Data and scholarly publishing: the transforming landscape

This article sets the scene for the special issue on research data and publishing. Research data – that material commonly accepted by the scholarly community as required evidence for hypotheses and insights, for verification and/or reproducibility of experiments – has become an increasingly critical issue for publishers given recent developments in funders' mandates, technological advances, policymakers' interests, and so forth. I outline some of the recent initiatives that are responding to policy directives, particularly Project ODE, and consider how publishers are working with data and integrating their practices with other collaborative efforts. A summary of the new policies, products, and partnerships demonstrates that the onus is now with scholarly publishers to gain an understanding of these developments and how they are affecting fellow key stakeholders within the research communications ecosystem.     

Forming an effective partnership with a dedicated LabAssistant: A software shell for engineering laboratory exercises

This paper describes the structure and use of LabAssistant, a software shell purposely written to run alongside engineering laboratory exercises and provide support to students undertaking the exercises. The structure of LabAssistant enables tutors to deliver their own laboratory sessions within the shell using only basic spreadsheet skills. LabAssistant is intended to be used in conjunction with in-depth, analytical laboratory exercises and its features include text entry, numerical input and checking (including verification of calculated values and provision of appropriate feedback), graph sketching, data plotting and report generation. Feedback from students confirms that LabAssistant has enhanced the learning experience, encouraging active engagement, building confidence and assisting progression through the exercise, even using the data and information input during the session to generate the majority of their laboratory write-up automatically. From the tutor's perspective, the provision of immediate and continual help to the students is a significant enhancement to the quality of the learning experience. LabAssistant complements the tutor who is now able to deal effectively with deeper conceptual difficulties and larger student numbers. The facility to verify all calculated values and the creation of a report in a standard electronic format are significant aids to the marking of student submissions.     

Grand Innovation Prizes: A theoretical,normative, and empirical evaluation

This paper provides a systematic examination of the use of a Grand Innovation Prize (GIP) in action – the Progressive Automotive Insurance X PRIZE – a $10 million prize for a highly efficient vehicle. Following a mechanism design approach we define three key dimensions for GIP evaluation: objectives, design, and performance, where prize design includes ex ante specifications, ex ante incentives, qualification rules, and award governance. Within this framework we compare observations of GIPs from three domains – empirical reality, theory, and policy – to better understand their function as an incentive mechanism for encouraging new solutions to large-scale social challenges. Combining data from direct observation, personal interviews, and surveys, together with analysis of extant theory and policy documents on GIPs, our results highlight three points of divergence: first, over the complexity of defining prize specifications; secondly, over the nature and role of incentives, particularly patents; thirdly, the overlooked challenges associated with prize governance. Our approach identifies a clear roadmap for future theory and policy around GIPs.     

Fresh thinking about academic development: authentic,transformative, disruptive?

We highlight three ways of conceptualising and enacting academic development: firstly as authentic, practice-based activity, secondly in terms of a new transformative paradigm for academic development units (ADUs), and thirdly as a space for disruption. We illustrate these conceptualisations through our investigation of the practice of internal secondment of faculty to ADUs. We report our findings from a sector-wide survey of Scottish higher education institutions and a series of in-depth interviews with secondees and their managers in two Scottish universities. We recommend further investigations to identify new ways of enacting authentic, practice-based, transformative, and disruptive academic development.     

Using autobiographical queer life narratives of teachers to connect personal,political and pedagogical spaces

Autobiographical queer life narratives are communicative spaces where queer teachers take up personal issues of being, becoming, and belonging in contextual and relational analyses of their situated experiences. In this work w/e consider the challenges and risks involved in this research, which, when shared and probed in classroom spaces, is a dangerous exposition of the queer self. With these challenges and risks in mind, w/e examine how our narratives provide fugitive knowledge to inform a pedagogy of ‘resist-stance’ that recognizes, respects, and engages queer identity, difference, history and culture. W/e provide examples of this pedagogy, discussing teaching strategies currently being used to connect the personal, the political and the pedagogical in classroom spaces. W/e also speak of the difficulties of living out this pedagogy as transformative teaching to transgress queer erasure in hetero-normative educational practice.     

Students with autism in regular classes: a long-term follow-up study of a satellite class transition model

Students with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are increasingly being educated within mainstream schools. While there is often an assumption that students with ASD who are academically capable will succeed in an inclusive educational placement, previous research has indicated that this is not always the case. Indeed, it seems that students with ASDs are often not equipped to cope with the social and communication demands of a mainstream classroom. Autism Spectrum Australia's (Aspect) satellite class programme aims to address this gap by blending specialised intervention with strategies to prepare students and receiving schools for transition to more inclusive educational placements. A long-term follow-up study comprising a parent survey of satellite class graduates and four detailed case studies was undertaken to determine whether these classes led to successful placement of students with ASD in more inclusive educational settings. Results indicated that a majority of graduates remained placed in more inclusive educational settings. Overall, parents were satisfied with the programme. Attendance at a satellite class was just one of a number of factors associated with positive outcomes in late adolescence. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for teachers and school staff planning for and supporting students with ASDs in their transition to inclusive educational settings.     

A Longitudinal Investigation of Siblings’ and Friends’ Features of Connectedness and Interaction Quality During Play

The present study examined features of sibling and friend dyads’ connectedness (e.g., length and emotional tone of connected sequences) and the quality of the dyads’ interactions during play from early to middle childhood. Forty-four families with a 4-year-old focal child were observed at Time 1 (T1) and again at Time 2 (T2) at age 7 in two separate play sessions (i.e., sibling and friend). Play sessions were coded for interaction quality (i.e., conflict, cooperation). Based on previous research, features of the sequences (i.e., emotional tone, length of sequence) were compared across relationship and time. Research Findings: Findings revealed similarities in the dyads’ interaction quality, with both siblings and friends increasing in cooperation over time. Similarly, the emotional tone of siblings’ and friends’ connected sequences was more likely to be positive than negative; however, siblings’ sequences were short rather than long, whereas friends’ sequences were more likely to be long than short. Practice or Policy: These findings provide new insights into children’s connectedness in child-child relationships and changes in connectedness across development from early to middle childhood. The study highlights the importance of observing the dyad when using a relationships theory framework to examine children’s interactions.     

Beyond hard outcomes: ‘soft’ outcomes and engagement as student success

This paper questions current policy discourses that equate student success with hard outcomes like retention, completion and employment. It offers another view, one that uses ‘soft’ outcomes and student engagement literature to widen our understanding of student success. In the paper, we first draw on literature to explore student engagement, usually understood as a means to achieve success, and ‘soft’ outcomes as acceptable student outcomes, as success. We present possible indicators for these forms of success and a matrix of factors which influence such success. We then examine these ideas using data gathered from a project that investigated success as experienced by post-school foundation learners in Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The findings suggest that the ideas have value. Finally, we identify some implications for teachers, arguing that, contrary to some current views, all four quadrants in the matrix are the business of teachers.     

Decision-making in big science—the development of the high-voltage electron microscope

This paper discusses the science policy implications of the development in the United Kingdom of one recent addition to the range of scientific instrumentation available to metallurgists and biologists — the High Voltage Electron Microscope.This case-study forms part of a larger study carried out at the R & D Research Unit, Manchester Business School for the Department of Education and Science, which is investigating the relationship between scientific techniques and fundamental research. The study shows the influence of prestige and competition as a stimulus towards the development, and concludes that the scale of such “Big Science” developments in this country, as the HVEM may well prove unjustifiable in relation to achieved or anticipated research and other benefits, and that in the future closer public scrutiny needs to be made of alternative funding policies in relation to anticipated benefits.