An empirical exploration of metacognitive assessment activities in a third-year civil engineering hydraulics course

Threshold concepts are transformative, integrative, and provocative; understanding these difficult concepts allows students to be capable of solving advanced problems. This investigation and evaluation of a metacognitive curricular approach explore variation in students' and teachers' discernment of structural complexity of concepts and its potential for enhancing students' learning and conceptual understanding of threshold concepts. Three trials of a metacognitive assessment activity administered to two cohorts of a civil engineering course (n?=?276 and n?=?264) were investigated. Students were presented with several answers (varying in structural complexity) to a question about a threshold concept and asked to mark each response. Quantitative analyses compared students' and teachers' marking schemes within and across trials, and qualitative analyses explored students' written reflections following the activity. Students' justifications for their marking schemes, their reflections on the activity's usefulness, and the convergence of students' and teachers' marking schemes suggest that the activity supported deep forms of student learning.     

A day in the life (and death) of a public university

This is a narrative of an actual day in the author's working life at a large public university in the southern hemisphere. It is an enquiry into life, and death, at the university. It attempts to balance a critical and informed perspective with a lived perspective and, as a story that contributes to a developing genre of academic writing, it works to counter the dominant neo-liberal discourse in the university by reaffirming the value of the imagination. It reflects on a remarkable–unremarkable day to show the complexity of being an individual subject, situated in language, hailed by different discourses, feeling and sometimes thinking contradictory things at once, in a contemporary university context.     

Meeting the expectation of industry: an integrated approach for the teaching of mechanics and electronics to design students

This paper examines the traditional engineering-based provision delivered to Product Design and Technology (B.Sc.) undergraduates at the Loughborough Design School and questions its relevancy against the increasing expectations of industry. The paper reviews final-year design projects to understand the level of transference of engineering-based knowledge into design practice and highlights areas of opportunity for improved teaching and learning. The paper discusses the development and implementation of an integrated approach to the teaching of Mechanics and Electronics to formalise and reinforce the key learning process of transference within the design context. The paper concludes with observations from the delivery of this integrated teaching and offers insights from student and academic perspectives for the further improvement of engineering-based teaching and learning.     

Concurrent validation of the Actigraph gt3x+, Polar Active accelerometer,Omron HJ-720 and Yamax Digiwalker SW-701 pedometer step counts in lab-based and free-living settings

Activity monitors are frequently used to assess activity in many settings. But as technology advances, so do the mechanisms used to estimate activity causing a continuous need to validate newly developed monitors. The purpose of this study was to examine the step count validity of the Yamax Digiwalker SW-701 pedometer (YX), Omron HJ-720 T pedometer (OP), Polar Active accelerometer (PAC) and Actigraph gt3x+ accelerometer (AG) under controlled and free-living conditions. Participants completed five stages of treadmill walking (n = 43) and a subset of these completed a 3-day free-living wear period (n = 37). Manually counted (MC) steps provided a criterion measure for treadmill walking, whereas the comparative measure during free-living was the YX. During treadmill walking, the OP was the most accurate monitor across all speeds (±1.1% of MC steps), while the PAC underestimated steps by 6.7–16.0% per stage. During free-living, the OP and AG counted 97.5% and 98.5% of YX steps, respectively. The PAC overestimated steps by 44.0%, or 5,265 steps per day. The Omron pedometer seems to provide the most reliable and valid estimate of steps taken, as it was the best performer under lab-based conditions and provided comparable results to the YX in free-living. Future studies should consider these monitors in additional populations and settings.     

Brain drain and the disenchantment of being a higher education student in Portugal

The efforts made by most countries to accelerate economic development have included a significant investment in education. It has been argued that investment in education, particularly higher education, was itself a potential factor in economic development. Education has become a relatively easy means of improving access to the labour market. However, in Portugal, the recent trend has been reversed, and the country now faces a growing number of university graduates in several fields of education and training that do not have a job based on their formal qualifications. Despite the differences of unemployment by area of education and training, unemployment of the young skilled has been a problem in recent years. Therefore, following this unemployment trend, there has been growing the exodus of highly skilled professionals from the Portuguese economy, leaving it with a reduced supply of skilled people. This article discusses the employability of graduates from several academic areas and discusses the educational and economic policies that generate a real brain drain.     

Analysing student written solutions to investigate if problem-solving processes are evident throughout

An interdisciplinary science course has been implemented at a university with the intention of providing students the opportunity to develop a range of key skills in relation to: real-world connections of science, problem-solving, information and communications technology use and team while linking subject knowledge in each of the science disciplines. One of the problems used in this interdisciplinary course has been selected to evaluate if it affords students the opportunity to explicitly display problem-solving processes. While the benefits of implementing problem-based learning have been well reported, far less research has been devoted to methods of assessing student problem-solving solutions. A problem-solving theoretical framework was used as a tool to assess student written solutions to indicate if problem-solving processes were present. In two academic years, student problem-solving processes were satisfactory for exploring and understanding, representing and formulating, and planning and executing, indicating that student collaboration on problems is a good initiator of developing these processes. In both academic years, students displayed poor monitoring and reflecting (MR) processes at the intermediate level. A key impact of evaluating student work in this way is that it facilitated meaningful feedback about the students’ problem-solving process rather than solely assessing the correctness of problem solutions.     

Educational Leadership and Context: A Rendering of an Inseparable Relationship

The amount of empirical research on leadership of educational organisations, and especially of schools, which has stressed the importance of being sensitive to context, is not great. This paper seeks to highlight the challenge presented by this situation. First, context is defined. Second, attention is drawn to what can be learned in the area of school leadership from the emphasis in other bodies of scholarship within the broad field of education studies on paying attention to matters of context. Third, an overview is provided of some of the key considerations arising out of the small body of work undertaken in the field by those researchers who have focussed on the broad range of issues that can arise for school leaders in distinctive contexts. Finally, five key and interconnected propositions to guide practice with regard to leadership in diverse contexts that have been generated from an analysis of the latter body of work are presented. In doing so, it is recognised that these are tentative in the absence of a much larger corpus of work. Overall, we hope that, along with providing intellectual sustenance, each of the four areas considered will also stimulate discussion on areas for further research.     

Applying the Rasch Model to Evaluate an Implementation of the Kentucky Electronics Education Project

Kentucky Electronics Education Project (KEEP) uses microelectronics to connect real world content to K-12 science education. KEEP trains teachers in a series of circuit building activities through summer workshops and in-service professional development. Teachers are expected to implement components of their training into their curriculum, and then participating students are asked to evaluate their experience. Here, survey responses of 61 Midwest high school students, who completed a circuit building activity in the classroom setting, are analyzed using a Rasch rating scale model. Insights are provided regarding the inquiry based, hands-on engineering activity, while introducing a tool for program evaluation. Results characterize students’ perceptions regarding difficulty of the project and potential misunderstandings. Suggestions for project enhancement, based on empirical evidence and practical experience, are described.     

Dating Violence and Self‐Injury Among Undergraduate College Students: Attitudes and Experiences

An Internet‐based survey about dating violence and self‐injury was completed by 1,777 undergraduates. A regression analysis tested if recent dating violence victimization and perpetration experiences predicted whether participants self‐injured in the past 90 days, after controlling for demographic variables and attitudes toward self‐injury and dating violence. Although the regression model explained only 6% of the variance in self‐injury, the relationship may indicate a co‐occurrence of dating violence and self‐injury.