Between two Advisors: Interconnecting Academic and Workplace Settings in an Emerging Field

This article examines a new training design for continuing professional development that aims to support the learning of the novel knowledge and skills needed in emerging professional fields by interconnecting academic and workplace settings. The training design is based on using two advisors, one from working life and the other from an academic context. The article examined whether participants’ personal orientation to adaptive expertise predicts the success of a guidance process. The interconnection of workplace and academic contexts was expected to occur through guidance practices. In addition, the features underlying the most successful guidance relationships were analysed. Data were collected by conducting repeated semi-structured interviews with 18 course participants, eight academic advisors and eight workplace advisors in the context of a 1-year energy efficiency training programme. The results indicated that a trainee’s personal orientation towards adaptive expertise is a significant component in successful guidance processes. An interconnection of workplace and academic knowledge and practices was hardly found in the guidance provided by each participant’s academic and workplace advisors. The feature underlying the most successful guidance relationships are related at the personal, dyad and context levels. An excellent match between the expert profiles of the learner and the advisor appears to be especially critical for successful guidance and powerful knowledge exchange in emerging fields. However, finding matching advisors is often challenging. Many problems are presumably solved if these ‘right persons’ can be found and if the trainees are themselves oriented to utilise the novel resources provided to them by the advisors.     

Jamaican Deaf Children Interacting with Written Language: Support for Bilingual Instruction?

The interrelationship among language components is the main conceptual framework for this study which examined the written language performance of Jamaican children with severe to profound hearing loss. Twelve subjects aged 15 to 16 years completed text level tasks in writing, reading and sign language. Hearing children aged 13 to 14 years completed writing and reading tasks. Multilevel analyses were undertaken. Differences and parity in performances were observed within and between groups at the word, sentence and text levels. Deaf children's ability to express complex ideas in sign language in the Jamaican education system indicated a need for nontraditional approaches in the teaching of written language. Suggestions are outlined for developing an instructional model to enhance written language using a bilingual approach.     

Developing Research Skills for Civil Engineers: A Library Contribution

A cowse‐integrated programme of library instruction has been developed for the School of Civil Engineering at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia; library instruction being one of the means selected to improve the research efforts of fourth year project students. The programme has been developed through consultation between the Civil Engineering Research Project Coordinator and the Civil Engineering Reference Librarian. Its aims are derived from those established for the fourth year research projects. Attention is focussed on the nature of the programme and the impact of instruction on fourth year research project students. Students who had received extended library instruction were compared with students from the previous year. Evidence suggests that the instruction has improved the information seeking behaviour of the students and their literature reviews.     

Reading Comprehension of Dutch Deaf Children

In this study, the reading comprehension of deaf children and adolescents in the Netherlands is examined along with their word identification. The reading comprehension of 464 deaf students and the word identification of 504 deaf students between 6 and 20 years of age was examined. The results show the reading comprehension scores of deaf children to be far below the scores of hearing children. On average, the deaf subjects scored at a level equivalent to a hearing child in the first grade. The word identification scores of the deaf children, however, were almost equivalent to the scores of hearing children. Although reading comprehension and word identification appear to be related, this relation does not completely explain the comprehension difficulties encountered by deaf children. Additional factors are required to explain deaf children’s difficulties with reading comprehension.     

Instructing adolescents with learning disabilities: converting a meta-analysis to practice

A previous meta-analysis indicated that eight instructional factors--Questioning, Sequencing and Segmentation, Skill Modeling, Organization and Explicit Practice, Small-Group Setting, Indirect Teacher Activities (e.g., homework), Technology, and Scaffolding-captured the majority of successful intervention programs for adolescents with learning disabilities (LD). Most important was the Organization/Explicit factor, which contributed significant variance (16%) to effect size. This factor included two important instructional components: advance organization and explicit practice. In this article, we convert these findings into practical guidelines to direct instructional practice.     

ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION OF INTELLECTUALLY GIFTED STUDENTS WHEN CONFRONTED WITH CHALLENGING AND UNCHALLENGING TASKS

Two groups of gifted adolescents solved two similar intelligence tests with differing levels of task difficulty in reverse order. Under both conditions the performance level on the less complex test was much lower, a result not observed in a control group of average intelligence. Behavioural observations revealed that the low performance of the gifted students was combined with lack of effort. This performance pattern is discussed with respect to recent postulates of achievement motivation theory, which empasize the impact not only of the achievement motive, but also of the informational value of a given task for evaluating own level of ability. It is argued that the perceived informational value of the easier test was not high enough to create an incentive for the gifted students to perform at the highest possible level     

‘You want us to teach outdoor education where?’ Reflections on teaching outdoor education online

This article reports on the experiences of two lecturers working at the University of Tasmania required to teach outdoor and sustainability education (O&SE) courses online. Using an (auto)ethonographic case-study approach, the lecturers were interviewed with a view to exploring their perceptions, challenges, ethical dilemmas, tensions, opportunities and experiences in this space. A number of themes emerged, including commitment to quality teaching and learning, the role of experience, and experiential learning, in the online space, the challenge of fostering a connection to place, difficulties faced when trying to develop a learning community, and the role of professional learning and support in terms of pedagogy and technology in the online space. These themes, and their implications for teaching and learning in higher education both generally, and specifically in O&SE, are discussed in light of what is a mounting body of literature exploring the move to online delivery in higher education.     

Faculty experience of rudeness in Scottish higher education: dealing with rudeness from students and colleagues.

This paper investigated rudeness experienced by academic staff from students, co-workers and senior staff members. The focus of much of the rudeness literature in an educational setting has been on the student experience of rudeness, predominantly in the classroom. The aim of the current study was to focus on the experience of academic staff rather than students, and to broaden consideration of rudeness beyond the classroom, to include e-mail. Using a mixed-methods questionnaire, with both closed and open questions, rudeness perception, impact and response was examined across a sample of 122 academic staff from Scottish Higher Education institutions. The study examined relationships between personality, stress, job satisfaction, level of rudeness and the impact of rudeness on staff. The qualitative segment explored responses to rude e-mails across three sources; student, colleague and senior colleague. The results indicated that academic staff reported similar levels of rudeness from students, co-workers and senior colleagues. Faculty who reported high levels of neuroticism were more likely to report a negative impact of rudeness. Academic staff also reported that their response to rudeness could differ according to the instigator: a greater proportion of staff reported that they would be likely to reprimand a student, in comparison to a colleague, for rudeness. Staff were more likely to seek an informal resolution to rudeness with a co-worker, rather than a student. This paper highlights the potential importance of individual characteristics in assessing the impact of rudeness on faculty and indicates that rudeness may come from several sources in academia.