Reimagining the place of students in academic development

ABSTRACT

As calls for student-staff partnership proliferate across higher education, academic development must re-examine and reimagine its relationship to students. Students generally occupy roles with limited agency in academic development. We argue that this needs to change. We propose re-articulating the purpose of academic development toward the creation of conditions that liberate everyone involved in teaching and learning in higher education. We offer four vignettes that illustrate what is possible when students have the opportunity to embrace their essential roles. We conclude by reflecting on the human implications of student agency in academic development and higher education more broadly.     

The continued usage of business e-learning courses in Hong Kong corporations

Other research has investigated aspects of e-learning, e.g., comparing the effectiveness of e-learning with traditional classroom training and gauging the success of IT or computer skills training. This study focused on how to ensure that individuals continue their usage of business and management e-learning courses for self-development in Hong Kong corporations. This paper reports the development and testing of a theoretical model for continued usage. The proposed model was calibrated with a sample of 212 cases from five corporations in Hong Kong, and was subsequently validated with 15 questionnaires from a small e-commerce company of 50 staff. The data supported the model and the model had a moderate explanatory power (R ² = 37%) for continued usage. The structural model was not affected by different collection periods (first collection batch vs. last collection batch), sample (calibration vs. validation), gender (male vs. female), position (manager vs. nonmanager), or computer usage experience (10 years or more vs. less than 10 years). However, the model was different for groups of different ages (aged 36 and above vs. below 36) and educational levels (university graduates vs. nongraduates). Further research and the business implications for improving the continued usage of business e-learning courses are discussed.     

Teaching as Designing: Preparing Pre-Service Teachers for Adaptive Teaching

This conceptual article explores teaching as design work, arguing that a critical thing teachers do is design systems that enable their students to learn. Designing occurs when teachers generate new learning activities or modify curricular programs to create coherence for themselves and their students. Nonetheless, few teacher education programs include instruction in learning how to engage in design thinking. Here, designing is explored as a means to help pre-service teachers develop their facility for adaptive teaching practice by incorporating design thinking at an early stage in their teacher education programs. Literature is drawn from traditional design fields to articulate design capacities and to describe design studio pedagogy practices often used in the education of designers. As an illustrative example is presented of such practices were incorporated throughout one 15-week educational psychology course embedded in an undergraduate elementary-education program to support pre-service teachers development of design thinking. The goal was not to prepare students to use particular instructional innovations, but to collaboratively design such innovations themselves.     

Systems learning with a conceptual representation: a quasi-experimental study

In this paper, we share results from a classroom intervention that used a conceptual representation to support reasoning about ecosystems. Engaging students in modeling allows them to make their ideas visible while being malleable and available for discussion, which enables students to make meaning out of systems. Further, the Components-Mechanisms-Phenomena (CMP) conceptual representation was designed to enable students to construct coherent mental models. Following our intervention, students deepened their understanding of ecosystem dynamics when compared to students who engaged in traditional instruction without use of the CMP conceptual representation. We discuss our results in terms of data that helped guide the design of the intervention and we describe a theoretical perspective that can be used to guide future instruction.     

Muscle co-activation and its influence on running performance and risk of injury in elite Kenyan runners

The relationship between muscle co-activation and energy cost of transport and risk of injury (initial loading rate and joint stiffness) has not been jointly studied. Fourteen elite Kenyan male runners were tested at two speeds (12 and 20 km · h^?1), where oxygen consumption, kinematic, kinetic and electromyography were recorded. Electromyography of seven lower limb muscles was recorded. Pre-activation and ground contact of agonist:antagonist co-activation was determined. All muscles displayed higher activity during pre-activation except rectus femoris (RF). Conversely, no differences were found during ground contact except for higher biceps femoris (BF) at 20 km · h^?1. Knee stiffness was correlated to RF–BF co-activation during both pre-activation and ground contact at both running speeds. However, energy cost of transport was only positively correlated to the above-mentioned muscle pairs at 20 km · h^?1 (r = 0620, P = 0.032; r = 0.682, P = 0.015, respectively). These findings emphasise the influence of neuromuscular control and performance and its support to musculoskeletal system to optimise function and modulate risk of injury. Further, neuromuscular activity during terminal swing is also important and necessary to execute and maintain performance.     

The Development of Preschoolers’ Living Kinds Concept: A Longitudinal Study

Given limitations in the integrative scope of past research, basic questions about the organization and development of preschoolers’ living kinds concept remain open to debate. This study was designed to address past limitations through use of a longitudinal design, extensive stimulus set, and alternate indices of understanding. Thirty‐five English‐speaking 3‐year‐olds from middle‐class families in Albuquerque, NM participated in four testing sessions over 1 year. Indices of understanding included statements that preschoolers generated about various living and nonliving objects, biological properties they attributed to the objects, and their characterization of objects as “alive” or not. Results reveal a multifaceted picture of developmental change in preschoolers’ living kinds concept involving both the construction and elaboration of a core biological understanding.     

Design and Reflection Help Students Develop Scientific Abilities: Learning in Introductory Physics Laboratories

Design activities, when embedded in an inquiry cycle and appropriately scaffolded and supplemented with reflection, can promote the development of the habits of mind (scientific abilities) that are an important part of scientific practice. Through the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), students construct physics knowledge by engaging in inquiry cycles that replicate the approach used by physicists to construct knowledge. A significant portion of student learning occurs in ISLE instructional labs where students design their own experiments. The labs provide an environment for cognitive apprenticeship enhanced by formative assessment. As a result, students develop interpretive knowing that helps them approach new problems as scientists. This article describes a classroom study in which the students in the ISLE design lab performed equally well on traditional exams as ISLE students who did not engage in design activities. However, the design group significantly outperformed the non-design group while working on novel experimental tasks (in physics and biology), demonstrating the application of scientific abilities to an inquiry task in a novel content domain. This research shows that a learning environment that integrates cognitive apprenticeship and formative assessment in a series of conceptual design tasks provides a rich context for helping students build scientific habits of mind.     

Unravelling legacy: a triadic actor-network theory approach to understanding the outcomes of mega events

Mega events have recently attracted the attention of social scientists due to their important role for festival capitalism, urban regeneration and political propaganda. Their planning stage often produces elaborate strategies for maximising the benefits before, during and after the actual event, which has given rise to interdisciplinary studies of event legacy and leveraging. This paper aims to advance ongoing debates on the outcomes of sports mega events by bringing together the literatures on mega event legacy, leveraging and actor-network theory. Drawing on a case study on the usage of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the main legacy of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the paper develops a novel conceptual framework for researching the multi-scalar outcomes of mega events and locating respective studies within the resulting wider research agenda. The proposed concept extends Preuss' (2007) legacy cube in two ways by visualising its five research dimensions in what we call the ‘legacy rings’ and by using three rather than two sub-dimensions per ring, thereby replacing the often restrictive dyads of dualistic thinking through more comprehensive but still understandable triads of triadic thought (Jöns, 2006, 2018).