‘Feedback interpreters’: the role of learning development professionals in facilitating university students’ engagement with feedback

Understanding how students engage with assessment feedback is a key concern of higher education professionals. Research commonly represents the perspectives of students and academic staff, yet little consideration is given to the role of learning development staff, despite these individuals supporting students when interpreting and implementing feedback. We report the findings from interviews with learning developers working in a UK University, exploring their insights into the barriers students confront when engaging with feedback, and into the role of learning developers within the feedback landscape. This study suggests that, while many challenges exist for staff and students in the context of assessment feedback, learning development professionals are able to provide a meaningful source of guidance, in partnership with academic staff, and are able to promote students’ development through dialogic interactions. Hitherto these interactions have not been fully explored, yet they provide powerful insight into the hidden processes of feedback recipience.     

Squishing Circuits: Circuitry Learning with Electronics and Playdough in Early Childhood

While circuitry lessons have traditionally been first introduced in late elementary school, they remain challenging conceptually for undergraduates in physics and engineering courses. Seeking to provide a higher quality and earlier introduction to circuitry learning for young children (ages 3–5), this paper investigates the affordances of utilizing the Squishy Circuits toolkit, a circuitry kit that combines circuit components and playdough, as a first introduction. Our study engaged 45 children across three nursery school classrooms in open-ended play with Squishy Circuits toolkits for seven sessions over a period of 2 weeks. Here, we focus on six children in one focal classroom in order to illustrate the concepts that children are developing during play and open exploration with the kits and a range of crafting materials. Findings indicated that the Squishy Circuits toolkit enabled children to explore concepts important to circuitry learning, including current flow, polarity, and connections. Additionally, analysis of whole class conversations before and after the circuitry explorations indicated significant gains in children’s ability to discuss circuitry concepts over the course of the study. Through individual case studies, we illustrate how children enacted these concepts through their play and how the transparency afforded by the toolkit make the big ideas of circuitry visible. This work serves to illustrate how very young children can successfully begin to engage with science topics commonly introduced in later elementary school when those topics are framed through play and discovery with transparent and malleable materials.

     

Tertiary education in the Noughties: the student perspective

The psychodynamics of learning and teaching at a time of changing funding arrangements and priorities are explored and discussed through students’ accounts of their experience of university. The contextual, organizational and socio‐political characteristics implicated in these psychodynamic processes are considered. Among the psychodynamic issues that emerged from students’ accounts were organizational distancing, expressed in the physical and symbolic distance between students and teachers as well as a perceived distance between lecturers and their teaching responsibilities, and transference evident in the students’ struggle between dependence and independence.     

Research,Governance, and Technologies of Openness

Recent policy changes in the European Union have introduced the requirement for publicly funded research to be published in open access. This can be seen as part of a mode of democratic accountability that not only promotes transparency but also, Naomi Hodgson argues, is constituted by visibility and openness. By drawing attention to the way in which the researcher is asked to understand herself in this policy context, Hodgson illustrates how particular technologies of performance measurement and management, and of publication, enter the researcher into this economy of visibility. The understanding of openness as a corrective to the traditional closed access system of publishing and the marketization of academia is challenged, then, in this article, which indicates how these technologies of reading and writing constitute the researcher as a particular figure in the emergent mode of governance.     

Situating secondary schooling in the transnational social field: contestation and conflict in Greater Toronto Area classrooms

This article situates secondary schooling within the evolving transnational social field. Drawing on 43 interviews with teachers and former students with transnational connections in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Canada, I examine how transnational practices and dispositions fit within existing curricular and pedagogical frameworks in secondary schools. It is suggested that the ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’ for transnational students are in conflict with the teachers’ views on how students ought to act and feel within classroom settings. When transnational secondary students travel to their sending societies for ongoing periods, the data reveal disconnections at school that threaten the dominant classroom norms. When there is sustained direct contact with multiple countries, including both travel and new modes of communication, this may create knowledge and vivid experiences for transnational youth who are ‘betwixt and between’, but also leads to concerns by teachers about a ‘strategic’ use of Toronto-area schools and fears about ‘dual loyalties’. Finally, many of the transnational youth find their teachers’ assumptions of schooling superiority in the Global North to be sorely misdirected, and perhaps even harmful. These discordances highlight the existence of competing systems of capital within GTA classrooms.     

Identification of visual dimensions in photographs using multidimensional scaling techniques

An examination of underlying visual dimensions commonly perceived in photographs was conducted using multidimensional scaling techniques. Fifteen male and female university graduate students individually examined 34 photographs chosen to represent a broad range of visual topics. Similarity judgments between photographs were used for multidimensional scaling, while subject interview data were used to describe meaningful visual concepts. Results indicate that pictures were grouped in clusters along three observable dimensions. Life, nature, and culture emerged as the dimensions of primary importance to viewers. This suggests the existence of universal meaning systems in visuals for communicating denotative and connotative meaning and presents experimental variables for future hypothesis testing. We gratefully acknowledge David Lancy’s inspiration and Ed Greenberg’s significant contribution to this work.     

Shall We Talk? Conversing With Humans and Robots

While social robots are the creation of human beings, it is not obvious what kinds of conversation people desire to have with computer-based devices. Progressive improvements in speech recognition, natural language parsing, and physical embodiment are making it technologically possible for social robots to engage with humans in essentially the full range of conversational modes that we do with one another. However, when we examine the variety of possible (human) linguistic functions, we discover reasons people may not wish for total verisimilitude when interacting linguistically with robots. Informational and empathetic functions are likely to be more welcomed than those involving social control or critique.     

Data exchange standards to support and acknowledge peer‐review activity

• Peer review is used to evaluate research, including publications, scientific awards, and grant proposals, and there is a continuum of at least six approaches to review from completely closed, double‐blind review to fully‐open and citable peer review.
• It is getting harder to find suitable experts to serve as reviewers so publishers and others are experimenting with methods to incentivize researcher participation, with a growing interest in enabling citation of peer‐review activity as a component.
• A Working Group on Peer Review Service, facilitated by CASRAI, was created to develop a data model and citation standard for peer‐review activity that can be used to support both existing and new review models.
• Standardized citation structures for reviews can enable the inclusion of peer‐review activity in personal recognition and evaluation, as well the ability to refer to reviews as part of the scholarly literature.