Sustainable assessment for lifelong learning

This paper explores the alignment of assessment practices in universities and lifelong learning as a key process and outcome for expansive student development. It outlines Boud’s approach to assessment, operationalises this to analyse practices in two contrasting national contexts: the sociology departments of the Midlands University in the UK and Nam Du University in Vietnam, and reframes this framework as a guide to improving practices and better-supporting lifelong learning. The paper thus contributes to recent debates about sustainable assessment and how to change assessment to better support students for lifelong learning in different countries. The findings suggest that although more elements were found at Midlands University than Nam Du University, assessment in both cases was an imperfect realisation of this framework. Nonetheless, the paper argues that the framework can offer guidance for changes to align assessment practices with lifelong learning, but to do this it should be adapted to the education context and also expanded to include explicit social commitments to others for expansive lifelong learning.     

Jurisprudential and Ethical Perspectives on "The Best Interests of Children"

Justifications of policies must be clearly warranted if educational leaders are to continue to maintain integrity and to sustain the trust of those served. Educators are called upon to mediate many private and public interests, including those pertaining to personal, organizational, professional, and societal values. This work of mediating conflicting values often relates to guarding and/or advocating the interests of children. Leaders must understand what they mean when evoking the potent phrase in the best interests of children. More importantly, they must avoid the temptations of sophistic misuses of the best interests of children notion. What is meant when we say we are deciding in the best interests of children? Each of the political, psychological, pedagogical, philosophical, jurisprudential, and ethical grounds undergirding the concept of the best interests of the child contributes content and meaning to the phrase. While each of these perspectives merits consideration, this article is delimited to an exploration of three interpretations from the field of jurisprudence and four interpretations from the field of ethics.     

Blood Pressure,Fitness, and Lipid Profiles of Rural Women in the Wellness for Women Project

Purpose: This study examined whether rural women, who had a high prevalence of prehypertension and hypertension upon enrollment in a wellness program, would also have a high prevalence of other cardiovascular disease risk factors such as low fitness and/or dyslipidemia. Methods: Data were analyzed from 225 rural women, ages 50-69, enrolled in a healthy eating and activity clinical trial. Cardiovascular health histories, fitness measures, blood pressure, and fasting blood serum samples were collected following standardized protocols at rural research offices. Chi-square and MANOVA were performed to examine differences in health characteristics, lipids, and fitness across blood pressure categories. Results: Fitness indicators of estimated VO_2max, 1-mile walk time, and resting heart rate differed between the blood pressure groups, with those in the prehypertensive and hypertensive groups having less desirable profiles than those in the normotensive group. Triglyceride levels of 150 mg/dL or greater, were observed in 36%, 32%, and 16.7% of women who had hypertensive, prehypertensive, and normal blood pressures, respectively. Conclusions: The need for routine blood pressure screenings by practitioners is reinforced by finding that rural women screened via PAR-Q and/or physician clearance had a high prevalence of prehypertensive and hypertensive blood pressures, in addition to low fitness and nonoptimal triglycerides. Practitioners need to provide counselling based on results and refer to other providers as appropriate.Key Words: blood pressure, lipids, fitness, rural women     

The impact of curriculum change on health sciences first year students’ approaches to learning

This study aimed to use a learning inventory (the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students, ASSIST) to measure the impact of a curriculum change on students’ approaches to learning in two large courses in a health sciences first year programme. The two new Human Body Systems (HUBS) courses were designed to encourage students to take a deep approach to learning. ASSIST was completed by 599 students enrolled in a biology class in 2006 that was part of the old curriculum, and by 705 students at the beginning and end of the new HUBS courses in 2007. Changes in students’ approaches to learning over time were examined. The ASSIST scores for both HUBS courses reflected the dominance of a surface approach, followed by a strategic and then a deep approach. However, by the end of the year, students were taking a deep and strategic approach to their studies to a greater extent, and a surface approach to a lesser extent. Moreover, students enrolled in the new course adopted a deep approach to their studies to a significantly greater degree than those studying the old curriculum. Despite the predominance of a surface approach, the results suggest that it is possible to bring about small but significant positive changes in students’ learning behaviour in a very large class through curriculum change. The proportion of students preferring a surface approach, and results showing that high performance on the final exam was significantly correlated with a surface approach, probably reflected contextual factors, including assessment, and is the focus of ongoing curriculum development.     

Dimensions of higher education and the public good in South Africa

The focus is on the micro-possibilities of student capabilities formation as the end of public-good higher education, rather than on a systems or organizations approach more commonly found in discussions of the public good and higher education. This does not discount other valuable public-good ends. Using South Africa as a global South context, a capability-based approach to the public good of higher education is proposed for its humanizing ethic, attention to fair opportunities, and participation in terms of what students are able to do and to be in and through higher education. A capability frame is complemented by thinking about decoloniality and epistemic justice to help identify central higher education capabilities. The three proposed intersecting capability dimensions are as follows: personhood self-formation, epistemic contribution, and sufficiency of economic resources, intended to guide university practices and policy interventions in the direction of the public good. By populating the space of the public good with capabilities, a shift is made away from micro-economics which see the public good as a reductionist space of commodities and human capital development. Higher education is rather understood as having both instrumental and intrinsic value, generating an alternative logic to that of neo-liberalism, and an individualist ontology of competition and untrammeled markets. The pressures of the global context are acknowledged so that the public good is understood as both “ideal-aspirational” but also “practical-feasible” in the light of local South African conditions. An expanded capability-based framing would contribute to reducing higher education inequalities as a public-good and public-accountable contribution by universities.     

Creating an LNG ready worker: British Columbia’s blueprint for extraction education

Since 2011, the government of British Columbia (BC) has focused on building the Canadian province’s economy through the development of a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) sector. In service of this endeavour, the government launched the Skills for Jobs Blueprint, which attempts to more clearly align BC’s education system with resource extraction industries. In this paper, I argue that at the heart of this policy is the idea of education for, through, and as extraction. Conceptually, ‘extraction education’ focuses on supply (what we can take out of the earth, institutions, and individuals) rather than demand (what is needed to put into the educational system to meet needs of the land, institutions, communities, and individuals), and is problematic on environmental, economic, employment, equity, and educational fronts. In theorising ‘extraction education’ I extend Freire’s ideas on ‘banking education’ and briefly explore dialogic, problem-posing counters to it.     

Innovating strategically in information and knowledge management: Applications of organizational behavior theory

A business school declares its strategy as becoming a leading European institution. As main vehicle for achieving recognition is the implementation of a top-down strategy naming five academic fields as key – (a) finance, (b) economics, (c) marketing, (d) law, accounting, and auditing, and (e) organizational behavior (OB). Top management allocates resources for research, academic activities, and positions to these five strategically chosen areas. Academic areas that are not strategically named must generate their own income through educational programs and research grants. Can OB serve as the platform to ensure the survival of IS/KMS? In our analysis, we found no other business school formulating a strategy along these lines; dominating strategic themes are internationalization, research excellence, and student environment. No academic field is singled out as strategic. We argue that selecting a few academic areas as a strategy is dysfunctional. We also found that OB is not very actively employed in research, be it positioning, theory, research model, analysis, or discussion. Hence, we do not find that OB offers any theorizing help to IS/KMS – this in contrast to innovation and change theories, for which we propose an framework as a means of defining IS/KMS research projects.