What Makes Informal Mentorship in the Medical Realm Effective?

Informal mentoring is based on a natural match between a junior individual and a senior one who share mutual interests. It usually aids in the professional and personal development of both parties involved. We reviewed the literature regarding factors that make informal mentoring effective within the medical realm, by searching a major academic search engine, Web of Knowledge, for the term “informal mentor*”. Our main research questions concerned the factors that lead to a successful informal mentorship process. A salient finding arising is that the success of informal mentorships hinges on the communication skills of mentor and protégé, their level of commitment, and the chemistry between the partakers. Good informal mentorships impose requirements on both mentors and protégés and rest on shared expectations.     

Translation,cross-cultural adaptation,validity, reliability and stability of the Dutch Injury - Psychological Readiness to Return to Sport (I-PRRS-NL) scale

The Injury Psychological Readiness to Return to Sport (I-PRRS) scale measures the psychological readiness of injured athletes to resume sports participation. The aim of this study was to translate and culturally adapt the I-PRRS scale into Dutch (I-PRRS-NL) and assess its validity, reliability, and stability in patients after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). The original I-PRRS was translated and culturally adapted from English into Dutch, and tested for clinimetric quality. To assess concurrent validity, 150 patients completed the I-PRRS-NL scale and five questionnaires measuring related constructs 3–16 months after ACLR. All predefined hypotheses regarding correlations between the I-PRRS-NL scale and these questionnaires were confirmed, indicating good concurrent validity. For test-retest reliability, 107 patients completed the I-PRRS-NL scale again two weeks later. The I-PRRS-NL scale showed good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha 0.94) and test-retest reliability (ICC 0.89). Standard error of measurement was 4.2 and smallest detectable change was 11.6. No systematic bias between test and retest was found. As the scale appears unstable at item level, only the total score should be used. Overall, the I-PRRS-NL scale showed sufficient validity and reliability to assess the psychological readiness to resume sports among Dutch-speaking patients after ACLR.     

Towards an integrated model for developing sustainable assessment skills

One of the goals of current education is to ensure that graduates can act as independent lifelong learners. Graduates need to be able to assess their own learning and interpret assessment results. The central question in this article is how to acquire sustainable assessment skills, enabling students to assess their performance and learning throughout life, and preparing them to meet their own future learning needs. This article presents an integrated model for developing sustainable assessment skills, consisting of three components: conditions necessary for the development of sustainable assessment skills, elements of sustainable assessment and instructional methods for guiding students in the development of sustainable assessment skills. The article concludes with suggestions for future research to further develop the proposed model.     

Stability and Variability in Young Children's Understanding of Floating and Sinking During One Single‐Task Session

Intraindividual variability is a key component in explaining children's development and learning. Studying this type of variability on the micro‐timescale can help us understand real‐time constructive processes and the subsequent long‐term development. The aim of this article is to study the process of children's understanding of floating and sinking during one single‐task session. A total of 38 kindergartners were asked to explain the floating or sinking of 14 different objects. The results reveal that the majority of children showed a high degree of intraindividual variability. In general, most children had a decrease in variability of both content and complexity of explanations during one task session and stabilized in both complexity and content toward the end of the task. The analyses indicated that hypothesis testing was not related to changes in children's explanations. These results can be the starting point for further research about change on different, nested timescales.     

Supporting Communication in a Collaborative Discovery Learning Environment: the Effect of Instruction

We present a study on the effect of instruction on collaboration in a collaborative discovery learning environment. The instruction we used, called RIDE, is built upon four principles identified in the literature on collaborative processes: Respect, Intelligent collaboration, Deciding together, and Encouraging. In an experimental study, a group of learners (ages 15–17) receiving this instruction was compared to a control group. The learners worked in dyads on separate computers in a shared discovery learning environment in the physics domain of collisions, communicating through a chat channel. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the logged actions in the learning environment and the chat protocols showed that the RIDE instruction can lead to more constructive communication, and improved discovery learning activities, as expected, although no direct effect on discovery learning results was found. This study shows the benefits of providing instruction on effective communication and the learning process in a collaborative discovery learning situation.     

Formative assessment in an online learning environment to support flexible on-the-job learning in complex professional domains

This article describes a blueprint for an online learning environment that is based on prominent instructional design and assessment theories for supporting learning in complex domains. The core of this environment consists of formative assessment tasks (i.e., assessment for learning) that center on professional situations. For each professional situation, three levels of situational complexity are defined, and within each of these three levels, tasks are offered that differ in the degree of support offered to the learner. This environment can support (beginning) professionals in complex domains in gaining insight into the available repertoire of behavior in professional situations, as well as into the quality and effectiveness of that behavior (assessment criteria), while simultaneously helping them to develop insight into the standards that their own behavior should (eventually) match.