Enhancing professional writing skills of veterinary technology students: linking assessment and clinical practice in a communications course

Veterinary technology is an emerging profession within the veterinary and allied animal health fields in Australia and affords graduates the opportunity to contribute to the small but growing body of literature within this discipline. This study describes the introduction of a contextualised assessment task to develop students’ research capability, competence and confidence in professional writing, and to engage them with the academic publishing process. Students worked in self-selected dyads to author a scientific case report, of publishable standard, based on authentic cases from their clinical practicum. Intrinsic to the task, students attended a series of workshops that explored topics such as critiquing the literature, professional writing styles and oral presentation skills. Assessment was multi-staged with progressive feedback, including peer review, and culminated with students presenting their abstracts at a mock conference. Students reported the task to be an enjoyable and valuable learning experience which improved their competence and confidence in scientific writing; supported by a comparison of previously submitted work. Linking scientific writing skills to clinical practice experiences enhanced learning outcomes and may foster the professionalisation of students within this emerging discipline.     

ON HAVING ONE'S CHANCE: AUTONOMY AS EDUCATION'S LIMIT

When hopelessness and helplessness become recurring themes in teacher education scholarship, this signals a conceptual problem with the question of autonomy in the profession. In this essay, Alice Pitt argues that breakdowns of professional life belong to what is most subjective in the profession. Pitt opens her analysis of this conundrum by examining some earlier formulations of the problem of learning a profession. Next, she explores four orientations to the role of education in modern life and examines an interview with a beginning teacher as a way to think about autonomy in its emotional as well as rational qualities. A reconfigured autonomy suggests that education is more than a site of the failure of the Enlightenment promise to advance reason's dominance in the organization of social life. Education, in its professional, practical, and experiential realms, reveals the dynamic qualities of the limits of reason, according to Pitt. She concludes that a constitutive alterity at the heart of the educational project renders the profession a significant site for ongoing investigation of the human condition and the play of autonomy.     

The Application of Games Theory to Group Project Assessment

Students in higher education are increasingly expected to work in small groups on projects over several weeks or longer. Where these make an important contribution to their marks, the application of games theory shows that the best strategy for the students may not be that which promotes teamwork and co-operation. Furthermore, putting students into groups can randomly disadvantage some students relative to others, producing serious unfairness in assessment.     

Graduate attribute development and employment outcomes: tracking PhD graduates

The provision of diversified research training is regarded as one of the most significant contributions made by the Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) programme [Howard Partners 2003 Howard Partners. 2003. Evaluation of the cooperative research centres programme, Canberra, ACT: Department of Education, Science and Training.  [Google Scholar], Evaluation of the cooperative research centres programme, Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra, ACT]. Yet, a systematic evaluation of Australia’s CRC research training programmes and outcomes has not yet been undertaken. This article reports on a pilot questionnaire designed to provide the beginnings of such an evaluation. Participants were science‐based research graduates who were awarded with a PhD within the four‐year period 2000–2003 and had completed the majority of their PhD project either in a university school or in a CRC environment. The questionnaire results provide insights into participants’ perceptions of the graduate attributes they developed prior to and during their PhD studies. It also investigates their perceptions about the relative importance of particular skills in university and industry settings. This article argues that understanding the perceptions and employment experiences of recent research graduates is a vital way of ensuring that PhD programmes are more effectively designed to prepare research graduates for a range of careers. In particular, these results confirm the importance of constant re‐evaluation and improvement of all PhD training programmes.     

Designing a connected learning toolkit for public library staff serving youth through the design-based implementation research method

Design-based Implementation Research (DBIR) is an iterative approach to developing practical theory and tools to solve problems of practice and to support innovation in improving teaching and learning, which is rarely used in informal settings such as libraries. This study presents findings from a multi-year researcher-practitioner collaboration in which the authors employed DBIR to iteratively design and implement a professional development resource, the ConnectedLib Toolkit, for use in public libraries across the United States (U.S.). In this study, the authors explain what established DBIR challenges and benefits in K-12 formal educational contexts manifest in the development and implementation of a professional development resource for youth-serving library staff working in diverse public libraries across the U.S. This study also disentangles how these challenges and benefits manifest in this setting. These insights will be useful to researchers and library practitioners who are considering partnerships to address problems of practice in library systems.     

‘The project cannot be approved in its current form’: feminist visual research meets the human research ethics committee

This article reflects on a university human research ethics committee’s unease regarding a feminist visual pilot study within the field of education. The small exploratory study proposed to explore a migrant mother’s production of her son’s identity through her family photograph collection. The committee requested substantial changes to the research design which centred primarily on their concerns regarding risk of harm to pre-existing relationships, and also issues of anonymity and consent. I consider the combined liberal individualist, utilitarian and positivist biomedical basis for the ethics committee’s discomfort with the proposed research which was to involve members of my family. I draw on my experience of the review process to critique the human research ethics committee paradigm which constructs the ideal researcher as an objective and disinterested observer, hinges on a weighing of risks and benefits, and considers humans to be independent and equal. I demonstrate how the blanket application of these values acts to problematise some kinds of research, and how these values can be inappropriate, incompatible and even destructive when applied to research proposals that are exploratory, visual, and/or involve the researcher’s family members as participants.     

The use of electronic mail in undergraduate teaching

An introductory computing course is described in which the students were required to register their presence and submit assignments by electronic mail. This was found to have advantages in improving class discipline without a schoolroom atmosphere. Returning assignments by electronic mail was found to be an effective method of giving individual help to those who needed it most, and individual student misconceptions could be more easily detected.