Developing conceptions of teaching and the scholarship of teaching through a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education

There is increasing pressure toward professionalisation of university teaching, through the attendance of academic development courses and programmes. This is based on the expectation that such courses lead to more student‐focused perspectives on teaching and learning and more effective teaching and learning practices. In this study we interviewed alumni of a Graduate Certificate programme, to explore its effects on teachers’ self‐reported experiences of teaching and the scholarship of teaching. This suggested that the programme had been successful in fostering the development of more complex experiences for most interviewees.

En Australie comme à l’étranger, les pressions visant la professionnalisation de l’enseignement universitaire se font sentir, en particulier par la participation à des cours et des programmes de développement pédagogique. Ceci repose sur la prémisse selon laquelle les cours de développement pédagogique dans l’enseignement supérieur, du certificat postgradué au niveau master, mènent au développement de perspectives pédagogiques qui sont davantage centrées sur l’apprenant, de même qu’à l’adoption de pratiques pédagogiques davantage efficaces. Dans le cadre de cette étude, nous avons effectué des entretiens auprès de diplômés d’un programme de certificat postgradué de façon à explorer si le programme affectait les expériences d’enseignement et de Scholarship of Teaching de ces enseignants, telles qu’ils les rapportaient. Les témoignages autour de ces expériences suggèrent que le programme a réussi à favoriser le développement d’expériences davantage complexes pour la majorité des personnes interviewées.     

Turning Heads: changes in the preferred learning styles of school leaders and managers in the 1990s

The study focuses upon the learning style preferences of 310 school leaders and managers collected, on the basis of opportunity sampling, over the last 3 years (1991–94), and identifies a trend towards the activist learning style preference, and away from the reflector, theorist, and pragmatist preferences described by Honey & Mumford. It suggests that the trend is significant, and relates at least in part to the subjects’ responses to legislative, societal and cultural changes since the Education Reform Act, 1988. The paper concludes that there are increased pressures upon school leaders and managers to act, to act decisively, to act quickly, and to act in concert as whole school management teams, that such action has overall priority, and that this leads to a decrease in the perception that analysis, synthesis and planning are relevant and necessary functions in the leadership and management of schools.     

Supporting behaviour support: developing a model for leading and managing a unit for teenagers excluded from mainstream school

In the UK, mainstream schools can decide to exclude students because of their behaviour. Students are then placed in pupil referral units (PRUs, sometimes known as short-stay schools) until their needs can be more thoroughly assessed so that they can then be placed appropriately. This article outlines the development of one particular approach to leading and managing a PRU for students aged 11–14. Beginning with the idea that staff and students all have a range of needs to be met, the approach draws on psychoanalytic ideas of containment, holding and attachment, as well as recent neuro-developmental research, to demonstrate how students' needs can be best met through meeting the professional needs of staff. A range of interventions and areas of practice are then described to illustrate how containment, management and support are operationalised in day-to-day practice. Specific areas of impact of these interventions for students and their families are then highlighted.     

Evaluating a Classroom Multimedia Programme in the Teaching of Literacy

This paper explores classroom interventions using a particular form of multimedia ICT, and looks to study pupil learning gains which accrue from its use. Work within the Literacy Hour in eight schools was detailed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of this communication system and the research data include pre- and post-test assessments, along with interviews with classroom teachers and pupils. The children are presented with a series of journalistic tasks and classroom activities which they resolve through the use of a compact and coordinated information system. The outcomes demonstrate that children can become self-directive and very active, exploratory, learners in a very short period of time. They quickly enjoy the freedom and control which the system permits, and through which they can be shown to enhance particular literacy skills. The lessons to be learned here relate to the management and organisation of classroom teaching in the face of systems which promote rapid devolution of learning to the learner.     

Enhancing resilience in youth through a 10-day developmental voyage

The present study sought to examine the potential for resilience to be enhanced in a group of youth participating in a developmental voyage, and to identify the factors that contribute to increased resilience following the voyage. Two studies are reported. Study 1 revealed that voyage participants experienced increased resilience over the course of the voyage. Study 2 sought to replicate and extend these findings by assessing the extent to which increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage and was associated with other psychosocial variables (i.e. self-esteem, social effectiveness, self-efficacy, belonging, social support and perceived weather). The findings revealed that increased resilience was maintained five months following the voyage. A regression revealed that the predictors explained 37% of the variance in increased resilience. Increased social effectiveness, self-efficacy and less positive perceptions of the weather were the only variables to make unique contributions.     

Understanding Person Perceptions: Comparing Four Common Statistical Approaches to Third-Person Research

This article addresses whether current methods of measurement are sufficient to reflect all nuances of the third-person effect. We do so by content analyzing all major third-person effect (3PE) articles, assessing measurement and analysis approaches employed by 3PE researchers. We revisit data from two published studies, comparing analytical models that emerged as commonly used by 3PE researchers (i.e., the standard subtractive measure, Whitt's Diamond model, first- and third-person estimates entered separately, and the subtractive measure with self-estimates as a control). Ultimately our analysis helps us understand past research and makes suggestions for research approaches in the future. First, researchers need to more carefully explore the role of first- and third-person perceptions in the behavioral hypothesis. Second, using only one analytical model does not tell the complete story. To that end, we propose a multimodel approach to analyses in third-person research be applied to extant and future work in this area.     

Search markets and search results: The case of Bing

Bing and Google customize their results to target people with different geographic locations and languages but, despite the importance of search engines for web users and webometric research, the extent and nature of these differences are unknown. This study compares the results of seventeen random queries submitted automatically to Bing for thirteen different English geographic search markets at monthly intervals. Search market choice alters a small majority of the top 10 results but less than a third of the complete sets of results. Variation in the top 10 results over a month was about the same as variation between search markets but variation over time was greater for the complete results sets. Most worryingly for users, there were almost no ubiquitous authoritative results: only one URL was always returned in the top 10 for all search markets and points in time, and Wikipedia was almost completely absent from the most common top 10 results. Most importantly for webometrics, results from at least three different search markets should be combined to give more reliable and comprehensive results, even for queries that return fewer than the maximum number of URLs.     

Testing the persuasiveness of evidence: Combining narrative and statistical forms

This study provides an experimental test for the conclusions of the Allen and Preiss (1997) meta‐analysis that statistical evidence is more persuasive than narrative evidence. This investigation extends that finding to consider the case where a message combines statistical and narrative evidence to determine if a combination of evidence is more effective than a single form of support. This investigation using 15 messages and 1,270 participants finds that a message combining narrative and statistical evidence is more persuasive than a message using either narrative or statistical evidence alone.     

Alphabetization and the skewing of first authorship towards last names early in the alphabet

The practice of listing co-author surnames in alphabetical order, irrespective of their contribution, can make it difficult to effectively allocate research credit to authors. This article compares the percentages of articles with co-authors in alphabetical order (alphabetization) for two-author, three-author and four-author articles in eighteen social sciences in 1995 and 2010 to assess how widespread this practice is. There is some degree of alphabetization in all disciplines except one but the level varies substantially between disciplines. This level is increasing slightly over time, on average, but it has increased substantially in a few disciplines and decreased in others, showing that the practice of alphabetization is not fading away. A high correlation between alphabetical order and the proportion of first authors near the beginning of the alphabet confirms that high percentages of alphabetical order could affect the appropriate allocation of research credit. Similar patterns were found for science and the humanities. Finally, since some degree of alphabetization is almost universal in social science disciplines, this practice may be affecting careers throughout the social sciences and hence seems indefensible.     

Which factors help authors produce the highest impact research? Collaboration,journal and document properties

This study assesses whether eleven factors associate with higher impact research: individual, institutional and international collaboration; journal and reference impacts; abstract readability; reference and keyword totals; paper, abstract and title lengths. Authors may have some control over these factors and hence this information may help them to conduct and publish higher impact research. These factors have been previously researched but with partially conflicting findings. A simultaneous assessment of these eleven factors for Biology and Biochemistry, Chemistry and Social Sciences used a single negative binomial-logit hurdle model estimating the percentage change in the mean citation counts per unit of increase or decrease in the predictor variables. The journal Impact Factor was found to significantly associate with increased citations in all three areas. The impact and the number of cited references and their average citation impact also significantly associate with higher article citation impact. Individual and international teamwork give a citation advantage in Biology and Biochemistry and Chemistry but inter-institutional teamwork is not important in any of the three subject areas. Abstract readability is also not significant or of no practical significance. Among the article size features, abstract length significantly associates with increased citations but the number of keywords, title length and paper length are insignificant or of no practical significance. In summary, at least some aspects of collaboration, journal and document properties significantly associate with higher citations. The results provide new and particularly strong statistical evidence that the authors should consider publishing in high impact journals, ensure that they do not omit relevant references, engage in the widest possible team working, when appropriate, and write extensive abstracts. A new finding is that whilst is seems to be useful to collaborate and to collaborate internationally, there seems to be no particular need to collaborate with other institutions within the same country.