To do or not to do with feedback. A study of undergraduate students’ engagement and use of feedback within a portfolio assessment design

Feedback is important for student learning; however, research shows that students can have a number of difficulties when attempting to learn from feedback. Based on an in-depth analysis of undergraduate students’ self-reported reflection logs, we present findings about students’ experiences with oral and written feedback and how they act upon this feedback when a portfolio is the main assessment and learning tool. Our findings indicate that, within our context, students’ overall experiences with receiving feedback are positive. Oral feedback was perceived as particularly valuable to the students while written feedback challenged their understanding. We identified four specific actions the students engaged in to create meaning from the feedback: internal feedback, using oral feedback, initiating dialogue and interacting with peers. The findings indicate that the students take responsibility in the feedback process. The findings are discussed in relation to current perspectives on feedback in higher education.     

Informal Education: A New Lens on Socially Engaged Design Practices

The disciplinary intersection between community work and design is under‐explored. Despite similarities in both the context and values of the work, there has not been a significant critical comparison of their respective approaches in either theory or practice. This article suggests that informal education offers an alternative lens to consider both disciplines and inform future practice. More specifically, it considers the relevance of informal education principles in design education and design practice that has an explicit social focus. This discussion is drawn from doctoral practitioner action research in Scotland during 2016–18. The fieldwork focused on the different outlooks and approaches to work in community settings from both design and community work perspectives.     

Collegiate influences on the civic values of undergraduate students in the US revisited

Even though colleges have long attempted to promote civic-mindedness among students, recently there have been strong calls for a return and rededication to this mission. Given the many social and political changes that have occurred since Pascarella et al. (J High Educ 59(4):412–437, 1988) in Higher education: Handbook of theory and research, study, the purpose of the present investigation was to extend their established line of inquiry by examining college’s influence on the civic values held by a more recent cohort of students. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we analyzed a sample obtained from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program, a nationally representative panel study of college students administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, which sample includes 12,738 undergraduate students from 106 four-year universities. Our findings mostly confirmed our theoretic conceptualization of collegiate influences on the civic values of students. As expected, those values were positively associated with students’ involvement in diverse activities. Institutional impacts, however, disappeared, except for structural diversity. University administrators and educators might find these results informative when developing institutional policies and practices to prepare students for good citizenship in the global society.     

Opportunities for a democratic pedagogy: a comparative study of South African and Swedish teachers' attitudes to inclusive education

This paper is based upon the collaboration between two research groups from Stockholm University and the University of South Africa. The main objective is to compare attitudes between South African (SA) and Swedish teachers regarding inclusive education (IE). IE in this paper is examined as a distinct part of the Swedish welfare system. The method used can be characterised as a combined, quantitative and qualitative research design with a purposive sampling. A similar adapted questionnaire was distributed in the two countries. The Swedish teachers in our data are more pro‐inclusion and more hesitating to accommodate learners with barriers in special schools. However, both the Swedish and the SA teachers in the study are hesitating towards the feasibility to implement IE practically. A team approach is concluded to be an adequate pedagogy for supporting IE both in South Africa and Sweden.     

Secondary school students' interests,attitudes and values concerning school science related to environmental issues in Finland

This paper explores the relationship between students' interests in environmental issues, attitudes to environmental responsibility and biocentric values in school science education. The factors were investigated within the framework of three moderators: gender, school and residential area of the school. The survey was carried out using the international ROSE questionnaire with ninth‐grade students (N = 3626) from 68 schools. Likert‐type items were categorised with explorative factor analysis, and multivariate analysis of variance was used to study the importance of the moderators. There were significant correlations between the attitude and value factors. Interest and attitude were also significantly correlated, but the correlation between interest and value was negligible. Girls' attitude was significantly more positive and their biocentric value stronger than those of the boys, while in terms of interest, the gender difference was small. The effect of residential area was negligible, but there were significant differences between schools in all the factors studied. A school's own environmental projects and participation in programmes linked to environmental education or education for sustainable development was suggested to enhance students' interest in environmental issues. The role of interests, attitudes and values in teaching environmental issues are important fields for future research in science, environmental and sustainability education.     

Motivation,Confidence, and Control; Unraveling Active Learning for Nutrition and Food Undergraduates

Abstract: Nutrition and food students at Sheffield Hallam University completed an “active learning” assessment as part of a final year module, Applied Nutrition 2. The purpose of the “active learning” assessment was to encourage and enhance learner autonomy. The assessment consisted of 5 main stages: a briefing, thought shower, oral business proposal presentation, a feedback stage, and Nutrition Fair. To assess learner autonomy, levels of motivation, confidence, and control were quantitatively and qualitatively monitored throughout the learning journey. The results showed that levels of confidence, motivation, and control increased following each stage and significantly across the learning journey. However, there were significant gender differences in terms of achievement of marks and in levels of motivation at various stages. On average, females achieved higher marks in certain assessments and they demonstrated higher levels of motivation after the initial briefing. Further, significant differences were also reported between different degree routes in terms of achievement of marks and levels of confidence, motivation, and control. “Active learning” has been shown to foster improved levels of confidence, motivation, and control in a cohort of nutrition and food students, contributing to overall learner autonomy. Graduates able to demonstrate such qualities will undoubtedly be welcomed by employers in the relevant sectors.     

Quality incentive based congestion control for multimedia communication over IP networks

In this paper we introduce a framework for using quality as an incentive to promote proper application level congestion control. Through integrating a joint-source channel coder and feedback-based congestion control scheme, we are able to construct accurate and efficient quality incentives. The framework is applicable in all network architectures where end-to-end congestion control may be used, and is as such not specific to either best-effort or traffic class-based architectures. The concept is presented along with preliminary simulations that highlight the resulting rate control accuracy. We also discuss how to implement some well-known congestion control schemes within our framework.     

Spelling feedback in an ICT-learning environment: Issues of proficiency, training efficiency, and transfer

This study was designed to compare the effectiveness of two different forms of feedback on spelling performance of Dutch Grade-2 students, that is, knowledge-of-results and informational feedback. In the knowledge-of-results feedback condition, the speller is told that the word is spelled incorrectly, whereas in the informational feedback condition, the speller is told what is spelled incorrectly. Three main questions were investigated. One, to what extent does the nature of feedback affect students with good and poor spelling skills differently? Two, does the nature of feedback affect various forms of spelling difficulties differently? Three, is training efficiency differentially affected by the nature of feedback?The results showed that both feedback conditions were equally effective in teaching students the spelling of words, irrespective of spelling level and spelling difficulty. Both feedback conditions led to a similar level of transfer to a set of new words, the effect being stronger in good than in poor spellers. Transfer was best on analogy spellings, followed by rule-based, and worst on idiosyncratic spellings. The poor spellers learned the spelling of words more efficiently in the informational-feedback condition than in the knowledge-of-results condition, whereas for the group of good spellers efficiency was equally large in both conditions.     

Tracing the development of international branch campuses: from local founding waves to global diffusion?

ABSTRACT

On the basis of the proliferation of international branch campuses, the paper analyses globalisation processes in higher education and the emergence of a transnational and global higher education market. While most research only refers to a growth and global expansion of branch campuses, this analysis traces and illuminates four waves of international branch campus foundations in different areas of the world and their specific founding conditions. In doing so, it provides a macro-perspective on the emergence of the global higher education market. Although international branch campuses have diversified remarkably, they are neither spatially equal nor distributed on a global scale.     

Mehrsprachigkeit als Argument?

In the discourse on primary school choice in Germany, the topic of internationality is often explained with reference to multilingualism. This article shows how multilingualism is used as an argument in various ways to justify parental decisions to choose or to avoid certain primary schools. The combination of the results from two different projects dealing with parental school choice allows a closer look at the school choice situation in Berlin. The article provides a critical perspective on the fact that the topics of internationality and multilingualism are used to negotiate a wider range of topics and problems.