Culture Clashes,Value Conflicts and Professional Education

Radical changes have taken place in the conditions of professional practice in recent decades, which have been recorded and analysed by a number of authors, together with various proposals for the adaptation of courses of professional training. One area in this evolution which has received less than systematic investigation is the greatly increased occurrence of clashes arising from ethical complications in much professional practice, a major source of which has been the greatly increased intermingling of cultures worldwide. In the present paper it is argued that the training of professional practitioners in the understanding of value conflicts is different in nature from the training in the knowledge and techniques specific to a profession. The distinction is traced and a definition offered of the educational problem involved in preparing professional practitioners for handling such matters. The remainder of the paper is taken up with a review of several approaches that have been reported.     

Confronting the biases in connoisseur review and performance indicators in higher education: A structural modelling approach

Scholarly productivity and the research reputation of academic staff frequently dominate as criteria in the review of higher education courses, disciplines and institutions, a bias which represents a profound hazard for plausible evaluation. Three distinct outcome constructs were identified from analyses of performance indicator data gathered on the accounting discipline in Australia. They were the scholarly productivity of the academic staff involved, the quality of teaching and learning as perceived by students and graduates, and the academic efficiency, in terms of subject completion rates, with which the courses were conducted. Each outcome was shown to be related in a different manner to various characteristics of the courses investigated. The results challenge the orthodox view that scholarly productivity will lead naturally to other desired outcomes of higher education, question the usual surface level interpretation of performance indicators, and suggest that evaluation in higher education might combine connoisseur and performance indicator approaches within the framework of a realist epistemology, placing emphasis on the structures and mechanisms which generate the diverse and distinct outcomes of different courses.     

An Expert System Helps Students Learn Database Design

Teaching and learning database design is difficult for both instructors and students. Students need to solve many problems with feedback and corrections. A Web‐based specialized expert system was created to enable students to create designs online and receive immediate feedback. An experiment testing the system shows that it significantly enhances student learning. The system also provides a more neutral learning environment in terms of personal factors such as gender and prior class work.     

Judging Teachers: the social and political contexts of teacher evaluation

This paper argues that the assessment and evaluation of teachers in slate provided schooling in Britain has never been simply a matter of technical competence. Judging teachers has always involved social, ideological and political considerations which have varied in different historical periods.

An analysis is made of attempts to apply principles and procedures of assessment especially to teachers in urban working class schools. It is shown that these attempts have historically moved from a ‘visible’ strategy of direct imposition and surveillance to an ‘invisible’ strategy through the ethic of legitimated professionalism. Current developments in British schooling suggest, however, a possible return to more direct and visible procedures as ‘teacher incompetence’ is placed at the centre of the education problem.     

Nineteenth-Century Telegraphy: Wiring the Emerging Urban Corporate Economy

Nineteenth-century telegraphy had a vital integrative role in the intersecting and mutually constituted developments of American industrialization, urbanization, and mediatization. Previous work by Tarr, Finholt, and Goodman¹1. Tarr, Finholt, and Goodman, The City and the Telegraph.View all notes focused on the internal activities of business, fire, and police institutions in American cities. Here, I move beyond their approach in relating telegraphy to broader infrastructural developments of national-level urban industry and modern mass media in the late nineteenth century and the rise of dominant, networked urban commercial, industrial, financial, and media centers. By radically accelerating the mobility of information and capital, telegraphy significantly reduced barriers of distance to industry, commerce, news and advertising, and state and military interventions. Owing to its commercial ownership in the USA, telegraphy privileged business over public use in comparison to Western Europe. Its enduring effects were its integrative functions in the development of a large-scale, urban-centered, largely private system of mass production, mass media, mass culture, and mass consumption.     

Managing Bibliographic Data Quality in a Consortial Academic Library: A Case Study

This article presents a case study of quality management for print and electronic resource metadata, summarizing problems and solutions encountered by the Cataloging and Discovery Services Department in the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. The authors discuss national, state, and local standards for cataloging, automated and manual record enhancements for data, user feedback, and statewide consortial factors. Findings show that adherence to standards, proactive cleanup of data via manual processes and automated tools, collaboration with vendors and stakeholders, and continual assessment of workflows are key to the management of biblio-graphic data quality in consortial academic libraries.     

Skilling for the Workforce: A tertiary education response to enrich professional development

Tertiary Education and Management - Tertiary educators are being directed by government policy: to develop a learning environment where participants become more than passive receivers of knowledge...     

The Effect of Team‐Based Learning on Student Attitudes and Satisfaction

We examined student attitudes toward a team‐based learning method known as the readiness assurance process encompassing team exams to model how student satisfaction is initially shaped and subsequently changed over time as a function of scholastic performance and perceived development of professional skills (PS). We found that students were generally positively disposed toward the learning method and recognized its benefits in terms of developing teamwork skills. A regression analysis of student responses to an instrument distributed directly after each of four quizzes given over the course of a semester leads to the inferences that satisfaction with the method depends minimally upon the immediate feedback provided by student performance on a quiz and more critically upon student perceptions of how it has enhanced their PS. There is also shown to be a strong carryover effect in satisfaction with the method in successive uses. The results suggest that student attitudes are shaped by multiple, high‐level goals, and not just scholastic performance. The study also evidences the need to study learning interventions over multiple uses rather than through a one‐shot design.