International collaborations in learning and teaching: perspectives from a visiting professorship

This article provides a reflection on the outcomes of an international collaboration between health librarians and academics at York St John University and Pacific University Oregon. In particular, it describes how a month‐long visiting professorship from an academic with a clinical librarian background at the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences helped to develop and inform teaching practice in the areas of information literacy and evidence‐based health practice on health programmes at Pacific University. Perspectives are offered from both institutions on the rich exchange of knowledge and practice that took place during the visit and the ongoing impact it has had on teaching practices. H. S.     

Collegiate athletes and career identity

Given the unique experiences of collegiate athletes and the need to facilitate their transition as they complete postsecondary education and join the workforce, the present study sought to evaluate a group-administered career development program at a US university focused on preparing students for the transition into professional life upon graduation. Utilizing the quantitative portion of the Life After Sport Scale, we surveyed National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I student athletes to examine the relationship between attending the career intervention sessions and career-athlete identity. Results suggested that attending one or more program session workshops was not significantly related to career-athlete identity, while student gender had the strongest association with this potentially important construct in student athlete career development. Research and practice implications of these findings are discussed.     

Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature

This article reviews current scholarship about how to promote change in instructional practices used in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. The review is based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Four broad categories of change strategies were developed to capture core differences within this body of literature: disseminating curriculum and pedagogy, developing reflective teachers, enacting policy, and developing shared vision. STEM education researchers largely write about change in terms of disseminating curriculum and pedagogy. Faculty development researchers largely write about change in terms of developing reflective teachers. Higher education researchers largely write about change in terms of enacting policy. New work often does not build on prior empirical or theoretical work. Although most articles claim success of the change strategy studied, evidence presented to support these claims is typically not strong. For example, only 21% of articles that studied implementation of a change strategy were categorized as presenting strong evidence to support claims of success or failure of the strategy. These analyses suggest that the state of change strategies and the study of change strategies are weak, and that research communities that study and enact change are largely isolated from one‐another. In spite of the weak state of the literature, some conclusions related to the design of change strategies can be drawn from this review. Two commonly used change strategies are clearly not effective: developing and testing “best practice” curricular materials and then making these materials available to other faculty and “top‐down” policy‐making meant to influence instructional practices. Effective change strategies: are aligned with or seek to change the beliefs of the individuals involved; involve long‐term interventions, lasting at least one semester; require understanding a college or university as a complex system and designing a strategy that is compatible with this system. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 952–984, 2011     

Are we wasting our children's time by giving them more homework?

Following an identification strategy that allows us to largely eliminate unobserved student and teacher traits, we examine the effect of homework on math, science, English and history test scores for eighth grade students in the United States. Noting that failure to control for these effects yields selection biases on the estimated effect of homework, we find that math homework has a large and statistically meaningful effect on math test scores throughout our sample. However, additional homework in science, English and history are shown to have little to no impact on their respective test scores.     

Promoting and Providing Expert Guidance in Work-intensive Clinical Settings

This paper discusses how expert guidance can be best provided in work intensive clinical settings. The adequacy for supporting learning in the clinical practicum for health care disciplines is often complicated by the intensive work practices in healthcare settings. Often, clinicians’ work is so intense that the scope for providing close guidance for students is quite restricted. The case advanced here draws on a range of empirical work to propose how clinician-student interactions might be optimized through the provision of a clinical supervisor to assist clinicians develop collegial relationships and acquire skills in guided learning such as demonstrating and role-modeling. These roles can contribute in essential ways to the development of learning environments where clinicians have the opportunity to facilitate the learning of others as part of their workload, and without being burdened by the requirements of teaching and assessment processes. It differs from other approaches because although clinicians partner students and provide feedback to them, clinicians are not expected to formally assess or award a grade for student performance. Assessment and remedial action, when required, is undertaken by the role of a designated clinical supervisor qualified to perform such activities.     

Librarians collaborating with nurses

Nurses have the potential to be one of the largest groups of users a medical library can serve. In recognition of this fact, librarians at St. John's Health System embarked on a journey to collaborate with nurses and increase this group's use of the medical library. In 2004, a nursing outreach plan was developed by librarians, with input from non-physician health care employees. The nursing outreach plan will be reviewed along with the barriers and successes encountered during implementation of the plan. Innovative strategies for reaching nursing personnel were accomplished by partnering with nurses to reach nurses.