Decolonising the curriculum: using graduate qualities to embed Indigenous knowledges at the academic cultural interface

The context of this paper is a strategy at a large Australian university that involves embedding a new graduate quality ‘cultural competence’ and lifting the profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, experiences and histories. It has been argued that the inclusion of Indigenous knowledges is essential for the decolonisation of our higher education institutions. Decolonisation involves removing the barriers that have silenced non-Western voices in our ‘multi-cultural’ higher education system and combatting the epistemic injustices of a system dominated by Western thought. In this paper, we suggest that our university’s suite of graduate qualities can provide a locus for work at the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. While these qualities may be firmly embedded within Western ways of knowing, being and doing, they can nonetheless be used to interrogate and revisit Western disciplinary knowledge construction and pedagogy so as to help bring about institutional change.     

The Evaluation Scale: Exploring Decisions About Societal Impact in Peer Review Panels

Realising the societal gains from publicly funded health and medical research requires a model for a reflexive evaluation precedent for the societal impact of research. This research explores UK Research Excellence Framework evaluators’ values and opinions and assessing societal impact, prior to the assessment taking place. Specifically, we discuss the characteristics of two different impact assessment extremes – the “quality-focused” evaluation and “societal impact-focused” evaluation. We show the wide range of evaluator views about impact, and that these views could be conceptually reflected in a range of different positions along a conceptual evaluation scale. We describe the characteristics of these extremes in detail, and discuss the different beliefs evaluators had which could influence where they positioned themselves along the scale. These decisions, we argue, when considered together, form a dominant definition of societal impact that influences the direction of its evaluation by the panel.     

Anatomical Sciences Education Vol. 5, Issue 1, 2012 Cover Image

Medical students at Durham University, United Kingdom receive instructions using ultrasound echocardiography . In this issue of ASE Dr. Finn and her colleagues compare the efficacy of ultrasound and cadaveric prosections for teaching gross anatomy of the heart.     

Transfer by very young children in the symbolic retrieval task

Cumulative experience with a variety of symbolic artifacts has been hypothesized as a source of young children's increasing sensitivity to new symbol-referent relations. Evidence for this hypothesis comes from transfer studies showing that experience with a relatively easy symbolic retrieval task improves performance on a more difficult task. Significant transfer was found for the 2(1/2)-year-old children in the 3 studies reported here, even with relatively low levels of contextual support (according to the taxonomy of transfer by Barnett & Ceci, 2002). Transfer occurred even though the 2 tasks were encountered in very different settings and there was a prolonged (1-week) delay interval between them. Transfer also occurred to a much more difficult task (one that even 3-year-olds typically fail).     

Exploring the Evidence in Evidence-Based Acquisition

ABSTRACT

This article explores the University of Colorado (CU) Libraries’ experiences with evaluating a patron-driven (PDA) program with Kanopy and an evidence-based (EBA) program with Alexander Street for streaming videos. The article includes a thorough comparison of EBA and PDA models, workflows, and outcomes. Three separately administered libraries within the CU system support campuses of different budgets, student and faculty demographics, programs, and exposure to streaming collections. Lessons in implementing and assessing streaming videos at each library and across the consortia are shared along with details on how to implement similar analysis at other libraries.