Shifting Challenges in Teacher-Education Research and Accreditation: Lessons Learned from Limitations on Studying Program Impact

ABSTRACT

A critical issue in educator preparation is how to ascertain if program graduates are sufficiently prepared to be effective through the acquisition of meaningful evidence of graduates’ impact on their students. Challenges to proving specific impact of educator-preparation programs on student learning include identifying and following program completers as they move into diverse teaching environments. Barriers include lack of access to measures such as students’ achievement scores and work samples. This article puts the research on educator-preparation-program accountability into perspective and provides a discussion about whether or not we have the capacity at this moment in time to access meaningful data about and proof of teacher impact.     

Preparing work-ready nurses: reflexive learning for diverse students in the Australian vocational education and training sector

This paper highlights a disjuncture between training frameworks designed to meet work-based competencies, and educational flexibility desirable to prepare diverse learners for fluid workplaces and roles. We describe a pilot study that explored teaching and learning practices in a vocational education and training Diploma of Nursing program. The study used qualitative approaches framed by a social view of learning as a reflexive process. Frictions emerged in how teaching and learning was fostered and how knowledge and skills were contextualised through nursing-accredited training packages. A case is made to enhance critical thinking and reflexive approaches to prepare work-ready nurse graduates.     

Community engagement is … : revisiting Boyer’s model of scholarship

ABSTRACT

Criticisms have been levelled at academics at a time when funding of universities is increasingly tied to private and corporate purposes and when academics are held accountable through a hierarchy of functions. Claims are also made that academics work within narrow specializations and are removed from real-world experience and problems. Boyer’s model of scholarship offers four categories of scholarship that remain relevant to understanding and guiding the work of academics, including how they engage with communities. To explore the nature of academics’ work, we draw on data provided by a group of academics who participated in a research project using both sociological elicitation and visual arts-based research methodologies. The participants were asked to explore what various aspects of current academic work mean for them by providing an image and text, akin to creating a postcard. In this article, we focus on responses they provided to the prompt ‘Community engagement is?…?’ The postcards show how community engagement can be interpreted in diverse ways and that, along with teaching and research, community engagement are all integrated, mutually reinforcing drivers and outcomes of academic work.     

School-site decision making in multicultural education: An Australian perspective

This paper examines a number of issues related to multicultural education and curriculum change. It focuses on school-level projects that were developed in Western Australian schools from 1979–1981. The results of the research raised the following points: teachers viewed multicultural education as a psycho-social rather than a socio-political phenomenon; the aims of multicultural education were seen to be best achieved by the collection of specific resource material; on-site implementation of the projects often led to changes being made to the original intentions of the project designers; qualitative research techniques proved more sensitive in portraying and consequently understanding the complexities associated with project implementation, and, finally, it seemed clear that more emphasis should be placed on understanding the role of the teacher as a policy mediator. It is at the school level that the final decisions are made about national policy intentions.

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Zusammenfassung In diesem Bericht werden eine Anzahl von Fragen untersucht, die sich mit der Veränderung in der multikulturellen Erziehung und im Curriculum beschäftigen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf Projekten für Schulabgänger, die in Schulen Westaustraliens in der Zeit von 1979–1981 entwickelt wurden. Einige der Ergebnisse waren: Lehrer sahen multikulturelle Erziehung weniger als ein psychopolitisches, mehr aber als ein psychosoziales Problem; die Zielvorstellungen der multikulturellen Erziehung erschienen am besten an Hand spezifischen Quellenmaterials erreichbar; bei der Anwendung der Projekte waren häufig Abänderungen der ursprünglichen Intentionen der Projektdesigner erforderlich; qualitative Forschungstechniken erwiesen sich bei der Darstellung und infolgedessen bei dem Verständnis der mit der Projektausführung verbundenen komplexen Umstände als besonders geeignet. Schließlich wurde deutlich, daß die Rolle des Lehrers als Vermittler der Bildungspolitik mehr Aufmerksamkeit zuzudenken ist. Auf der Schulebene fallen die endgültigen Entscheidungen über die Intentionen der nationalen Bildungspolitik.

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Résumé Ce document étudie un certain nombre de problèmes relatifs à l'éducation multiculturelle et aux changements qu'il peut occasionner au niveau du curriculum. Il place un accent sur les projets concernant l'école qui ont été dévelopés en Australie occidentale de 1979 à 1981. Les résultats de ces recherches ont soulevé un certain nombre de points: les enseignants ont considéré l'éducation multiculturelle plutôt en tant que phénomène psycho-social que socio-politique et il s'est avéré que les objectifs de l'éducation multiculturelle pouvaient être le mieux atteints en réunissant des matériels de référence spécifiques; la mise en oeuvre sur place a souvent conduite à des changements qui ont été apportés aux premières intentions des planificateurs du projet; les techniques de recherche qualitative se sont montrées le plus efficaces dans la définition et par conséquence dans la compréhension des problèmes liés à la mise en oeuvre du projet et finalement, il a semblé qu'un accent soit placé sur la définition du rôle de l'enseignant en tant que médiateur politique. C'est au niveau de l'école que les décisions finales sont prises en ce qui concerne les intentions politiques nationales.

     

Teacher stance in creative learning: A study of progression

This paper reports focused findings from a qualitative scoping study undertaken in four sites in England focusing on progression in creative learning (PICL) (February 2005–January 2006), funded by Creative Partnerships, a national development programme. The study sought to explore how progression in creative learning can be described in two curriculum areas. The paper introduces the analytic framework which emerged from the study, and summarises some of the key findings, with a particular focus on teacher stance, taking this slice of analysis further than is done in the original research report and discussing in particular teachers’ attitudes toward creative learning and toward teaching for creative learning.     

Validity extension of the Course-Faculty Instrument (CFI)

The Course-Faculty Instrument (CFI) demonstrates similar measurement properties with student populations at four diverse institutions. These students agree about the nature and extent to which course and instructor attributes relate to their learning. The results suggest that: (1) a perceived learning criterion may have general relevance to students, and (2) validity extension research is an economically feasible alternative to full-scale instrument development and validation efforts. Since validity extension is practical and facilitates cross-institutional comparisons, it appears to be a more viable strategy for researching and instituting student evaluation systems than is suggested by its current usage.     

Improving Writing of College-Bound Students with Rubrics: An English Department's Collaborative Journey through Teacher Leadership

A high school English department collaboratively addressed the issue of college-readiness in writing while utilizing a focused four-phase leadership model to guide their efforts. Although this discussion highlights the strategic use of writing rubrics, it is the intention to share the benefits of using the four phases of collaborative teacher leadership model with a clear path that strategically uncovers instructional problems, identifies solutions, and analyzes data within a sustainable process. This discussion illustrates how the leadership model guided the department in identifying core causes of students' struggles with academic writing and solutions of strategically using writing rubrics to guide students to higher levels of mastery.     

e is for exploration: Assessing hard-to-measure learning outcomes

The focus of this paper is on the use of e‐technologies to enable higher education to better assess aspects of learning that have proved difficult to assess using more conventional means. Higher education describes the knowledge and abilities it intends its graduates to have acquired before graduation, and it has a wide range of approaches to assess these. Higher education also seeks affective outcomes in the form of values, attitudes, behaviours and related attributes or dispositions, and these have consistently proved more difficult to assess by examination or assignment. After graduation, however, graduates are often assessed within the professions via portfolios, interview and peer or expert review. Assessment may focus on teamwork and networking skills, productivity, creativity and values fit to the profession. How can e‐technologies help with these forms of assessment? This paper reviews some of the e‐based approaches and explorations that have supported or could support assessment of affective attributes. At each stage, the paper seeks to establish the common elements of assessment in the different regimes and how e‐assessment contributes, or may contribute in the future. The paper concludes that many of the strengths of e‐assessment lend themselves to an evaluation paradigm rather than to conventional assessment for intended learning outcomes.