed effects approach to analyze the impact of these kinds of narrow teaching practices on student performance on a specific test as well as a general knowledge test. We find that test-specific classwork and practice tests with specific test items tend to have little or negative impacts on curriculum specific or general knowledge test performance, except for male students, and that subject practice tests (without emphasizing test-specific items) have positive effects on student outcomes on both kinds of tests, but larger on the curriculum-specific than on the general test, and much larger on the curriculum-specific test for male students. We discuss the logic for these results and what they tell us about the effectiveness of test-focused teaching practices more generally.     

Constructing constructivism: how student‐teachers construct ideas of development,knowledge, learning,and teaching

This case study investigates the development of the understanding of constructivist theory among students in a Masters level elementary teacher education program within a particular course. The focus of the study is a seminar entitled ‘Advanced Seminar in Child Development’. The questions explored include: How do students’ ideas of teaching, learning and knowledge develop within the context of their experience in this course? How do they come to understand constructivism? What are their definitions of constructivism? What is the course of the development of this understanding? The nature of the students’ learning processes is examined through three sources of data: dialog journals, videotaped sessions and the instructor’s reflective teaching journal. The study looks both at student development and instructional practice to further understanding of how student‐teachers can learn to apply constructivist theory to their teaching and to understand the learning process, both within themselves and their students. Their development is placed in the context of Korthagen and Kessels’s model of teacher understanding and practice, and within a broader context of principles of practice that emphasize a belief in equity and social justice. The case illustrates how the way student‐teachers are taught theory can help them integrate their own ideas of learning and teaching with constructivist theory in order to think critically about their own practice in an ongoing developmental manner.     

A framework for developing pre‐service teachers’ competencies in using technologies to enhance teaching and learning

This paper presents a framework for developing pre‐service teachers’ competencies in using technologies to enhance teaching and learning. It focuses on building the capacity of teacher education institutions (TEI) based on six strategic dimensions: (1) vision and philosophy; (2) program; (3) professional learning of deans, teacher educators and support staff; (4) ICT plan, infrastructure, resources and support; (5) communications and partnerships; and (6) research and evaluation. This paper describes each of these six strategic dimensions and synthesizes these in the overall framework for developing pre‐service teachers’ competencies in generating technology‐enhanced teaching and learning.     

Teachers’ ability to assess students for teaching and supporting learning

Over the last decade, the pressure has increased for teachers to facilitate the best possible learning for all children. States collect much information to ensure that schools are accountable to all students. But is this information helping to improve provision for a diverse student population in inclusive settings? It is well established that teachers’ attitudes and beliefs influence students’ learning. Research evidence also shows that teachers seem to face particular difficulties in trying to understand students who have a disability or are performing poorly. Teacher education could contribute more substantially towards helping teachers to adequately understand those student characteristics most relevant to learning. This article presents a model to help understand the complex competency required to assess students adequately. It is suggested that introducing teachers to a functional language for describing disability could help teachers to focus on enabling learning and development rather than labelling.     

Using student‐centred teaching to develop human resource management competencies

The paper examines the management of student ‐ centred learning in a human resource management undergraduate module with a hospitality industry focus. It outlines the educational aims, approaches to the management of delivery, assessment and monitoring issues of attempts to foster the deep learning capabilities of management students about to embark on their careers. The case for wide application of syndicates, dialogue and team ‐ working to in‐house training and development across the educational\training spectrum can be made. Tips, guidelines, reservations and applications are listed to help hospitality trainers customise the general approach to suit their own needs. Some of the advantages claimed are that individual learners can draw upon a structure of learning resources which can help ground their work and so alleviate anxiety, leaving the learners to pursue their own learning goals, show competence and enjoy the process of learning for its own value.     

The ‘truth’ of academic development: how did it get to be about ‘teaching and learning’?

The nature of academic development in contemporary universities has been a recent focus in the literature. Highlighting the diversity of practices that exist under its name, ‘academic development’ has been described by some as an ambiguous project and a fragmented field, while others suggest a more coherent project, pointing out a near universal concern with, in particular, teaching and learning. Through an exploration of the practices of the first academic developers in New Zealand, and a consideration of the particular institutions in which they were operating, this article draws on the work of Foucault to consider the modalities of power that were available to them. This exploration is used as a basis from which to consider the systems of truth that began to emerge as a result of the early appointees' practice, in particular their original and enduring concern with teaching and learning as objects of knowledge.     

Comparing children's and student teachers’ ideas about science concepts

Children and teachers may not think in the same way about particular science concepts. Such parallel lines of thought can compound children's confusion and misunderstanding as they learn science at primary school. The situation could be more acute when student teachers are teaching science, because of their limited experience of considering children's ideas. This paper investigates children's and student teachers’ ideas about certain science concepts: ‘animal’, ‘flower’, ‘living’, ‘force’ and ‘energy’. The ideas and understandings of 96 children and 168 student teachers were explored. Results showed that the student teachers and children had similar ideas about ‘flower’ and ‘animal’, whereas they evidenced very different responses to ‘living’, ‘energy’ and ‘force’. Implications for classroom practice are considered.     

‘Teach as you preach’: the effects of student‐centred versus lecture‐based teaching on student teachers’ approaches to teaching

This study investigates the effects of teaching and learning environments on student teachers’ approaches to teaching and compares a lecture‐based setting to a student‐activating teaching environment, in which self‐discovery learning by means of authentic tasks is central. Data collection (N = 852) was obtained by a pre‐test/post‐test design including the Approaches to Teaching Inventory. Though student teachers’ approaches changed significantly, the direction is only consistent with the assumption that the student‐activating experiences push students towards conceptual change/student‐focused approaches; however, not away from information transmission/teacher‐focused teaching. In fact, students’ approaches to teaching at the start of the experiment are important predictors of their scores after they followed the course on child development under both conditions. Moreover, student teachers’ changes in approaches to teaching tend to be affected by variables such as performance, academic self‐esteem, perceived workload and students’ changes in approaches to learning: variables that operate in distinct ways for diverse categories of approaches and work differently in both settings. In addition, the willingness of students to teach in the way they have been taught is not as straightforward as might be expected. Although several students became convinced of the use of the teaching methods in the experiment for their own practice, the majority of students demonstrate reflective practices, make critical judgements, formulate terms or suggest amendments to the teaching methods before simply adopting them for their own future pupils.     

Irish student teachers’ beliefs about self,learning and teaching: a longitudinal study

This paper explores the beliefs about self-as-teacher, learning and teaching of preservice elementary teachers during a three-year undergraduate programme. Using a qualitative grounded theory analysis, the study examined the initial beliefs or personal theories of 27 preservice teachers during their first Semester. Longitudinal data were gathered from 7 of these students over the three-year duration of their teacher education programme through iterative interviews and reflective journal analysis. The findings demonstrate expansion in preservice teachers’ understandings of the teacher’s role, the value of reflective practice, the differential needs of learners and approaches to pedagogy. Findings point to lacunae in preservice teachers’ capacity for critical reflective practice and demonstrate how classroom management concerns can cause preservice teachers to adopt more cautious and traditional pedagogical approaches, despite their espoused commitment to child-centred principles.     

Teachers’ and students’ perspectives on teaching and learning through virtual learning environments

The aim of this investigation was to get an insight into how teachers and students responded to the use of virtual learning environments (VLE) in engineering education and what their expectations were from online courses. Teachers designed their online courses with the assistance of a support e-learning team and questionnaires were used for teachers and students to express their views on the online courses. Teachers pointed out that the online courses by themselves would be able to tackle limited lecture time and strengthen the students’ background knowledge. Students, on the other hand, stated that their difficulties regarding the courses could be facilitated by using a more interactive teaching approach with the use of collaboration tools and receiving individual feedback. Thus, students suggested that teachers adopt a more student-centred approach by using VLE. Teachers’ and students’ perspectives were related to their personal characteristics, as students were more familiar with everyday e-communication tools.     

Basic school teachers’ perspective to digital teaching and learning in Ghana

This study proposes a model for describing the situation of Digital Teaching and Learning (TD-TaL) in Ghanaian schools using the perspectives of basic school teachers. The Digital Teaching and Learning model was developed based on the theories of Valsiner’s Zone of Free Movement (ZFM) and Zone of Promoted Action (ZPA) and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The model proposes to look at the effects of ZFM in schools (comprising Digital environment factors and Personal attitudinal and Digital Culture factors) and ZPA (comprising Teacher Training factor) on the Teachers’ Digital Knowledge, Competence and Action ( TDKCA) factors to influence teachers in their Zone of Proximal Development. The model was tested in Ghana’s case using the survey data collected from 256 teachers from 45 schools across six districts in the Western Region of Ghana. The findings from Regression path analysis revealed that Personal and Digital Culture factors, but most of all teachers’ Digital Attitudes effected directly on Teachers’ Digital Activities they claimed to be doing, whereas from Environmental factors only Schools’ Digital Agenda was impacting Teachers’ Digital Action both directly and indirectly through Teachers’ Digital Training (ZPA). The model specifically highlighted that in observed Ghanaian schools the ZFM factors Digital Infrastructure and Digital Support to Digital Teaching did not associate with the ZPA factor Digital Teacher Training and overall to Teachers’ Digital Knowledge, Competence and Action factors.     

Pre-service teachers’ use of tools to systematically analyze teaching and learning

Learning to systematically analyze the relationship between teaching and student learning is an important but difficult skill to engender in teachers. In this study, we examine how pre-service teachers who were introduced to a framework for analyzing teaching in a video-based teacher education course drew on this tool to analyze their own practice after the conclusion of the course. We conceptualize the framework as a conceptual tool that scaffolds pre-service teachers to learn to attend to particular dimensions of teaching and learning and to analyze how their teaching influences student learning. Using the Portfolio Assessment for California Teachers-Teaching Event of 14 English language arts pre-service teachers, we conducted a qualitative analysis to examine the extent to which they applied this framework to analyze their own practice after the conclusion of the course, as well as different strategies they adopted as they analyzed their teaching practice. Findings suggest that pre-service teachers made progress in using the framework to study their teaching, but development of sub-skills for all four facets are needed to develop more productive analyses of teaching and student learning. This study has important implications for the design of teacher education that intends to support pre-service teachers in developing tools for learning to learn from their teaching practice.     

Using summative and formative assessments to evaluate EFL teachers’ teaching performance

Using classroom observations (formative) and student course experience survey results (summative) to evaluate English lecturers’ teaching performances is not new in practice, but surprisingly only a few studies have investigated this issue in a higher education context. This study was conducted in an English department of a large university in Vietnam. The data include: (1) semi-structured interviews with all the full-time lecturers, (2) two department heads and (3) course experience surveys from English as a foreign language (EFL) students (N?=?2886). Three lessons can be learned: (1) formative assessments do not seem to have an effect on promoting better teaching practices when their feedback is not helpful in improving high-stakes summative assessment results, (2) without sharing a common definition of good teaching practices among assessors, summative assessments appear to make the feedback from formative assessments less meaningful and applicable, and (3) as a result, the combination of formative and summative assessments tends to make EFL lecturers’ self-assessment practices less effective.     

‘A kind of exchange’: learning from art and design teaching

This paper analyses pedagogic practices in four fields in art and design higher education. Its purpose is to identify the characteristics that might be called signature pedagogies in these subjects and to identify their role in student centred learning. In a time of growing economic pressure on higher education and in the face of tendencies for normative practices brought about through mechanisms such as quality assurance procedures the authors seek to articulate and recognise the issues relating to spaces and pedagogies from this discipline that might be made to wider debates about learning in the sector.     

Applying Education Theory to Nursing Curricula: nurse teachers’ definitions of student‐centred andragogical teaching and learning concepts

Abstract

Student‐centred learning and teaching are concepts often given in relationship to philosophies of nurse education. Nursings’ Professional Regulatory Bodies and Higher Education Institutes generally can be shown to advocate such approaches to the delivery of educational programmes. The literature reviewed, however, highlights how no clear definitions of this concept are available. Student‐centredness can be shown to be a multi‐faceted concept and in addition has interrelationships with concepts of andragogy. This article describes an exploratory qualitative study which investigated nurse teachers’ perceptions of student‐centredness and concepts of andragogy. The findings are shown to be of relevance to nurse teachers and the higher education sector generally.     

Student-centred learning environments: an investigation into student teachers’ instructional preferences and approaches to learning

The use of student-centred learning environments in education has increased. This study investigated student teachers’ instructional preferences for these learning environments and how these preferences are related to their approaches to learning. Participants were professional Bachelor students in teacher education. Instructional preferences and approaches to learning were measured by means of questionnaires. Results showed that most students preferred teacher direction, cooperative learning and knowledge construction, and adopted a deep approach. Moreover, significant correlations were found between approaches to learning and instructional preferences. Students adopting a deep approach preferred knowledge construction and cooperative learning, while students adopting a surface approach had a preference for teacher direction and passive learning.     

Staff–student collaboration: student learning from working together to enhance educational practice in higher education

The association of research and teaching, and the roles and responsibilities of students and academic staff and the nature of their interrelationship are important issues in higher education. This article presents six undergraduate student researchers’ reports of their learning from collaborating with academic staff to design, undertake and evaluate enquiries into aspects of learning and teaching at a UK University. The students’ reflections suggest that they identified learning in relation to employability skills and graduate attributes and more importantly in relation to their perceptions of themselves as learners and their role in their own learning and that of others. This article draws attention to the potential of staff–student collaborative, collective settings for developing pedagogic practice and the opportunities they can provide for individual student's learning on their journey through higher education.