“I ‘feel’ like I am at university even though I am online.” Exploring how students narrate their engagement with higher education institutions in an online learning environment

This article outlines a collaborative study between higher education institutions in Australia, which qualitatively explored the online learning experience for undergraduate and postgraduate students. The project adopted a narrative inquiry approach and encouraged students to story their experiences of this virtual environment, providing a snapshot of how learning is experienced by those undertaking online studies. The study explores what impacted upon students’ engagement in this environment and how different facets of their learning experience made a qualitative difference to how individuals enacted engagement. Drawing upon Sharon Pittaway’s engagement framework, the article seeks to foreground student voice as the learners define their engagement in learning, the strategies they employed to assist this process and how engagement was enacted at an individual level. The students’ reflections presented in this article can be used to inform teaching and learning strategies designed to improve engagement in the online environment within the higher education sector.     

Developing a competency framework for the initial training of educational psychologists working with young people aged 16–25

The Children and Families Act (2014) extends statutory protections for young people with special educational needs and disabilities until age 25. Consequently the core curriculum for trainee educational psychologists (TEPs) needs to be developed beyond the current focus of work with early years and school-age children. In order to define requisite professional competencies for working with young people aged 16–25 with learning difficulties and disabilities, and mental health needs, the Delphi Technique was employed to obtain consensus amongst an expert reference group. Two rounds of an online questionnaire and a face-to-face meeting with educational psychologists (EPs) reporting expertise in working with post-16 learners enabled the identification of areas to be added to, or extended within, existing training curricula. A competency framework for EPs working with young people aged 16–25 is proposed and implications for both TEPs and practitioner EPs explored.     

Psychology students’ perception of and engagement with feedback as a function of year of study

Undergraduate students’ perception of feedback and level of engagement with the feedback they receive have gained increasing attention in the educational literature recently to identify areas which require educators’ attention. However, research in this area has generally been based on limited self-selecting samples, and has not considered how students’ relationship with feedback may alter depending on their year of study. To address this, a survey measuring students’ views and practices regarding feedback was completed at a higher education institution by 447 first-, second- and third-year psychology students, representing 77% of the cohort. Findings revealed that third years responded more negatively in both areas than their first- and second-year counterparts, whose ratings on these aspects themselves were far from optimal. These findings highlight the need for early interventions to improve students’ perception of and engagement with feedback in the earlier years, and to prevent the recorded deterioration later on in the degree course.     

Women academics and research productivity: an international comparison

In the prestige economy of higher education, research productivity is highly prized. Previous research indicates, however, a gender gap with respect to research output. This gap is often explained by reference to familial status and responsibilities. In this article, we examine the research productivity gender gap from an international perspective by undertaking a gendered analysis of the Changing Academic Profession Survey. We suggest that family is not, in all cases, operating as a form of negative equity in the prestige economy of higher education. In addition, we argue that an over-reliance on an explanatory framework that positions family-related variables as central to the research productivity gender gap might well be drawing our attention from significant structural and systemic discriminatory practices within the profession.     

Investigating the Potential of Guided Practice With an Enactment Tool for Supporting Adaptive Performance

Recently, attention has focused on identifying core instructional practices that could leverage novice teachers’ development of professional knowledge and skill. To help novices learn to implement these practices, there is also increasing interest in developing enactment tools that could translate abstract conceptual tasks into more concrete steps. Less attention, however, has been paid to understanding how novices might learn to use these tools adaptively in the context of practice. We address this issue by integrating a set of theoretical considerations that together serve as a model for investigating how novices could learn within a community of practice to use a specified elicitation sequence adaptively, guided by more experienced members in that community. In our results, we provide thematic categories for the problems that arose as novices used the sequence of questions and demonstrate how these problems afforded the teacher educator opportunities to connect novices’ work to a set of professional commitments that could guide their adaptive practice. In particular, we highlight how these opportunities arose in the midst of modifying the question sequence and investigating the consequences of its enactment. Although our analysis focuses on a particular question sequence, we see our results as relevant to the development of other forms of enactment tools for use in adaptive practice across a range of professional domains.     

Digital technology and creative arts career patterns in the UK creative economy

In this article, we ask what role both digital and artistic human capital play in the creative economy by examining employment patterns of digital technology (DT) and creative arts and design (CAD) graduates. Using student micro-data collected by the Higher Education Statistical Agency (HESA) in the United Kingdom, we investigate the characteristics and location determinants of these graduates. The article deals specifically with understanding how digital and creative skills in the UK are embedded across industries, or are concentrated in creative sub-sectors. Furthermore, it explores the role that these graduates play in each of the different sectors and their financial rewards. Findings suggest that digital technology graduates tend to concentrate in the software and gaming sub-sector of the creative industries, but also are likely to be in embedded creative jobs outside of the creative industries. DT and CAD graduates are more likely to be in a creative job than other graduates. Although they are more likely to be in full-time employment than part-time or self-employment, DT graduates suffer from a higher level of unemployment than CAD graduates.     

Exhibiting monstrosity: Chang and Eng, the 'original' Siamese twins

Chang and Eng, the two young men who would eventually be known around the world as the ‘original’ Siamese twins, arrived in the West in 1829. They were brought to the West to be examined by medical men and to be exhibited to the general public. Throughout the 19th century in Britain and the US, ‘monstrosities’ such as Chang and Eng, as well as a host of other people with unusual anatomies, were considered both spectacles worthy of public display and edifying medical subjects with the potential to build on medical knowledge. The unique case of Chang and Eng illustrates that the boundary between what is of legitimate medical interest and what is considered merely spectacle is often blurred.     

Advancing text-analysis to tap into the student voice: a proof-of-concept study

Abstract

Student evaluations of teaching and courses (SETs) are part of the fabric of tertiary education and quantitative ratings derived from SETs are highly valued by tertiary institutions. However, many staff do not engage meaningfully with SETs, especially if the process of analysing student feedback is cumbersome or time-consuming. To address this issue, we describe a proof-of-concept study to automate aspects of analysing student free text responses to questions. Using Quantext text analysis software, we summarise and categorise student free text responses to two questions posed as part of a larger research project which explored student perceptions of SETs. We compare human analysis of student responses with automated methods and identify some key reasons why students do not complete SETs. We conclude that the text analytic tools in Quantext have an important role in assisting teaching staff with the rigorous analysis and interpretation of SETs and that keeping teachers and students at the centre of the evaluation process is key.     

A case for climate justice education: American youth connecting to intragenerational climate injustice in Bangladesh

Abstract

In this paper, I present evidence for framing climate change education around social justice. More specifically, I provide empirical support for framing climate change education around intragenerational climate justice, and argue that this frame can influence youth in industrialized, wealthy nations to become mobilized, climate-engaged individuals. To do so, I apply critical qualitative analysis to narratives from American youth who participated in a global climate change education program in Bangladesh. My findings include the importance of contextualizing climate justice, framing climate change around humans, implicating ourselves in the problem and recognizing our own obligations in mitigation, seeing climate change as real and tangible, being in a place impacted by climate change, feeling solidarity with those impacted, and recognizing social injustice and power disparities within climate change impacts. Based on these findings, I recommend an approach that provides context, nuance, and personal connection to an otherwise abstract global problem.