How can simulation help with learning project work skills? Experiences from higher education in Finland

ABSTRACT

Background: Effective project management and project work skills are important requirements in higher education and many other work place settings. Simulation-based learning, with its use of simulated scenarios and environments, may be a helpful way of supporting skill development. However, much more needs to be understood about the possibilities and challenges that can be involved in the application of this method of learning and teaching, from the perspectives of the learners.

Purpose: This exploratory qualitative study sought to describe university lecturers’ experiences and views of simulation as a method of learning and teaching project skills. The simulation method was tested in Finland, in the context of the national Research and Development Expert Coaching Programme, which was developed for the staff of the Universities of Applied Sciences.

Research methods: Data were collected via a questionnaire with two open questions, to which total of 12 multi-professional participants, all lecturers from Universities of Applied Sciences, were asked to respond in essay form. The data was analysed using inductive content analysis.

Results: Overall, our analysis suggests that participants felt that simulation-based learning was suitable for learning project work. According to the participants, the method helped them learn concrete project work skills, identify and manage challenging situations and promote dialogical sharing between professionals.

Conclusion: The results indicate that simulation can be used to promote project work competence of both new and more experienced project workers in various fields. It is suggested that the method is suitable for both initial and continuing education.     

School education and development of gender perspectives and sexuality in Japan

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The Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium funded the development of a licensure assessment based on its Standards for School Leaders. But moving from a set of professional standards to a licensure assessment poses many challenges and raises difficult questions: Which standards should be assessed? How authentic should an authentic assessment be? How can licensure assessment help lead the field to a new pedagogical paradigm, when licensure has typically been reserved for protecting the public? This article explains these challenges and documents the methods used to meet them in the development of the School Leaders Licensure Assessment.     

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People who exploit their strengths flourish; they are not only engaged with their goals, but also to their well-being and the content of life. In this study, interest focused on the high-achieving students in the Finnish general upper secondary education, in other words, on straight-A graduates’ characteristic strengths. This was a narrative study in which the data were obtained through written narratives and narrative interviews among 14 Finnish straight-A graduates. The data were analyzed with narrative analyzing methods. Ten typical strengths found and further categorized into three key dimensions were: (1) the thirst of knowledge and passion for learning, (2) fortitude and authenticity, and (3) love. This study implied that the youth’s school paths and well-being actively increased their own characteristic strengths.     

Reading during sentence composing and error correction: A multilevel analysis of the influences of task complexity

In this study we investigated the role of reading, how writers coordinate editing with other writing processes. In particular, the experiment examines how the cognitive demands of sentence composing and the type of error influence the reading and writing performance. We devised an experimental writing task in which participants corrected an embedded error (orthographic near-neighbors or far-neighbors) and completed a sentence (using 1 or 3 context words)—in either order. Data were collected by logging keystrokes and recording eye-movements. The results revealed that both error and sentence complexity influenced the approach to error-correcting. Participants generally completed the partial sentence first, and then corrected the error (approximately 90% of the items). Task complexity reinforced this tendency. Moreover, in most of these cases, the error was fixated at least once prior to sentence completion. This suggests that the error was detected (at least partially), but the correction response was inhibited. The differences in cognitive load also affect the reading activity during planning. This investigation illustrates how the interplay of two task factors, error and sentence complexity, appears to influence how writers coordinate error-correcting with sentence composing.     

The Impact of an Engineering Design Curriculum on Science Reasoning in an Urban Setting

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English Language Learners (ELLs) usually spend most of the school day with regular classroom teachers. The ability of English-as-a-second-language (ESL) teachers to help these students, then, depends in part on their ability to influence how the classroom teachers think of ELL students and ESL itself. One way ESL teachers do this is through “positioning discourses”—discursive practices that connect the children in certain ways to neighborhood reputations, political imagery, policy priorities, and professional responsibilities. This paper examines how ESL teachers in two contrasting school systems produce different kinds of positioning discourses in responding to different contextual constraints and pressures. Drawing on interview data, we show how teachers in an urban setting use elements of neighborhood reputation to position their students, while teachers in a more affluent suburb use discourses of expertise and professional knowledge to reshape the way ESL is understood. Our goals are to explicate how these discourses are produced and used.     

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