Epistemological Beliefs Across Domains Using Biglan's Classification of Academic Disciplines

The purpose of this study was to examine students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning, epistemological beliefs, across domains that vary according to Biglan's classification of academic disciplines (hard vs. soft disciplines and pure vs. applied disciplines). One hundred and fifty-two university students completed three questionnaires that assessed their epistemological beliefs about mathematics (hard-pure), the social sciences (also pure), and business (neither hard nor pure). Correlations indicated that students' epistemological beliefs were similar for mathematics and social sciences, as well as for mathematics and business. When the amount of academic experience was taken into account, some evidence of domain specificity was found. These results support Sternberg's caveat that the dichotomy of domain generality/specificity is an assumption that should be questioned. We propose that future researchers should investigate the breadth of applicability of epistemological beliefs.     

Rural young people’s work/study priorities and aspirations: The influence of family social capital

The transition from school to secure work has become more difficult as young people bear the brunt of the restructuring of the Australian labour market. Young people raised in a rural community are over-represented in the most disadvantaged labour market group- those who have not participated in post-school training and who have experienced long periods of unemployment. Rural labour markets feature lower paid, less secure jobs than their urban counterparts. Education is a proven way of accessing the ‘better’ jobs offered by national labour markets. Why then do young people from disadvantaged rural areas not take up education and training opportunities to the same extent as their urban counterparts? The research discussed in this paper investigated ways in which family and school/community social capital influence young people’s work/study values and priorities with regard to post-school pathways. Family networks and information that are limited and concentrated in rural areas tend to be associated with a desire to find a job before completing school, preferably located near to home. Incomplete understanding and lack of trust of educational institutions and labour markets in urban centres based on local experience may be transmitted through advice of family and friends and influence young people toward current work rather than the longer term goal of post-compulsory education. The implications for regional and national programs of educational and community development are discussed.     

Becoming Schoolgirls: The ambivalent project of subjectification

In this article, the authors examine the concept and practices of subjectification; that is, the processes through which we are subjected, and actively take up as our own the terms of our subjection. They use Judith Butler's theorising of subjection both as a starting point for working with their own memories of being subjected in school settings, and as the theoretical basis of their analysis of subjectification. Their method of working, which they refer to as collective biography, is derived from Haug et al. 's methods developed in Female Sexualization . Their memories focus on aspects of the achievement of the individual, appropriate(d) schoolgirl subject who simultaneously constitutes herself and is constituted through discourse. They analyse the illusion of autonomy through which modern subjects are made possible, and the inevitable ambivalence that is experienced as schoolgirls take themselves up appropriately within the possibilities made available to them. Through re-membering their own pasts, and the embodied and emotional detail through which we became (and go on becoming) subjects, they open up for inspection the contradictory ground of the humanist subject, and in particular the feminine humanist subject, as it is achieved in educational settings.     

Developing educational goals: insights from a Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme

The rapid changes facing higher education are placing increased focus on the quality of the student experience, achieving learning outcomes, and employability expectations. As a result, academics in teaching roles are increasingly measured on performance via student evaluations amplifying attention on professional development initiatives for academics. One such initiative is the Peer Assisted Teaching Scheme currently in practice across many Australian universities. The critical component of the scheme is the establishment of teaching goals that provide focus and direction for the peer partnership. This study addresses two questions: (1) Around which aspects do academics set their goals for teaching improvement? and (2) How do academics’ goals align with the SMART goal-setting framework that is prescribed in the scheme? Findings from five Australian universities showed that goals align with a variety of educational areas yet many were underdeveloped, or misaligned with the proposed strategy. The implications of this are discussed and a framework for setting education goals for teaching improvement is developed.     

African international doctoral students in New Zealand: Englishes,doctoral writing and intercultural supervision

While the experiences of international doctoral students, especially those from Asian countries, have been well researched, fewer studies have explored the experiences of African students in Southern countries like Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand. This article reports on doctoral writing and student and supervisor perspectives on English languages in a small study of supervisors and African students in New Zealand. It challenges deficit constructions of African students and illustrates how the growing internationalisation of higher education is adding to the complexities of doctoral writing, raising questions as to how students and supervisors recognise and navigate differences in Englishes and doctoral writing. It makes a number of recommendations about how supervisors might work effectively with African and other doctoral students.     

Are health professional competency assessments transferable across cultures? A preliminary validity study

This study investigated if professional competency assessments are transferable across cultures using COMPASS®: Competency assessment in speech pathology, a tool developed and validated in Australia. Students in Hong Kong were assessed by clinical educators using COMPASS® and the usual clinical evaluation forms. Analyses compared Hong Kong data with the original Australian field trial data. Rasch analysis was used to evaluate how well the ratings and score generated represented students’ development of competency. Hong Kong clinical educators’ ratings represented the same seven distinct categories of judgement as Australian clinical educators. The order of item difficulty was very similar for the two samples. However, Hong Kong clinical educators were not rating students in a pattern that reflected increasing competency with experience and very few year 4 students were rated at entry level. It is concluded that an assessment tool validated and developed in one culture may well support valid judgements and yield measures that can be used to judge student competency in another culture. Further evaluation is required to investigate the differences in the judgement of student progress in another culture and strengthen the validity of using its measures to judge students' competency performance.     

Evaluating instructional quality

ABSTRACT

Building on the papers in this special issue, this article uses modern conceptions of validity theory to provide a framework for considering the evaluation of teaching quality. The 3 facets of teaching quality focused on are domain conceptualization, evidence and inferences, and their evaluation. Domain definitions vary in their specificity with tradeoffs in their range of applicability and specificity of inference. Evidence collection can range from highly standardized assessments to observations that must attend to evidence from a myriad of classroom interactions. For all assessments, however, even the most standardized, different interpretations of assessment tasks can threaten the validity of score interpretations. The papers consider a range of processes that are designed to generate, support, and interrogate the validity of inferences based on assessment scores. A fundamental question underlying this type of measurement is whether differences in the quality of teaching that students experience can be causally attributed to the teacher.     

Interprofessional/multiprofessional health professions education: designing an efficient search to scope the literature of this exploding field

Background and objective: With the advent of an interprofessional approach to delivering health care in today's health care systems, should health care professionals be educated together? Supported by policy‐making circles worldwide, interprofessional education is accumulating a research literature at an exponential rate. Using one‐word search terms in the medline query box for scoping this body of literature, we obtained an unmanageable number of articles (342 338 in all fields). The objective of our study was to outline an efficient specific query. Methods: We created 1072 phrasal search terms consisting of a prefix, an adjective and a noun. Of those, 66 were prolific for the whole indexed period (1950–2006). Results: Only 2510 citations have the search term in all medline fields; of those 2049 were in title/abstract and 652 in title alone. From the 1950s, the citations were published at a slow rate, but the rate then exploded during the decade 1995 to 2006. The combination of prefixes ‘inter’ and ‘multi’ with the adjectives ‘professional’, ‘disciplinary’ and ‘shared’, and the nouns ‘education’, ‘learning’ and ‘training’ may retrieve almost all the relevant citations, while the terms ‘collaborative’ and ‘common’ may retrieve mainly irrelevant ones. The adjective ‘cohesive’ and nouns ‘practice’ and ‘role’ should be also considered. Conclusion: Phrasal search terms highly increased the relevance of medline ‐retrieved citations.